NASA created a flight simulator for the first astronauts landing on the moon — using Space-Age technology:
Fifty-four years ago, we tested out Project LOLA — the Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach simulator — at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. The pilot perched on a gantry, peeking out the cockpit at a close-circuit TV system that tracked along detailed lunar mosaics in response to their commands.
NASA constructed four models at different scales, so the cockpit could track over the murals simulating a landing. The largest was on a six-meter (20-foot) diameter sphere, simulating the lunar surface from an altitude of 322 kilometers (200 miles) so every 1 centimeter covered 5.7 kilometers (1 inch per 9 miles). The three smaller full-relief scaled sections at 4.5 meter (15 feet) by 12 meter (40 feet). The final model of Crater Alphonsus scaled to just 1 centimeter for every 61 meters (1 inch to 200 feet). The lunar surfaces were created by carefully hand-painting and airbrushing the surfaces using detailed photographs taken from earlier lunar missions.
More proof, methinks, that we never went to the moon. It was all just a simulation.
Maybe I’m fooled, but the argument buried in Errol Morris’s blog on the Crimean Cannonballs convinced me it was real. The dust they kick up falls straight down — no Brownian motion.
It took three long posts and a trip to the Crimea to figure out which cannonball photo was taken first.
That’s not the biggest Apollo lunar landing simulator. Back in those days, men were men who flew to other worlds. Figure out the best way, then do it.
They built a full-size scale model of the landing site in a volcanic mountain range in Arizona. They used explosives to make the craters. The astronauts walked it, flew over it slowly in a Cessna, and flew over it in a jet to simulate orbital speeds.
See this page for photos (the article is about something else, skip to the bottom for the Apollo photos).