[HN Gopher] Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)
___________________________________________________________________
Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)
Author : johndcook
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-06-14 10:18 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thespacereview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thespacereview.com)
| sambeau wrote:
| Can I recommend "Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race" by
| the BBC.
|
| It's a fascinating deep dive into this, and the difference in
| long-term goals between the USA and the USSR. It explores how
| close the USSR were to getting to the moon first, the reaction of
| the USSR's team (some swearing, some shrugging), the grief over
| the loss of their chief rocket scientist, and why there was no
| need for a "pivot"--the long term goal had always been to
| populate and explore space.
|
| The interviews are great and there is some amazing footage.
|
| It is a testament to their long-term plan that, despite the
| collapse of the USSR, the Russians were--for a long time--the
| only country capable of putting anyone into space.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lcxms
| DylanSp wrote:
| I'm curious what the BBC doc has to say about the Soviet lunar
| program; my impression (mostly from reading Asif Siddiqi's
| history _Challenges to Apollo_ ) is that the lack of political
| support and focus post-Gagarin lead to a late start on a lunar
| landing program, plus lack of funding and splitting resources
| between Korolev's N1-L3 architecture and Chelomei's programs.
| Between those factors, the uncertainty caused by Khrushchev's
| overthrow, and Korolev's death, it doesn't seem like the
| Soviets had much of a chance of beating the US to a lunar
| landing.
| mannerheim wrote:
| They tried to get Lunokhod on the Moon before Apollo 11 in
| '69 as a consolation prize, but the rocket blew up and they
| scattered polonium over much of Russia. Not sure the
| documentary was referring to that, though.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > despite the collapse of the USSR, the Russians were--for a
| long time--the only country capable of putting anyone into
| space.
|
| For a few years?
| adolph wrote:
| About 9.
|
| > Space Shuttle which retired from service in 2011.
|
| > 30 May 2020 (crewed)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2
|
| EDIT:
|
| Sorry, I forgot the capability of China. I mentally equated
| "putting anyone in space" with putting people into the ISS.
|
| With China in the picture, the Soviet-only gap would be
| between Skylab and Shuttle, I guess?
|
| _China 's first crewed mission in space on October 15, 2003,
| which carried Yang Liwei in orbit for 21 hours and made China
| the third nation to launch a human into orbit._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Manned_Space_Program
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| More like between Apollo-Soyuz and Shuttle, so about 6
| years (1975-81).
| uncertainquark wrote:
| Related shameless plug: I've been tracking the progress of NASA's
| Artemis plans to return humans to the Moon on my one-of-a-kind,
| technical newsletter Moon Monday https://blog.jatan.space/s/moon-
| monday
|
| It also covers global lunar exploration, science and commercial
| developments to show that our return to the Moon this is truly
| worldwide and how valuable each vertical is. Thoughts?
| ncmncm wrote:
| They are going about the Artemis program in about the worst way
| imaginable.
|
| The lunar gateway notion is about as terrible as I have ever
| heard of.
| uncertainquark wrote:
| The lunar gateway has largely independent goals to the crewed
| landing missions part of Artemis. IMO only the legally
| mandatory use of SLS+Orion part is a screw up for Artemis but
| most of the rest of the hardware and infrastructure will be
| on commercial models extended from successful ones at LEO,
| including the at least two spacecraft capable of landing
| humans on the surface.
| colineartheta wrote:
| May you please elaborate on why you feel this way? I think
| statements like these would be very valuable to casual
| observers (i.e. 'me') of the Artemis program if you could
| provide some more detail that possibly counters the
| relatively successful Artemis PR.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The "lunar gateway" has no legitimate technical purpose,
| beyond that it is an orbit that SLS can get to, but Falcon
| can't. It is not an orbit that is favorable for moon
| landing: first you need to get from there to "low lunar
| orbit". And stopping there on the way to another planet
| would be hugely wasteful.
|
| Essentially, its only purpose is to ensure there is
| something SLS will be needed for.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My understanding is that the "lunar gateway" is a
| politically expedient chance to get an ISS replacement on
| the budget ledgers. It has good technical reason to exist
| just as an ISS replacement (which must deorbit a lot
| sooner than we'd all like; some of its warranties are
| "coming due" as they say).
|
| > And stopping there on the way to another planet would
| be hugely wasteful.
|
| My understanding is that the scientific missions are less
| what they'd "stop there on the way" and more what they
| could eventually consider to "start there". At least some
| of the "lunar gateway" plans I heard had some complex
| "fabricator" goals, to assemble and build bigger modules
| in a "cheaper" in orbit than if they built it on the
| ground and shipped it all at once straight to the moon. I
| don't know how many of such plans remain on the books and
| I don't know enough of the science behind some of the
| proposals to know how viable they are (I do know that the
| growing body of inflatable modules research on ISS was
| pretty neat and supposedly related).
