NASA HONORS LEGENDARY ASTRONAUT VANCE BRAND

Dale wrote:

Our economy
was a mess (did the Apollo crew wear "WIN" buttons in space?


I may still have one of those lying around.
For the young 'uns here who don't know what "WIN" button is, it was
President Ford's laughable way of confronting inflation- if we all wore
"Whip Inflation Now" buttons the thing would somehow go away.
He was not reelected.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:
Dale wrote:

Our economy
was a mess (did the Apollo crew wear "WIN" buttons in space?


I may still have one of those lying around.
For the young 'uns here who don't know what "WIN" button is, it was
President Ford's laughable way of confronting inflation- if we all wore
"Whip Inflation Now" buttons the thing would somehow go away.
He was not reelected.

Pat

You have to be elected in the first place before you can be reelected.
The only office Ford was elected to was as congresscritter from
Michigan. (Yea, he was nominated as Vice President by Nixon and
confirmed by the Congress. Then he became President when Nixon
resigned. But that's not an election.)

Rusty

Pat Flannery wrote in
:

Jim Oberg wrote:

It can even be argued that the most important lessons learned were
harmful. On Shuttle-Mir, NASA watched space crews dodge death on
almost a monthly basis and may have subconsciously absorbed the lesson
that since nobody had actually died, you could get sloppy with safety
reviews and it wouldn't ever bite you.

We'd learned that way pre-Shuttle/Mir. Our Shuttle crews were also
able to "dodge death on almost a monthly basis" due to the defective
field joints on the SRBs and the shedding foam on the ET. And we are
way ahead of Russia in space fatalities at 14 to 4 respectively.

We are also way ahead of Russia in person-trips to space, 763 to 236
respectively. Which, not surprisingly, works out to about the same fatality
rate.

As for life threatening situations on Mir, they had the fire, a near
collision with a Progress, an actual collision with another Progress,
The Soyuz thermal blanket shedding, and the big glycol leak. They had
a lot of trouble with the orientation system and the air recycling
system, but if worst came to worst, they could have always abandoned
the station via the Soyuz, so those weren't life threatening.

Not in the case of the fire - it blocked the escape route to one of the two
Soyuzes, stranding half the crew if the fire had been more serious.

And not in the case of the collision, either. According to the commander
(Vasily Tsibliyev), the crew was unable to power up the Soyuz because its
batteries were drained. Had the Progress collided with Kvant or the base
module instead of Spektr, the crew would have died.

After the ISS debacle, I'm fairly sure we won't be getting too cozy
with Russia for some time to come.
Assuming we had gone it alone and built the Freedom station, I still
think we would be trying to figure out what exactly to do with it as
the whole thing was a reaction by Reagan to the Russians launching
Mir,

Incorrect. The space station program was initiated in 1984, two years
before the launch of Mir.

--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Pat Flannery wrote in
:

Herb Schaltegger wrote:

We'd also have our own equivalent of a CRV by now, too, quite possibly
giving a leg up on the current impetus to create CEV, rather than
having to do so from scratch.

That's true, but a situation with the Station built and the loss of
Columbia means that the crew has to evacuate via the CRV, and then you
have to hope you can keep the unmanned station operational while you
fix the Shuttle.

Freedom was designed to be a lot more autonomous than ISS turned out to be,
mainly because the assembly sequence called for it to be man-tended until
assembly complete. When the Russians joined ISS and permanent-manned
capability moved much earlier in the assembly sequence, a lot of that
autonomy was sacrificed since there was assumed to be a crew there.

--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:09:09 -0600, Pat Flannery wrote:

For the young 'uns here who don't know what "WIN" button is, it was
President Ford's laughable way of confronting inflation- if we all wore
"Whip Inflation Now" buttons the thing would somehow go away.
He was not reelected.

Well, the thinking behind it wasn't entirely stupid- we'd all grown so
accustomed to prices going up that some prices rose simply due to the
assumption that they just should, not that they actually needed to. And
Ford could be credited with at least stimulating the US comedy industry

I bet without Apollo-Soyuz, and that model with the cool bilingual packaging
and instructions, you would have turned your evil genius toward the annihilation
of the Soviet Union and thus all of humanity, huh Pat? We may well owe our very
existence to that mission...

Dale

Dale wrote:

I think there's a touch of
revisionism in your article as well.



I can guarantee you that's the first time I ever saw the loss of the
Columbia blamed on the Russians.
That hits me a a very odd conclusion to draw.

Pat

OM wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:20:38 GMT, "Jim Oberg"
wrote:


I wouldn't call him a 'legend', because
he flew too late to get the media attention,


Q: did he fly as CMP on ASTP?

A: Yes.

Q: Then is he a legend?

A: What the frack do *you* think?

It's kinda like old-school British prog-rock. Everybody and their dog
knows who Yes were, but you had to be _seriously_ into that stuff to
know who 801 and Planet Gong were. Not huge stars, but awesome nonetheless.


--

..

"Though I could not caution all, I yet may warn a few:
Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools!"

--grateful dead.
__________________________________________________ _____________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
"Mikey'zine": dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

Rusty wrote:

You have to be elected in the first place before you can be reelected.



You got me on this one...the problem I keep having is remembering he was
ever president at all. It wasn't a very high profile presidency by any
standards.

Pat

"OM" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:20:38 GMT, "Jim Oberg"
wrote:

I wouldn't call him a 'legend', because
he flew too late to get the media attention,

Q: did he fly as CMP on ASTP?

A: Yes.

True - but if he hadn't been selected, there were several other people who
could have trained to do it.

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

I may still have one of those lying around.
For the young 'uns here who don't know what "WIN" button is, it was
President Ford's laughable way of confronting inflation- if we all wore
"Whip Inflation Now" buttons the thing would somehow go away.

Ford pills!