In the 1969 moon landing how was the moon rocket relaunched from the moon back to earth?

Answer 1

The Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM did the trick. the two man craft separated from the command module and used its expendable descent stage to retro-rocket down to the lunar surface. this consumes a lot of fuel, despite the lower lunar gravity, when exploration was finished the astronauts manned the upper stage of the LEM ( sometimes called the Bug) and leaving the spent lower stage on the Moon ( space junk, as it were) and a built-in launching pad, blasted off in the upper stage- to rendezvous with the solitary astronaut manning the command-service module orbiting the moon. a rather wasteful means of travel, but there were ascent and descent stages on the lunar module, and presumably separate control consoles or boards for each to avoid firing the wrong thrusters! The Lunar modules were not built to withstand re-entry ( those in museums are models used for training or simulation) and were abandoned to burn up in the upper atmosphere, only the Command module with three astros aboard made the re-entry as it was equipped with heat shielding.