History Channel - Man, Moment & Machine

Double check your local cable channel for History Channel listings

Premiere episode tonight (October 17) at 10 PM Eastern / 9:00 PM Central /
7:00 PM Pacific
Apollo 13: Triumph on the Dark Side
http://www.history.com/shows.do?acti...isodeId=191915

Re broadcasts

Wednesday, October 18 at 2:00 AM Eastern / 1:00 AM Central / 11:00 PM
Pacific (17th)
Saturday October 21 04:00 PM Eastern
http://www.history.com/minisites/manmomentmachine

April 1970--the Apollo 13 mission is 178,000 miles from Earth, just two days
away from a lunar landing, when an explosion rips the spacecraft apart and
puts the crew's lives on the line. Captain Jim Lovell has to work quickly
and decisively to save his crew and what's left of his ship. After
struggling to stay alive for four days in a freezing cold spacecraft, no one
knows if the command module carrying the astronauts can survive a fiery
re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Only the leadership of Jim Lovell, the
ingenuity of the NASA team in space and on the ground, and the robust
systems of the spacecraft offer a chance for survival.

Too bad ABC, CBS, & NBC, are not showing this in place of regular
scheduled crap. It should be a mandate that we teach/force feed/shove
down the throat, this history, (at least twice a year), in broadcast
programming. Show the world of vid-idoits, that the real heros don't
throw/catch a ball, play a instr., or make wise cracks, (Real heros
ride bombs to orbit & beyond).

God Bless The History Channel, (and someone please kill the info-sales
programs in the early morning)!

Carl
P.S.
Does anyone remember when we all got cable to get away from adverts.

wrote in message
ups.com...
Too bad ABC, CBS, & NBC, are not showing this in place of regular
scheduled crap. It should be a mandate that we teach/force feed/shove
down the throat, this history, (at least twice a year), in broadcast
programming. Show the world of vid-idoits, that the real heros don't
throw/catch a ball, play a instr., or make wise cracks, (Real heros
ride bombs to orbit & beyond).

God Bless The History Channel, (and someone please kill the info-sales
programs in the early morning)!

Carl
P.S.
Does anyone remember when we all got cable to get away from adverts.


No, I remember when we had cable because it was the only way to get more
than one channel out in the boonies.

Ami Silberman wrote:

No, I remember when we had cable because it was the only way to get more
than one channel out in the boonies.

Forgot about that, (Sorry). I too am from the Boonies, (Plant City, FL,
was the Booines, (Before the Yankee invasion of the late 70's)). I have
been given a safe place to retreat to in, Fitzgerald, GA. We welcome
all true, Craker Refugees from Central and South FL.

Safe in the Boonies,

Carl
P.S.
We still have a Stocked, Town Bomb Shelter, (With Air Raid Horn)!

From w9gb:
Premiere episode tonight (October 17) at 10 PM Eastern / 9:00 PM Central /
7:00 PM Pacific
Apollo 13: Triumph on the Dark Side
http://www.history.com/shows.do?acti...isodeId=191915

April 1970--the Apollo 13 mission is 178,000 miles from Earth, just two days
away from a lunar landing, when an explosion rips the spacecraft apart and
puts the crew's lives on the line. Captain Jim Lovell has to work quickly
and decisively to save his crew and what's left of his ship. After
struggling to stay alive for four days in a freezing cold spacecraft, no one
knows if the command module carrying the astronauts can survive a fiery
re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Only the leadership of Jim Lovell, the
ingenuity of the NASA team in space and on the ground, and the robust
systems of the spacecraft offer a chance for survival.

While I am a huge fan of the History Channel in general, I was
disappointed to see this latest program to be mostly a rehash of the
Mission Control cheerleading that has become standard in recent years
with little critical analysis of decisions made by MOD during that
mission.

Even without such critical analysis, I would at least hope for accurate
history. Instead that program perpetuated the story that "an explosion
rips the spacecraft apart". It went so far as to show computer
graphics with scorch marks around the blown out panel on the Service
Module as though there actually was some kind of explosion, when the
historical record includes photographic documentation that no such
scorch marks were evident at all.

