The Absence of Airlocks

[smartcooky]

In a way, the LM itself IS the airlock.

I like that.

So do I. One can run it on to lunar rendezvous with the CM. Once again the LM is the airlock. The simple engineering elegance is a joy.

Weellll. I say simple in a relative sense, but you catch my drift.

And it wasn't a new idea. The same concept was used in Ed White's 1965 Gemini 4 spacewalk. Both astronauts wore spacesuits, and the whole crew cabin was depressurized before White exited the capsule.

[raven]

In my opinion, a better system than the LOK/LK would have had to face, with the cosmonaut needing to do a spacewalk with whatever samples they collected and film shot to the Earth returning LOK.