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is literally nothing that could done in high moon
| orbit that would not be _overwhelmingly_ better done in
| low earth orbit.
|
| The only reason to even consider using the high moon
| orbit is to have something, _anything_ for SLS to do.
| Every conceivable mission scenario is better staged from
| low earth orbit, but they wouldn 't need SLS for that.
|
| And the whole point of SLS is so they can hand out $2B in
| plums to mil contractors for every mission, that they
| couldn't for a measly LEO launch.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I'm very willing to believe SLS itself is mostly a
| political boondog, but I'm also still willing to give
| Nasa the benefit of the doubt that they're trying their
| best to get useful science/engineering out of projects
| like the Lunar Gateway. My understanding is that the
| lunar orbit they want would give a lot of interesting
| science opportunities and technical opportunities
| (simpler communications versus the "tin can on a string
| that blacks out for worryingly large periods of time" of
| Apollo communications).
|
| If anything the Lunar Gateway sounds to me a lot like
| "classic" Nasa risk aversion and over-preparedness. It
| _isn 't_ strictly necessary, probably, but it sounds like
| it makes lunar projects overall safer (in communications
| access at the very least, but also reusing ascent stages,
| and providing more backup habitat space in cases of
| disaster readiness) and that's still good science to
| prepare for risk. (They don't want a second Apollo 13,
| and who can blame them for that?)
|
| > The only reason to even consider using the high moon
| orbit is to have something, anything for SLS to do.
|
| It seems like that is already disproven. The first few
| missions to setup Lunar Gateway modules have _already_
| been scheduled on SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches (in 2024)
| so clearly even Nasa understands they may have to rely on
| SpaceX even for access to Lunar Gateway orbits because
| the SLS has already missed deadlines. The "traditional"
| flipside to political boondoggle politics is "standard"
| commercial bids and contracts, and Nasa is far too
| pragmatic to rest important pieces of a scientific
| mission waiting for the SLS as the "only option".
| ncmncm wrote:
| They solved the comms problem on Mars with relay
| satellites. Would those be harder to use, around the
| moon? "Habitat space" is useless unless you can get
| there, and if you can get there, you can get back to
| Earth.
|
| To disprove it, you would need to find something useful
| for SLS to do.
|
| NASA, of course, has no say in whether to use SLS.
| Congress decides that. The best NASA can do is have it
| not ready to fly. The longer they wait, the fewer flights
| they will end up forced to do.
| jabl wrote:
| It's producing $$$ for the 'old-school' space companies,
| which seems to be the whole idea. The more elaborate they can
| make it and the longer they can drag it out and suck up
| taxpayer money the better.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| Wouldn't those crews have all had big problems with cancer and
| muscular atrophy?
| dotancohen wrote:
| No.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Muscle loss isn't the big problem in long term microgravity,
| _bone_ loss is.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Interesting that NASA is now pursuing something similar right
| now. I wonder if some of the then junior engineers started work
| on this back then and were cut off by Nixon to work on the space
| shuttle and have now climbed into a position of power and want to
| complete that initial work they started.
|
| Or I could be reading way too much into this.
| otter-rock wrote:
| This sort of already happened when some of the Apollo engineers
| came out of retirement for the Constellation Program. The
| program was cancelled and they went back into retirement.
| Nobody came back for the Space Launch System because it was
| just a jobs program with no real substance. Also, they were
| very old at that point.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Yeah seems like a lot of the programs aims were to build a
| moon base of sorts and get a person to mars. They obviously
| haven't met those goals and have now been heavily defunded,
| enough that it'll be impossible for them to actually follow
| through. The latest goals are the same and I can't help but
| be sceptical if they'll ever get back to the moon.
| otter-rock wrote:
| Yup. The "missions" are an excuse for funding. But the
| funding is insufficient and misallocated to support the
| stated missions in earnest.
|
| If NASA gets to the moon again, it'll be on a cheap ride
| they buy from SpaceX.
| jankeymeulen wrote:
| They'd be retired by now, even the most junior engineer in 1970
| would be into their seventies.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Most of them, yes, but there were some serious geezers
| wandering the halls before the pandemic. One of my coworkers
| started at NASA the same year I was born, and she doesn't
| show any signs of retiring any time soon. These folks don't
| usually end up directly in management positions, but they
| often hold advisory roles that give them the ear of those
| calling the shots.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Perhaps but their direct reports and coworkers that followed
| them were or are aware of their predecessors goals.
| wiremine wrote:
| Somewhat related: I've been enjoying the series "For All Mankind"
| on Apple TV+. Really fun alt-history drama that explores these
| topics.
| xwdv wrote:
| Is this show like a prequel for The Expanse?