I would be extremely interested to have someone analyze the
high-resolution version of this photograph:
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/NA...8/48image.html

....or any other photo from that mission and have them point out any
evidence of an explosion having had occurred. Also I would like to
have it pointed out if any damage is evident in these photos, beside
the panel having separated in what appears to me a benign manner.

I certainly don't see any scorch marks like the History Channel is
trying to promote. Calling the event an explosion and doctoring the
computer graphics is nothing short of revisionist history that serves
to placate Kranz's decision to take the long way home instead of a
direct abort. A decision that came very close to costing the lives of
the crew.

I also note that this TV show made absolutely no mention of that
trajectory decision. Kranz has been quoted as saying that this was his
most difficult decision of the entire mission, saying something to the
effect that half his team wanted to bring them straight home in a
direct abort while the others favored continuing the long way for days
on end by going around the Moon.

Every story I've read on Apollo 13 has been light on covering the abort
options that were dismissed, leading the mission into the consumables
shortage among other near catastrophes.

I found this M^3 episode to be extremely interesting, yet in the end I
was left feeling thoroughly dissatisfied.


~ CT

I wrote:
snip
I would be extremely interested to have someone analyze the
high-resolution version of this photograph:
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/NA...8/48image.html

...or any other photo from that mission and have them point out any
evidence of an explosion having had occurred. Also I would like to
have it pointed out if any damage is evident in these photos, beside
the panel having separated in what appears to me a benign manner.
snip

Most importantly, I see no evidence of any engine damage like Haise
reported in real-time after SM sep.

Certainly SM systems are questionable after an O2 tank rupture event,
but I don't see the photographic evidence as supporting Kranz's
decision. If anyone can point out evidence of systems damage in that
photograph (or another) please let me know. Or if you know of any
reference that points out visible signs of damage, I'd like to see that
as well. I don't recall Cortwright as having provided any annotated
photograph saying...

"Look here. You can see that this has been damaged. So this indicates
that Kranz made a smart decision by choosing to take the long way
around the Moon."

From everything I've seen, I am highly skeptical that such evidence
exists. Yet people will persist in talking about the incident as an
"explosion". Even Lovell himself talks about the "explosion", when he
is the one who is quoted to describe the event by saying:

"there was a dull but definite bang - not much of
a vibration though...just a noise,"

(As previously discussed on this forum:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.s...dc99c324babd68)


~ CT

Certainly SM systems are questionable after an O2 tank rupture event,
but I don't see the photographic evidence as supporting Kranz's
decision. If anyone can point out evidence of systems damage in that
photograph (or another) please let me know. Or if you know of any
reference that points out visible signs of damage, I'd like to see that
as well. I don't recall Cortwright as having provided any annotated
photograph saying...

Spelling correction: Cortright

Link to his report: http://history.nasa.gov/ap13rb/ap13index.htm


~ CT

In article ,
says...
Double check your local cable channel for History Channel listings

Premiere episode tonight (October 17) at 10 PM Eastern / 9:00 PM Central /
7:00 PM Pacific
Apollo 13: Triumph on the Dark Side

I caught this by accident. Watched it for 5-10 minutes and gave up. The
audio track in isolation wasn't too bad, but the visual track was
horrid. A complete mish-mash of actual footage and highly inaccurate
"recreations" spliced together with no regard to what was being said on
the sound track. ugh.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

What gets measured gets done. -- David Patterson

I got to thinking that maybe someone would like a better explanation of
the trajectory options available to Kranz, so here is one view of
Direct Abort...

TLI is not a commitment to go to the Moon. It is only a commitment to
go *toward* the Moon.

To understand why, consider this scenario: Shoot a basketball in a
high arch to land near the center of the court. At any point along
that arch, you can impart a delta-v (a change in velocity) on that ball
so that it goes directly to the target at the center of the court, no
longer traveling to the apex of the original arch (its apogee). This
change in basketball arch trajectory is analogous to a Direct Abort for
an Apollo spacecraft headed for the Moon. Both are trajectories within
the gravity field of the Earth.

