The Lunex Project was a

US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Signal ...

1958 plan for a crewed lunar landing prior to the Apollo Program. The final lunar expedition plan in 1961 was for a 21-person underground Air Force base on the Moon by 1968 at a total cost of $7.5 billion. The primary distinction between the later Apollo missions and Lunex was the orbital rendezvous maneuver. The Lunex vehicle, composed of a landing module and a

lifting body A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as a fuselage wi ...

return/re-entry module, would land the entire vehicle and all astronauts on the surface, whereas the final Apollo mission involved a separate ascent module leaving the command module and service module connected in lunar orbit with a single astronaut. The original plan for Apollo was for

direct ascent Direct ascent is a method of landing a spacecraft on the Moon or another planetary surface directly, without first assembling the vehicle in Earth orbit, or carrying a separate landing vehicle into orbit around the target body. It was proposed as ...

, similar to Lunex.

Design details

Associated vehicles (estimates)

Lunex Lunar Lander *Crew Size: 3 *Length: 16.16 m (53.01 ft) *Maximum Diameter: 7.62 m (24.99 ft) *Span: 7.62 m (24.99 ft) *Mass: 61 000 kg (134 000 lb) *Agency: USAF

Location

Selection of base sites were to be made by automated probes, with Kepler crater being a studied location.

Background

Lunex planned to make its first lunar landing and return in 1967, in order to beat the Soviets and demonstrate conclusively that America could win future international competition in technology with the USSR. The Air Force felt that no achievement short of a lunar landing would have the required historical significance. The use of the

profile was considered to be the most promising because it eliminated some of the complexities of the

Lunar orbit rendezvous Lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) is a process for landing humans on the Moon and returning them to Earth. It was utilized for the Apollo program missions in the 1960s and 1970s. In a LOR mission, a main spacecraft and a smaller lunar lander travel to ...

that would later be used by Apollo: in particular there would be no need to develop rendezvous techniques in space. The down side was that the Lunex spacecraft would be much heavier than Apollo to carry the extra fuel required to land the entire spacecraft on the Moon and return it to lunar orbit, and consequently a larger rocket would be required to send it to the Moon.

Major "Prestige" milestones

Problems

The main problems to be solved were: * Re-entry at 37,000 feet per second, with the flight path within a two-degree angle to avoid overheating or skipping out of the Earth's atmosphere. The latter would not kill the crew directly, but would leave the Earth-return spacecraft in an elliptical orbit where they might be exposed to excessive radiation in the Van Allen belts before the next re-entry opportunity. * Development of the lunar landing stage, which would have to make a precision landing tail-first on rocket thrust: something never previously tested. * Development of the lunar launching stage, which had no backup capability, so must be extremely reliable and capable of automated checkout on the lunar surface, and capable of putting the crew into the correct orbit to return to Earth.

References

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Projekt "Lunex" (in German)
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When the US Air Force Planned a Moon Landing
{{Moon colonization Abandoned military projects of the United States Human spaceflight programs