| freeflight wrote:
| That's a fan theory I've heard based on both shows trying to
| keep the space action mostly realistic.
| MarcScott wrote:
| Except that the moment they enter the Jamestown base,
| gravity suddenly seems to be 1g.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I'd consider it more of an informal sequel to Battlestar
| Galactica. Especially given all the people the two shows have
| in common and similar style (unsteady crash zooms across vast
| reaches of vacuum!)
| foobiekr wrote:
| I find it incredibly depressing. At least through season 2 it
| presents a better America that didn't just give up.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| If it's a consolation prize, I think there are interesting
| parts of For All Mankind's timeline that aren't better and
| may actively be worse. I'm not sure how much of that is
| intentional message or not, though.
|
| The biggest for instance: in our timeline gay rights advances
| were able to piggy back on other civil rights advances and
| waves of feminism. In getting major civil rights and feminist
| victories early _in space_ it seems like not as much happens
| "on the ground" as it did in our world, especially with
| regard to follow up rights such as gay rights.
|
| The next biggest and certainly much more obvious is that the
| Cold War is much, much worse and international politics a bit
| more fraught and MAD overall.
|
| There's lots of little other things like earlier backslides
| in immigration policies. There's deep implications that
| tobacco companies won for longer and there's less EPA power
| and there's a lot less public awareness of radiation concerns
| and carcinogens. (Things that stopped, for instance, real
| world Project Orion from anything like tests in Earth's
| atmosphere.)
|
| So much of these details are easy to miss in the background,
| and again I don't know how much is intentional commentary
| versus accidental bits of world building. A lot of people
| joke about all the Beatles Reunion Tour of the 90s stuff as
| evidence that the world building of FAM has overly generously
| been "super optimist utopia" the show claims to have created,
| but if you actually pause some of the headlines and stories
| there's a lot of nasty stuff, too, including a lot of
| interesting digs into that same Reunion Tour with shades of
| "aged rockers past their prime who don't like each other
| anymore don't bring anything new or exciting to label
| requirement to tour again".
|
| I can't fault the show for being optimistic and it's a big
| reason I tune into the show because I want that "competence
| porn" of smart people doing cool smart things. I don't think
| the intent is "utopian" though, I think the writers
| understand if all the smart people are busy doing smart stuff
| in space, there's fewer smart people on the ground and some
| of that bleeds into the world building and I appreciate that
| as a viewer.
| amysox wrote:
| The article's mention of lunar bases based on LM-derived
| vehicles made me think of _For All Mankind_ and Jamestown Base.
| Jamestown was landed on what were, essentially, four LM DPS
| engines.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Not spending any time showing the effort to design the base
| was a huge missed opportunity. The show basically went from
| mentioning "the race for the base" in the beginning of one
| episode to showing a few seconds of it landing at the end of
| the episode with virtually no in-between.
|
| Some of the best scenes in HBO's From Earth to the Moon were
| about how the engineers tackled designing the LM and
| expositing all sorts of things about the technical
| challenges. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they
| catered to the space-nerd audience _a little more_ by
| spending a little less time on interpersonal drama.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| I'm sure spec scripts in this vein already exist, but it would
| be cool to do a 1970s "parallel history" in retro futurist
| style where NASA fully realizes Werner von Braun's concept for
| a Kubrikian spoke-and-wheel spinning mega space station ;)
|
| 1952 Colliers' article: "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon!
| mahrain wrote:
| Spoiler alert for Season 3 ;-)
| Bud wrote:
| That is actually featured in the new season of For All
| Mankind.
| adolph wrote:
| Like 2001: A Space Odyssey? I guess the station wasn't
| central to the plot.
| gumby wrote:
| > The only reason it was not done is because politically it was
| inexpedient for the Nixon administration to continue supporting
| the Apollo program, which it saw a legacy of the Kennedy and
| Johnson administrations.
|
| What shortsighted thinking! Yet another reason to hate the Nixon
| administration.
|
| The one month limitation due to CSM seems crazy. I can't imagine
| spending a month in the CSM.
| chernevik wrote:
| It's a sleight-of-hand to shift blame for NASA's failure to
| articulate a mission to Nixon.
| messe wrote:
| > The one month limitation due to CSM seems crazy. I can't
| imagine spending a month in the CSM.
|
| From the article, it sounded like the CSM would be unmanned
| during that time, as they planned to carry a crew of three down
| to the surface.
| jmyeet wrote:
| The Apollo missions were awe-inspiring, particularly given the
| tech at the time. But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply
| too expensive. I see inflation-adjusted numbers putting the
| Saturn V launch cost at just over $1 billion but I honestly think
| the equivalent is way more than that.
|
| The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program
| and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more
| expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms).