To simplify the situation, let's take the Moon out of the picture for
the moment. In this case, you can see that all the Trans-Lunar
Injection burn is doing for you is taking you out of your circular Low
Earth parking orbit, and pumping your trajectory way up into a highly
elliptical orbit that will top out at lunar distance (where the Moon
used to be). This is like the high arching basketball shot. The first
half of the ellipse acts as the Hohmann Transfer. With nothing out
there, the spacecraft will just go way up, and then way back down. But
the stack has plenty of energy to change its direction. While it is
still going out, if you decide that you want to bring it back quickly
you can simply turn it around and point it toward the Earth and do a
burn that takes you directly back to Earth. This Direct Abort burn is
like swatting the basketball mid-flight so that its path goes directly
toward the target at the center of the court, never getting anywhere
close to the height of its original trajectory (never making it out to
"lunar" distance).

That is the simplest way I can describe the basics of a Direct Abort.


If anyone would like a more exacting analogy, we can place the Moon
back in the picture. Imagine that hanging at some height above the
basketball court is a spherical magnet. Imagine that the ball is
metallic so that it is attracted to the magnet. (Magnetic attraction
follows the inverse square law similar to gravity.) Now when you shoot
the ball in a high arch it gets attracted to the magnet. The Earth
never stops pulling on the ball, but when the ball gets close enough to
the magnet it is that force that dominates, opening the possibility of
the magnet capturing the ball. This brings the analogy to a three-body
problem where the Earth-basketball-magnet corresponds to the real-world
Apollo situation of Earth-ApolloSpacecraft-Moon. And the basketball
shooter is like the S-IVB that imparts the energy for the high-arching
trajectory.


To be even more complete, the spherical magnet would not be hanging
stationary over the court. It would be moving steadily at a fairly
high speed along some kind of track. So the actual problem of getting
the basketball captured by the magnet is not one of slowing the ball
down, but rather speeding the ball up to more closely match the
magnet's speed. Notice that the reason for a spacecraft falling back
toward Earth after completing the half-ellipse outbound trajectory of a
Hohmann Transfer is that it does not have enough speed for a circular
orbit like the Moon's. From the point of view of the Moon, the
spacecraft appears to be slowing down during the Lunar Orbit Insertion
burn. But in an inertial reference frame it becomes clear that the
spacecraft is actually speeding up. Notice that the LOI burn happens
behind the Moon with the thrust vector pointing in the same direction
as the Moon's orbit.

For one more step toward completeness...

Imagine now that the court is not rectangular and stationary, but
circular and rotating. So not only is it a moving target that you're
shooting for, but your position itself is moving when you take the
shot.


More and more complexity could be piled onto the analogy, but the basic
point regarding the Apollo 13 abort trajectory decision is that if you
want to get them home quickly, you can turn them around and come
directly home. You can swat the basketball directly back down to the
court.

I've seen little to support Kranz's decision to take the extra days
going all the way out to the Moon before bringing them home, especially
given the near pristine condition that I see in that hi-res photo of
the SM. Had Lovell&Co *not* made it back due to a consumables shortage
or some cold soaked parachute failure or such, I am certain that the
mishap board would have cited Kranz's trajectory decision as the fatal
mistake.


~ CT

In message .com,
Stuf4 writes

I've seen little to support Kranz's decision to take the extra days
going all the way out to the Moon before bringing them home, especially
given the near pristine condition that I see in that hi-res photo of
the SM. Had Lovell&Co *not* made it back due to a consumables shortage
or some cold soaked parachute failure or such, I am certain that the
mishap board would have cited Kranz's trajectory decision as the fatal
mistake.

And they would have been wrong. Not knowing what the error was, would
they have lost another crew? Would another Apollo crew have even gone to
the Moon?
"Pristine"? :-)