What a lovely picture.Isn't that just some tape to hold the insulation together?
Looks like a Romulan bird of prey.
The following discussion comes from the Apollo 11 review done with Neil and Buzz in Santa Fe in 1991: Armstrong - "(The LEC) was a piece of equipment that did not exist - was not planned - until we were someplace in the middle of our training cycle. And we were not confident about our ability to transfer articles to and from the cabin and the surface. I can't remember who devised this idea, but it was devised collectively by our EVA planning group. It was a jury-rig that we collectively devised." Aldrin - "It was needed. There wasn't another solution to the problem. Didn't it do the job reasonably well?" Armstrong - "Yeah, it did." Aldrin - "It wasn't very professional." Armstrong - "It was a bit of a jury-rig, but it did the job." Aldrin - "I guess one problem was that it tended to carry up dust? It didn't have a pulley, you just lifted at the top. Or did it have a pulley?" (see below) Armstrong - "It was a flat nylon strap, as I remember..." Aldrin - "Didn't it just go through the AOT guard, or did it have a pulley?" Armstrong - "I don't remember. It may have been some kind of a cylinder with a hook." Aldrin, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "There are alternate ways of bringing things up, other than by the LEC. I think there is promise of being able to bring things up over the side (of the porch); straight up, versus making use of the LEC. We didn't have the opportunity to exercise those."The Apollo 11 style LEC was used on Apollos 11 through 15; although, beginning with Apollo 14, the astronauts sometimes carried equipment up and down the ladder by hand. The Apollo 16 and 17 crews flew with only a simple lanyard with which they raised and lowered the Equipment Transfer Bag with its cargo of relatively fragile cameras at the side of the porch, as Buzz had suggested.