|
| Payload costs are now <10% of the Saturn V/STS costs in real
| terms. That's what we need. If Satrship lives up to expectations,
| that'll drop even further. In addition to that there are
| important advancements in scalability (ie how many launch
| vehicles you can product and that really translates to how many
| launches you can do per year) and reliability.
|
| My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was
| never going to happen and wasn't sustainable. Lots of people like
| to say things like we'd already have put a man on Mars if we
| didn't cancel Apollo but that was never going to happen.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I question the assertion that it was too expensive given the
| costs of programs like the F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2,
| or Reagan's SDI program.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Apples and oranges. You are comparing NASA spending to
| military expenditures (F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or
| Reagan's SDI program). In 2020 the US GDP was 20.94 trillion
| USD [1]. In the same year, NASA's budget was $22.6 billion
| [2], less than 0.11% of GDP, while US military spending was
| around 766.58 billion USD [3], roughly 3.66% of GDP. Other
| sources place US military spending 16%-21.9% of GDP from 1996
| to 2015 [5].
|
| In other words, NASA's budget was approximately 3% of the
| military budget (and maybe as little as 0.5%). NASA's budget
| has been less than 1% of the federal budget since 1975 [4].
|
| [1] https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
|
| [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-
| spend...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:
| NAS...
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Unit
| ed_...
| april_22 wrote:
| I don't think that even the moon landing itself was 'too
| expensive' for such an achievement. Going to the moon will be
| remembered for a long time by future generartions as an example
| of what humanity can achieve. What are $1 billion against that?
| adolph wrote:
| An interesting aspect of the Shuttle mission was the military
| dual-use. Scott Manley's video "The Most Important Space
| Shuttle Mission Never Happened" is a great explainer of a
| specific planned but never executed mission, the requirements
| of that drove many of the shuttle's design tradeoffs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY
| Teever wrote:
| I havent read the article yet but from my understanding the
| issue of cost of Saturn V wod have been mitigated by scaling up
| production.
|
| I read a recebt biography about Von Braun and IIRC the entire
| project was designed to scale up, and all of that was hastily
| thrown away for the ineffective shuttle program.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The Shuttle was amazingly effective. It succeeded in most of
| its original mission objectives. It conducted hundreds of
| scientific missions, launched and repaired Hubble, and built
| the ISS (originally Freedom).
|
| The "cost" of Shuttle launches was calculated as NASA's
| entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of
| scheduled launches. They paid salaried staff all year no
| matter how many launches happened. That cost was trending
| downward as the number of launches increased prior to the
| Challenger disaster. After return to flight after Challenger
| NASA cut the launch schedule but had to pay the same
| infrastructure costs so Shuttle flights got more "expensive".
| Gravityloss wrote:
| One problem about technology development is scaling too
| early.
|
| The transistor, integrated circuit, surface mounted component
| robotic pick and place machine, laser and fiber optics. In
| the software world, countless of ideas. Open source too.
| Whole generations of software developers. All those were
| needed for the information age, not just throwing money to
| scale up Sage or Sabre or VAX or anything.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can
| happen is reuse. Probably also intact abort and other
| technologies.
|
| One should look at the operational capacity, not the
| theoretical capacity. Who cares if you have an airplane
| that can theoretically do Mach 3 if it's being repaired in
| the hangar and you need it now? In airplane lingo a plane
| like that is called a "Hangar Queen"
|
| Falcon 9 is a huge step in the operational direction. But
| more is needed. Can one do two flights in 24 hours? Can one
| save the second stage too? Just the fairing? Or can one
| make the second stage cheaper? Or salvage it in orbit?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up
| can happen is reuse.
|
| There are other ways to reduce cost, such as cheaper
| rockets, more efficient fuels, etc. Whatever SpaceX does
| isn't the only possibility or a necessity.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Those also help, certainly.
| mmmeff wrote:
| This is why newer space startups like Stoke are aiming to
| produce totally reusable second stages. The goal is
| commercial airline-like refuel and relaunch.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is a pattern you see a lot in sechnology. Often the
| second version of something _significantly_ learsnf rom the
| first. Take something like C#, which really corrected a lot
| of the problems Java had.
|
| A more physical example is the rail network in the US. It's
| often asked "why don't we have high speed rail in the US?"
| Being a nation of autophiles obviously doesn't help but
| it's not as simple as putting higher speed trains on
| existing track. It's not even as simple as replacing the
| existing track with track that can take a higher speed
| train.
|
| The rail network we had is an artifact of the performance
| constraints of 19th century trains for the most part. Top
| speed is the most visible constraint. But the grading,
| turning angles, etc are all a function of much lower
| constraint on top speed.
|
| We'd probably be better off if we had no national rail
| network at all, which is pretty much the situation China
| was in. Admittedly there are other factors in China's rapid
| HSR deployments (eg streamlining planning and acquisition
| of land).
