NEWS - Bush May Announce Return To Moon At Kitty Hawk - Space Daily

JRS: In article , seen in
news:sci.space.policy, Kevin Willoughby
posted at Thu, 30 Oct 2003 19:57:00 :-
In article ,
says...
The USA, using 1960's technology, needed under 7.5 years to go from
Glenn-in-Mercury to Moon-Landing, with a delay of ?? caused by Apollo I.

Yes, but a lot of ground work was done before Glenn's flight. The F-1
design had begun years before. North American was working on the Apollo
CSM. Various big Saturns were on the drawing board.

It's hard to say just when the US started working on potentially manned
spaceflight; but ISTR that little of value was done before the
Importation of Wernher von Braun, whenever that was. Under 17 years,
maximum.

The Chinese have been launching to orbit, including many loads as big as
Mercury, since 1970. They have been thinking about the Moon for a
considerable while. We may not know all that they have been actively
working on.


That was when NASA was young, encouraging innovation and wild ideas
(flying two Geminis at once, flying Apollo 8, LOR, all-up testing), and
willing to take out insurance against the unknowns (when an Agena
failed, they just happened to have this little Target Docking gadget
sitting in a hanger, heck, the entire Gemini program was both an
admission of ignorance and a way of learning what had to be learned
before Apollo was flyable).

Much of what was learned then is available to everybody now, if they are
willing to use it.

More important, the quality of the senior management was extraordinary.
I'm not aware of a von Bruan in today's NASA, nor a Gilruth, nor a Web,
nor a, well, the list goes on.

Indeed. And the Chinese could be implementing additional management
techniques impractical in the USA - but effective.


There in a risk that Forty-Three might want to defend against.

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