"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...
Ian Parker wrote:
:
:I have just read an article in the Times which says that
Apollo/saturn
:veterans are being drafted in to sort out the Ares problems.
:

Which "Times" and could we have a real cite to that?

You do realize that "Apollo/Saturn veterans" would be in their 80's or
older by now, right?

:
:I did say
:some time back that Sauturn worked and one could do a lot worse than
:dig out the S5 designs.
:

One could also do much, much, MUCH better...

--
"Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is
only stupid."
-- Heinrich Heine

Note those words:

One could also do much, much, MUCH better...

which are true but if you have any engineering experience
then you would be thinking,

Well, there are basically two kinds of product improvement
over time. These are, 1) incremental growth; 2) breakthru.
However, the few Saturn V flights (in face of budgets cuts
and engineering shops and production line rumors) weren't
sufficient experience for either one to happen. Truly
great ideas were on the boards (and when I think what would
have come of it if the Vietnam war had been cut back to free
dollars for Apollo rather than Apollo killed to gain dollars
for the war, *that hurts*. Think of how today's America
would be different).

Anyhow, yes, I recall hearing of the Saturn V pogo, and of
the remedies for it. You know the age of the workers who
made Apollo averaged out to about 28? If the program had
not been killed, those people in their primes would have
accomplished miracles. I have a suggestion, if you want
to know a little more of the Washington political style
around that time: find a video of Burt Rutan's talk at
ISDC 2005. The video loses his slides, so I'm scouting
around cyberspace to find a pointer to his talk put in
print somewhere -- with the slides. If I can find this,
I'll advertise it all thru cyberspace. From the rooftops,
as they say, but that's another topic.

Yes, we could do much, much, MUCH better.... Can you
review the news, scout around right here in this topic,
sci.spac.policy, and guess some reasons why such bad
people in power could foist such bad decisions upon
all of us? So it never happened? ??

Titeotwawki -- mha [sci.space.policy 2008 Oct 31]