|
| But I digress. Timing is hugely important in scaling.
| nradov wrote:
| The US low speed rail network works pretty well for
| freight. Despite some occasional bottlenecks and delays,
| it's still superior in certain ways to rail freight in
| China and the EU.
|
| As for HSR, do we really need it? It might make sense in
| the northeast corridor but it's hard to make a business
| case elsewhere. The California HSR project has turned
| into the usual government megaproject boondoggle with
| long delays and cost overruns. Even if it actually gets
| built I'll probably never ride on it.
| gedy wrote:
| This is very true, and also reminds me of our telephone
| system, or Japan - which someone described as "living in
| a futuristic version of the 1990s".
| frxx wrote:
| Most accurate description of living in Japan I've read!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah, but if we had just kept investing in faxtech
| innovation, it might have turned out pretty awesome. Just
| saying.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| >But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive.
|
| Sure, at that moment in time. You are, however, discounting the
| abilities of clever people to innovate and improve the $/kg
| performance. I prefer to think we engineers are pretty good at
| reducing the effective cost of tech over time.
|
| However, none of this is about Saturn V vs Shuttle vs some
| other platform. If NASA remained the sole customer over that
| period, there would not have been adequate incentives to drive
| that cost down. In that situation I think improvement would
| have been slow independent of platform choices.
|
| It is the telecommunications age creating scaled incentives
| that has led to cost efficiencies and companies like SpaceX
| (and many others) competing to drive those costs down. Lacking
| the current scale of global incentives, SpaceX and others still
| wouldn't exist. They certainly couldn't have acquired the
| necessary funding back in the 70s.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| NASA could have gotten the price down to whatever the
| lockheed's is now. Or should I say up?
| loudthing wrote:
| Up. Politics is a major detriment to NASA's efficiency.
| cnlevy wrote:
| > My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was
| never going to happen and wasn't sustainable
|
| There was a project to make the Saturn V partially reusable,
| see
|
| http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program
| and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more
| expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms).
|
| Highly relevant:
|
| "Human Space Exploration: The Next 50 Years" by Michael
| Griffin, NASA Administrator, March 2007. He wrote that had the
| agency continued using Apollo-Saturn instead of developing the
| Space Shuttle, "we would be on Mars today <https://np.reddit.co
| m/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_ex...>
| towaway15463 wrote:
| You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the
| Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space
| shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for
| decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could
| reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch
| system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs
| out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems
| like many of their plans would have played out, the continued
| moon missions at least.
| bsder wrote:
| > You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the
| Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the
| space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued
| operating for decades.
|
| It was worse than that. NASA never received sufficient
| funding for the STS. So they turned to the miltary who wanted
| it and were willing to fund it.
|
| However, the military needs were also what made the space
| shuttle so stupidly hard to engineer. Think about how much
| harder all of the current commercial space programs would
| have it if they also had to engineer switching to a polar
| orbit. That's why the STS has those stupidly big engines.
|
| So, because Congress neither gave the project sufficient
| funding (would take money from my favorite pork barrel!) nor
| allowed the project to shut down (don't you dare take away
| pork barrel from my district!), NASA created a vehicle that
| killed a bunch of astronauts.
| stetrain wrote:
| Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would
| be cheaper.
|
| But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war
| between government agencies, being a bit too early and
| ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and
| defense payloads after Challenger.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The shuttle is still an interesting _science experiment_ in
| what it did teach us about reusability in space craft,
| failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery
| and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed
| the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good
| command module design for reuse based on available data at
| the time (even with all the design by committee
| compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to
| maintain /refit between missions.
|
| Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery
| and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse
| including the learning about how expensive heat shield
| maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle.
|
| (A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger
| disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or
| do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was
| a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the
| shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload.
| (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and
| its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder
| if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did
| more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an
| interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places"
| in a different timeline.)
| thaeli wrote:
| There was a near miss of heat tile damage from a foam
| strike very early in the STS program - STS-27 but it was
| on a classified military payload flight and the whole
| thing was ignored.
|
| I wouldn't quite say "covered up" but the damage would
| have been a lot harder to hand-wave away if this had been
| a normal mission with all the media coverage those got.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program
| and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more
| expensive_
|
| There's no contradiction here. It's resolved because, relative
| to its original promise, the STS program was a complete
| failure. Yes, it did wind up doing a bunch of useful stuff. But
| it didn't achieve nearly as much as was promised, and what it
| did do cost vastly more than anticipated.
|
| Source: my grandfather. He was a project manager on the Hubble,
| and specifically on the ill-fated mirror, this being
| simultaneously his greatest pride and greatest embarrassment.
