My piece of Apollo

Today being the 40th anniversary of the first lunar walk, I wanted to share my Apollo story.

In the 1960’s, my father worked for a company that made knobs. NASA approached the company to design a mechanism to solve a problem with knobs on the instrument panel of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM).
When wearing the heavy gloves on their space suits, the astronauts had trouble feeling when the knob reached the end of its travel. As a result, the would strip the knob loose from the attached shaft. The company solved the problem be designing a slip-clutch mechanism so that when the knob reach the end of its travel, the knob’s shell would continue to turn, but the inner mechanism would not. The knob’s slip-clutch mechanism prevented stripping.

If you visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, you can see a mockup of the LEM. The large fake knobs are clearly visible, as they are in the photo. Look for the large knobs at the bottom of the panel.

As Dad told it, two of the knobs never went on the LEM. He had one and the shop foreman had the other. Unfortunately, Dad’s knob was lost over the years. He always claimed that I lost it. I always claimed that it was in his attic, but I didn’t find it when I was clearing out his house last year.