Return to Apollo?

about friggin time!

Yup, but frankly I can see today's aerospace industry taking a simple, elegant, and reliable concept and turning into an over-engineered, over-subcontracted, over-managed and over-budget boondoggle which costs 5x more than originally estimated while taking 3 times longer to develop, and ultimately proving only 1/2 as capable and 1/3 as reliable.

Remember that 10-year, $11 billion space station we started back in the mid-80's, with its crew of 18 and dozens of modules? ;O(

Not that Apollo was without its problems, but we need a return to the "can-do" engineering spirit that got us to the moon from scratch in less than 10 years.

Isn't that the mission where they splashed down off Los Angeles, and when they emerged from the spacecraft, they had changed into monkeys?

tad danley wrote in news:Szj7b.534$WA3.154 @newssvr22.news.prodigy.com:

But what are they going to put it on top of?

Hmm, consider a shuttle stack but instead of the orbiter, a more traditional cylinder with the SSMEs at the bottom and an updated Apollo capsule on top...

len.

I'm not sure the comparison of capsule to shuttle reliability is accurate. The US Space program launched a total of 31 manned capsules, compared to

113 (I think that's close) shuttles. That's 3.6 times as many shuttles to capsules, so we'd expect 3.6 times as many failures as well.

We've lost one shuttle on boost, and another on landing, although the failure occured on boost as well.

While we never lost a capsule in flight, there were 2 failures that came damn close, and resulted in mission aborts: Gemini 8 and Apollo 13. Plus the Apollo 1 fire. We've never had a test or mid-flight failure of a shuttle that matched any of these incidents.

I agree that the Shuttle design is old. And it's mission was designed in congress, not by engineers and scientists. We don't need a manned craft to deploy satellites. We need small, medium, and heavy lift unmanned boosters for that. Ditto for probes to other parts of the solar system. And for launching space station parts.

What we need in a manned craft is a taxi, something that can get us up to a space station and back to earth. Something small, cheap, and reliable. Something that can be launched from more than one location. Something that can always be ready to take off in an emergency. Something that can land where needed, not on one runway in FL or a dry lake bed in PRK. And frankly, something cheap enough that we can build enough of them to do the job even if we lose one or two in flight. The shuttle has shown us that it WILL happen. We lose automobiles every day, and airlines perhaps one a year. And those are proven technologies, not bleeding edge technology.

I see the solution as hybrid vehicles. Perhaps an offshoot of the X-planes, carried aloft by a conventional jet, then flown to orbit. Perhaps something along the lines of the Dyna-Soar, launched by an expendable booster. Even the Soyuz has shown its flexibility over the years.

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

You mean this?

Delta IV.

Read this week's Aviation Week.

I'm taking a class with a bunch of Delta IV engineers. Geez, they look very young.

-Fred "OF" Shecter NAR 20117

-- ""Remove "zorch" from address (2 places) to reply.

NO.

The Delta IV Heavy.

-Fred Shecter NAR 20117

-- ""Remove "zorch" from address (2 places) to reply.

"Fred Shecter" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.boeing.com:

Yeah, that's the ticket...

Disadvantages of using Apollo:

1) You throw it away after using it once. 2) You have to hitch a ride to dry ground after "landing". 3) Must redesign vehicle and launch system.

Perhaps my views on this are colored by my having recently re-read "Halfway to Anywhere" by G. Harry Stine, but returning to Apollo seems like a giant step backwards.

tad danley wrote: > Cool! >

Just found a copy of "Halfway to Anywhere" yesterday at MicroCenter. Probably should go by and get it.

Perhaps my views on this are colored by my having recently re-read "Halfway to Anywhere" by G. Harry Stine, but returning to Apollo seems like a giant step backwards.

Thanks, Bob...your message was exactly what I was preparing to write. Saved me a lot of typing. The Shuttle is a wonderful machine, and two losses in 113 flights is a record a lot of systems wish they could match. But it's time to take what we've learned and make something better. Shuttle is not a DC-3, but the DC-3 didn't spring full-grown from a drop of sweat on an engineer's forehead, either.

Doug Pratt

George, good points here.

GCGassaway wrote: ...

I think Soyuz had a string of near 100 successful launches. but that was the mature vehicle after 30 years of practice and many many failures. definitely not going to get that reliability right out of the box.

If the knowledge base was in anyuseful form at all current designers could factor in working corrections into new vehicles.

As it is, there is a patchwork of vendors, agencies, customers and governments, ALL with incentive to keep secret, hide, misinform and generally prevent any success by anyone.

Jerry

Yes and here's why.

There were no bureaucracies formed. It was an ad hoc group in every way and as such was nearly perfectly efficient. Now post Apollo and post Shuttle, 90% of what we have IS bureaucracy and very few indians and they are not allowed to form ad hoc networks. It is against policy.

Gee I wonder why every post accident report points out that the culture at NASA is broken?

The government itself is no better.

Jerry

You have an engineering manager. He yells accross the room (no email, no pbx, no technology at all), and says "George who do we have to make a turbopump", George puts down his PENCIL and replies, "the guys at Rocketdyne can probaly do it. I'll put together a list of basic requirements. Goes over to TYPEWRITER and MAILS it to Rocketdyne.

Despite the glacially slow communications network, EVERYTHING happened faster. because there was no "procedure" for needs definition", no "procedure for RFQ", no "Procedure for purchasing".

Just make a sample, send it over, test it and if it generally works, order the 12 we need for actual flight to flight weight and specs and sizes.

It may not always be quite that easy, but the point is, it is by comparison to the way things are done now.

Jerry

Check out Homer Hickam's article "Not a Culture but Perhaps a Cult" at:

This is extremely well put.

I have read most of the CAIB report, and it says after the foam strike was discovered, some engineers put together an ad hoc team to work on the problem. The report concluded the engineers worked the way engineers work. But since they were not working through the rigid CHAIN OF COMMAND of the bureaucracy, much of their work never reached the MANAGERS.

In one case, an engineer with security clearance called someone he knew at the DoD and requested high resolutin imagery. But the request was later cancelled by the MANAGERS because it did not go through the PROPER CHANNELS.

One of the criticisms of management in the report is that managers did not defer to technical expertise as they had the Apollo program.