[X] My Assistant

[gndonald]

While looking through the Encyclopedia Astronautica website, I came across a short entry which shows an Apollo CSM docked to something that looks like an overgrown Hubble Space Telescope. (See: Entry)

The web entry does not have any references however, but the picture which seems to show the launch configuration as well, must have a source.

Can anyone help?

[dvandorn]

Yep, the example you showed from the Encyclopedia Astronautica was one of the really large man-tended telescope concepts that was considered in the mid-60s. Interestingly, the Apollo Telescope Mount went from a few solar telescopes attached to the Service Module to a concept of using a Lunar Module as the basis of the ATM. The original LM-based ATM designs showed a basically unchanged LM ascent stage, which would have served as the control room for the telescopes, while the descent stage was replaced by a suite of solar telescopes housed inside a LM descent stage's octagonal frame.

The final version of the ATM flown on SkyLab was actually a rather severely modified version of the LM-based design. If you look closely, you can see that the main structure of the flown ATM was the same size and octagonal shape as a LM descent stage.

-the other Doug