| We talked about this stuff often. According to gramps, and not
| denying that there were major errors in the Hubble mirror
| management, they wound up getting screwed by the STS failures.
| It was always understood that the mirror wouldn't be perfect
| because they expected to be unable to perfectly compensate for
| the deflection of the mirror due to gravity while it was being
| manufactured. The STS promised the ability to deliver the
| Hubble to orbit to test it, and bring it back down again to
| correct if necessary. In the end, something like this was
| eventually required, but only many years later, and not in the
| fashion that the initial STS mission would have allowed.
| dmead wrote:
| hey, i got to learn about deconvolution in undergrad because
| of this. pre-fix hubble data can be corrected in software
| fairly reliably and i learned a lot messing around with it.
| asciimike wrote:
| > And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and
| out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed
| for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the
| Senator suggested that there might not be any medical
| obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into
| space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the
| mission.
|
| From https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm,
| which contains far better analysis of the politics of the STS
| program than I can provide.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| Sharlin wrote:
| (2005), mind, which is relevant given the main topic of the essay
| is NASA's contemporary moon program which was originally
| introduced back then.
| irrational wrote:
| > President Nixon rejected the ambitious Space Task Group plan,
| choosing instead to develop the infamous, loved and hated space
| shuttle.
|
| So, he really was a crook.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| If you like this subject, I highly recommend the show For All
| Mankind (on Apple TV).
|
| I don't want to spoil the premise, but it's an amazing alternate
| history along the consequences of investing in science.
| loudouncodes wrote:
| I started watching it, but the whole thing turned me off
| because they took two fantastic women involved at NASA -
| Margaret Hamilton and Poppy Northcut, and combined them into
| one character that in the several episodes I saw was trending
| towards being a love interest.
|
| For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was
| unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in
| tech.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| Wait, are you talking about the character margo? I'm onto
| season 3 and I'm not picking up on this love interest vibe
| you're talking about.
| freeflight wrote:
| The thing I'm picking up from her is how she seems to be
| one of the main driving forces behind NASA's success in the
| show, as hinted at by the fact how she spent years living
| in her office and gets problems solved trough her USSR
| contact.
| ghaff wrote:
| Leaving aside the tendency to want to have love interests in
| movies, the two women didn't even work in the same place.
| Margaret Hamilton worked for a subcontractor (one of many)
| that was not introduced in the series.
|
| (There is probably also a tendency in general to make it all
| about _NASA_ which, while obviously central to the whole
| effort, heavily depended on the aerospace industry and their
| network of subcontractors.)
| sho_hn wrote:
| I wager there's quite a few stories exploring this premise.
|
| I remember reading Stephen Baxter's "Voyage" in the 90s, in
| which Kennedy escapes his assasination, the Apollo program ends
| rather differently and NASA subsequently stretches/evolves the
| hardware to put a crewed mission on Mars, rather than building
| the Shuttle. It's been a long time, but I think I recall
| enjoying the geeking out on the equipment and little historical
| details.
|
| (I've since read the novel has been widely criticized as
| plagiarizing the Cox/Murray book on Apollo history, which I
| read 20 years later and is an amazing achievement.)
| guidedlight wrote:
| I highly recommend this too.
|
| For me it demonstrates what is possible if we continued to
| employ the risk taking attitude of those early space programs.
|
| It seems being risk adverse makes human progress very slow and
| expensive.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Since you didn't, I won't spoil it either, except to say that
| the first five minutes were an unexpected gut-punch. I knew the
| premise going in, but I was stunned at how much it affected me
| to see it happen.
| mannerheim wrote:
| It's entertaining, but I wouldn't take the 'consequences of
| investing in science' too seriously. The idea of the Soviets
| managing to land on the Moon because one man didn't die is,
| when you take a critical look at it, as silly as the idea of
| the Nazis winning WW2 because a single battle went the other
| way. The Soviets were never able to land on the Moon for good
| reason, and I'd say for similar reasons their predictions on
| American technological development would be similarly too rosy.
|
| Alternate history is fun, but maybe best not taken too
| seriously.
| zardo wrote:
| If Korelev had not died it's reasonable that he would have
| spent his political capital to keep the N1 program going, and
| worked through it's problems.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Maybe, but there are still a number of problems, even
| assuming Korolev could have solved the problems in N1's
| development history that had already been around for years
| by the time he died.
|
| Let's look at the timeline: Saturn V was rolled out onto
| the launchpad in May of '66, maiden flight in November '67.
| In February '66, they tested the Apollo CSM.
|
| Meanwhile, N1 made it onto the launchpad in November '67,
| but wasn't tested until February '69. Even assuming
| Korolev's survival could have moved up the dates, there's
| not a lot of time here between test flights to crewed
| missions. The LOK wasn't even flying until December of
| 1970, on a Proton rocket since N1 wasn't ready. But even
| assuming N1 had had its first test flights in '68, how long
| do you think it would have taken to go from that, to
| testing LOK, to actually landing someone on the Moon?
