Bill writes:

> Out here in Sacramento (where I am blessed by a broken home a/c, 100+ temps
>  and the a/c people can't come out until Friday ;-) ) = anyway we have
>  Aerojet-General - during the 1960s they had the contract to design and
build
>  the rockets for the lunar lander - and I can remember on a still summer
>  night hearing those things being tested 30 miles away...

Here's my chance to irritate at least a few people, but I don't think that
that can be true. Bell Aerosystems built the ascent engine for the Lunar Lander.
Rocketdyne Division of North American designed and manufactured the descent
engine, and the Marquardt Corporation manufactured the reaction control system
(the little nozzles that stuck out away from the corners of the spacecraft).

Nor were the engines big enough to be heard more than a few blocks away. We
had both a descent and ascent engine in our high bay where I worked (NASA White
Sands Test Facility, a part of the Johnson Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston)
and I was always amazed at how small they were. The descent engine was just
about as tall as I am, and about as round. The ascent engine was about half
that size.

Low gravity and low-weight spacecraft mean you don't need exceptionally large
engines.

Wirt Atmar

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