Originally Posted by
ORAC
When the LEM was designed nobody knew the composition of the moon’s surface - it was feared it would be a thick layer of dust in which the feet could sink.
Sink the Apollo missions it is known it is a hard surface and, by choosing the appropriate landing sites, the risk of toppling is insignificant.
A Just for info - I forget when the LM gear design was frozen but as I recall it the dust theory was never really a major consideration or a driver for the LM gear design or spec..that was a pet theory amongst certain astronomers, Thomas Gold almost made a career out of it…and of course the media picked up on it
Coping with landing on a sea of very thick fine dust ended up not being a major consideration in the way gear design evolved, especially after the first close up, fine detail pictures of the surface started coming back came back from ‘64 onwards.
The two main drivers behind the final gear configuration were concern about surface gradients (knowledge of which was poor at the time) and/or toppling due to excessive horizontal velocity on touchdown…two things that I suspect will still be of concern to some extent and I’m sure will have been factored into the design of the HLS and subsystems.