| Probably more than a single year.
|
| Finally, let's look at something entirely unrelated to the
| troubled N1 program: the matter of rendezvous. It was
| important enough to master that Protect Gemini was devoted
| entirely to getting rendezvous working as smoothly as
| possible. The US conducted the first rendezvous in December
| '65, first docking in March '66, and several more
| successful tests with Gemini after that (all manned
| missions), as well as a rendezvous in Earth orbit with
| Apollo 7 in October '68 and lunar orbit with Apollo 9 and
| 10 in March/May '69.
|
| Meanwhile, the first rendezvous/docking by the Soviets was
| in October '67, by unmanned crafts that used more fuel than
| expected, and their follow-up attempt with Soyuz 2/3 in
| October '68 failed to rendezvous after running out of fuel
| to maneuver. Their first success with manned rendezvous
| wasn't until January '69.
|
| It wasn't impossible that the Soviets could have gotten
| extraordinarily lucky on numerous fronts if he hadn't died,
| but I wouldn't call it realistic, or in fact reasonable.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Wait, who's this one man that didn't die in the show?
|
| The alt history takes the, unlikely due to inferior
| technology, path that the last ditch Soviet launch right
| before Apollo 11 (a launch that did in fact happen, but
| failed), succeeded. The show seems to make it clear that this
| was influenced largely by luck as the Soviets had not done
| any sort of "dress rehearsals" to the moon like NASA had.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Sergei Korolev[0], chief architect of the N1 rocket[1]
| which never really made it off the ground. I believe the
| show mentions him surviving heart surgery, and the show's
| creator points to this as the 'divergence point'. The
| rockets the Soviets use to land on the Moon in the show
| were N1.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
| philistine wrote:
| The N1, in our real world, was never crewed. The last ditch
| Soviet launch you're talking about was a test.
|
| For All Mankind to have a successful Soviet Moon landing,
| things happened differently before that launch. I thought
| the show would be interested in exploring what those things
| are, but it never was the case. As for OP, presumably
| they're talking about Vladimir Komarov:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov
|
| His death during Soyuz 1, the first space casualty, could
| perhaps be a hinge between our universe and For All
| Mankind.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| I strongly don't.
|
| It's an extremely presentist view of the 1960/70s.
|
| _spoilers_
|
| The idea that the US of the period would have cared about
| putting minorities on the Moon because the USSR did it is a
| fantasy.
|
| The USSR's first female cosmonaut flew in 1963, two years after
| Gagarin's first flight. By contrast the first US female
| astronaut didn't fly until 1983, 22 years after the first US
| manned spaceflight.
|
| The US of the 1960s didn't go for copy cat tokenism, their
| response to losing the Moon race would have been to start the
| Mars race. It's a sad indictment of current American mentality
| that this blindingly obvious escalation wasn't the response of
| the writers of the show. It's a side effect of living in a
| country which hasn't been able to build anything more complex
| than a sports stadium in 40 years. We have no new ideas and
| neither does our fantasy.
|
| _end spoilers_
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > a country which hasn't been able to build anything more
| complex than a sports stadium in 40 years. We have no new
| ideas and neither does our fantasy.
|
| What are you writing this on? If you flew out to L2, what
| would you see? Etc. Seriously, what forum are you in?
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >What are you writing this on?
|
| A glorified BBS.
|
| >If you flew out to L2, what would you see?
|
| Nothing much since the 1960s plans of massive space
| stations never materialized.
| Veedrac wrote:
| You mean James Webb? That's a prime example of how we've
| failed. It's a decent $500m telescope with a moderate but
| not particularly ambitious scope, that overran its budget
| by a factor of 20 and launched fifteen years late. That so
| many people think unfolding a sunshield is a pinnacle of
| human achievement just underlines how much ambition we have
| lost. We could have had an in-space constructed telescope
| ten times the size, if the government still actually knew
| how to build things.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > a decent $500m telescope with a moderate but not
| particularly ambitious scope
|
| So says someone on the Internet. We can make whatever
| claims we want if we don't have to back them up. That's
| the point of the JWST: gather evidence to back up claims.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >That's the point of the JWST: gather evidence to back up
| claims.
|
| The original cost of James Webb was meant to be $500m and
| it was meant to launch in 2007.
|
| The actual cost was $9.7b and it launched in 2021 and
| still isn't fully operational.
|
| We don't know how to build things any more.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#
| Cos...
| generj wrote:
| They immediately pivoted towards a moon base race in the
| series.
|
| Landing on the moon was just what had to be done in order to
| enable entering the moon base race.
