Off The Drawing Board
During the production of the Apollo program, which would eventually place men on the moon, several ideas never passed the development stage. Many of them could have been exciting additions to lunar exploration. While on the other hand, other proposals were down right strange and impractical. Unfortunately, NASA's lunar program was a streamlined effort with little room for extra hardware. Ideally, if the Apollo program had had enough funds for additional projects, several of these ideas would have become a reality and would be sitting in museums today.
During the flurry of proposals in the early 1960's numerous companies were vying for big government contracts to help America go to the moon. Ultimately, Grumman (which received the Lunar Module or LM contract) and North American Aviation (which received the Apollo spacecraft or Command and Service Module or CSM contract) garnered the biggest contracts, but development for other pieces of hardware to supplement or extend the usefulness of the CSM and LM, and other vital components, continued.
Several schemes came from simply modifying the Apollo CSM for other purposes. Apollo X was one such program that hoped to turn the three man spacecraft into an orbiting laboratory capable of staying in Earth orbit for up to 100 days. The design of the spacecraft was not much different than the original except that it had fins and vanes on the side to aid an attempt at land landing (in the 1960's a rather costly and time consuming part of spaceflight was sea recovery).
Another idea proposed essentially stripping a LM of propellant, engines, and landing gear and stuffing it full of several tonnes of scientific equipment. While mated to an Apollo CSM, the two components could have made for an inexpensive orbiting laboratory.
The Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) was an advanced observatory designed to be either free flying, like a satellite, or attached to an Apollo CSM. A second proposal intended the ATM to be built into the frame of a LM to reduce electrical and mechanical development costs, but the idea never really took hold. However, unlike most of the proposals during the Apollo program, the ATM was actually built and became an integral piece of the Skylab space station.
Other ideas from the drawing board were focused on how astronauts would be mobile once on the moon. Since time was precious on the surface, seeing as much as possible became a concern. The question was would simply walking on the surface really be an adequate means of studying and collecting wide variances of geological samples on the moon? Thankfully, astronauts did have faster means of exploration; the lunar rover was used on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 and quadrupled the area astronauts could cover. Another device, called the Mobile Equipment Transporter (MET) helped Apollo 14 astronauts while on the moon. The MET was essentially a two-wheeled cart that allowed astronauts to carry more tools and return more lunar samples back to the LM.
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