Apollo astronauts often fell behind schedule on the Moon
When the Apollo astronauts journeyed to the Moon, they had a hard time sticking to schedule. Virtually all of their excursions fell behind their pre-set timelines, new research finds, and that could have big implications for how NASA handles human missions to Mars in the future.
The astronauts’ tardiness was uncovered by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who analyzed all of the Apollo Moon walks in a new study presented to NASA. Specifically, they pored over the logs of each trip the astronauts took outside their spacecraft to collect lunar samples, called an “extravehicular activity,” or EVA. They found that all the EVAs were slightly late for a variety of reasons, including malfunctioning technology and dealing with…