| robbiep wrote:
| I second the series, it's amazing (for space nerds). Produced
| by the same guy who did the Battlestar Galactica reboot which
| was also amazing.
|
| I think the thing about For All Mankind that makes me sad is
| how it conveys the potential that the 60s really offered but
| failed to deliver on, in terms of progressivism, equal rights,
| womens roles in the workplace. Of course it's a work of
| fiction, but science fiction has always been a mechanism for
| exploring different socio-political evolutions and it makes me
| feel like we missed something important that we're only just on
| the cusp of today.
|
| Anyway, my 2c
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| What in the epic hell are you on about?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I don't want to spoil, but the show displays a much faster
| social progress than our reality, and explains it with a
| rich political context.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The first Black astronaut wasn't until 1983. Same for
| women. The show portrays a very different scenario as part
| of its plot points.
| Bud wrote:
| You might want to review the part about how most of the
| civil rights movement's goals were foiled or rolled back,
| and someone shot all the major figures, and then Reagan
| happened and we had another half-century of horrific
| racism.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > most of the civil rights movement's goals were foiled
| or rolled back
|
| Not everything is perfect at all - there are very serious
| problems - but the country (and world) is transformed
| since before the Civil Rights Movement, and civil rights
| have spread to others (LGBTQ+ and disabled people, for
| example).
|
| It's the people against civil rights who want you to
| quit, to believe you are powerless, that it is all for
| nothing. Maybe they want to believe it too! :)
| freeflight wrote:
| _> civil rights have spread to others (LGBTQ+ and
| disabled people, for example)_
|
| That only started in the last two decades and in many
| places it's still a far cry away from being properly
| established.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > That only started in the last two decades
|
| Plenty happened in the four decades before that. Look up
| Stonewall, for example.
|
| > it's still a far cry away from being properly
| established
|
| That doesn't mean nothing happened. People can get
| married, and most of the country supports that!
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The tv show is make believe.
|
| Your complaint is that it's not a documentary?
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| What? Read the thread. I'm talking about the AP take on
| it. It's a cool story. Just dont prop it up as some kind
| of self defeati g example how how bad we fucked up
| because the reality is we did pretty fuckin well.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > you need to let this Russia shit go
|
| Some people certainly would like to silence any
| discussion of it, and they have every argument in the
| book. Disdain / contempt are a popular tactic.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's just trolling, an attempt to disrupt others. It
| produces nothing for our society, which is falling apart.
| You can do better! We need you.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| It's a bit more than trolling at this point.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Before BSG, Moore was also heavily involved in DS9 from
| season 3 onwards, and before that was responsible for the
| arcs in TNG (the whole Worf/Duras/Gowron arc)
| dotancohen wrote:
| DS9, maybe, not TNG?
| munchler wrote:
| Moore co-wrote 27 episodes of TNG, including the series
| finale, and two of the TNG films.
|
| https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ronald_D._Moore#Star_Tr...
| iso1631 wrote:
| Pretty much every episode Worf got character growth --
| growth that was referred back to in later episodes, which
| was amazing for the late 80s and early 90s.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Nixon, who was president by the time the US landed on the moon,
| in case you've forgotten, _hated_ JFK, and had ever since he lost
| to Kennedy in the 1960 election after Nixon 's disastrous
| appearance at the debate vs JFK.
|
| So of course, when Nixon became president, he considered Apollo
| to be JFK's program and killed it. Not all at once - first by
| cancelling missions after 17, then more so. Also, Nixon wanted
| the money for his expansion of the war in Vietnam after the Tet
| Offensive, as well as money for his other imperialist
| interventions around the world.
|
| The reason why we got the Space Shuttle was, bluntly, Air Force
| involvement in wanting a reusable, crewed vehicle to deploy and
| retrieve spy satellites. That's why the shuttle bay got to be so
| big[1]
|
| 1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1960/1
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Adding on to the Air Force thing, the shuttle program was being
| starved of money so the decision was made to accommodate the
| Air Force to get some money from the DoD. It wound up seriously
| disfiguring the original design of the shuttle and it never
| ended up doing any of the kind of missions the Air Force
| required the changes for.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| > The only reason it was not done is because politically it was
| inexpedient for the Nixon administration to continue supporting
| the Apollo program, which it saw a legacy of the Kennedy and
| Johnson administrations.
|
| Politicians would do well to remember the quote by Picasso
|
| "Good artists copy; great artists steal!"
|
| If you try to make a name for yourself by creating your own
| rendition of a space program while scrapping your predecessor's
| then you'll only be remembered for your limited success or
| spectacular failure. If you take what's already there and make it
| your own by expanding upon it and pushing it further then you
| will look like a genius who advanced the art far beyond where it
| was before.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-14 23:01 UTC)