On Jul 13, 9:06*am, Pat Flannery wrote:
As the Shuttle finishes up its last flight and Soyuz goes right on
flying, it might be well to note that we could have had a spacecraft
just like it from the mid/late 1960's if one fateful Apollo decision
hadn't been taken.
The General Electric entry in the Apollo competition was so close in
design to Soyuz that some think the Soviet spacecraft was a copy of it:http://web.archive.org/web/201001021...&searchsubmit=
A bit larger internally than the Soyuz one, the reentry module of the GE
Apollo was still smaller and lighter than the Apollo CM, due to the lack
of the very wide (and heavy) heatshield that NASA wanted for their
chosen squat conical shape.
Not only would a GE Apollo design have given us the ability to use
different orbital modules with it for different type missions (crew
living quarters, cargo, science experiments, etc), but the reduction in
reentry module weight might have allowed a direct ascent type flight to
the Moon via a single Saturn V, where all three crew could land and do
EVA's rather than having a separate lunar module, greatly simplifying
the whole mission profile.
It would have been a lot more optimized for space station resupply than
the Apollo CSM was, and if built, we may have had more stations beyond
Skylab.

Pat

if we had stuck with apollo saturn family von braun wanted to give
boosters wings and flyback capability, now imagine the shrinkage of
electronics since apollo last flew.. weight capacity would of increase
a lot.

by making vehicle reusable we basically froze much of the design fr 40
years.

and now we have no manned launch capacity at all.......