A really great essay by Keith Cowing

"Reed Snellenberger" wrote in
message .158...
(Eric Chomko) wrote in news:bqg3td$2tch$1
@news.ums.edu:


Also, there is an implication that their lives are expendable as well.
Folks that throw numbers around as being small feel that (soldiers are
expendable), as well as those that claim that the servive is volunteer.
I
have noticed a pattern there.


The one thing that distinguishes soldiers from civilians in time of war is
that soldiers *are* expendable, and (in the U.S. case) volunteer to risk
themselves in that way.


Note that's a rather new concept for the US. Just ask many of the Vietnam
Vets whose buddies did not make it back.

Or Korea, WWII, etc.


When an officer orders men to assault a fortified
position, he knows that some of them are likely to be killed or wounded.

That doesn't mean that their lives should be expended carelessly,
casually,
or needlessly...

--
Reed

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...
Henry Spencer ) wrote:
: In article ,
: Eric Chomko wrote:
: : FY68 (being formulated in 1967) saw the following programs seriously
: : curtailed or cancelled
: : - Voyager mars probes
:
: We still managed to get 2 launched.

: Nope, there were no Voyager Mars probes. All canceled. The name -- and
: only the name -- was later reused for what began as Mariner
Jupiter-Saturn.

Cripes! Of course you are right. That is two Viking landers to Mars and 2
Voyager spacecraft to the outer Solar System.


And note how descoped the Viking landers were compared to the original
Voyager plans.


Eric

: --
: MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
: pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...
Greg D. Moore \(Strider\) ) wrote:

: "Eric Chomko" wrote in message
: ...
:
: I disagree. Why is it a strawman? Reagan never stated that we should
put a
: man on the moon or anything equivalent to it.

: He didn't? It was his stunt double that called for a space station by
1994?

I'd like a cite on that. Did he direct it to Congress? Also, let's see the
allocated budget for the SS under Reagan.

It's called his State of the Union speech. I'm not going to do your
homework for you. Try hitting Google please.

For someone who speaks with such conviction, you just might want to make
sure you have at least a few of the facts correct.



I think you confuse the Iran/Contra affair with SS Freedom, regarding
commitment.

Eric

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...
Henry Spencer ) wrote:
: In article ,
: Eric Chomko wrote:
: : Apollos 15 (not 14) and 19 died in September 1970...
:
: Accoring to http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/apollo_landings.html
: Apollo 15 flew.

: That was the mission originally numbered 16, the first of the J-series
: Apollos. The original Apollo 15 was the last of the H series. Note
that
: both CSM numbers and LM numbers skip one between Apollos 14 and 15 --
the
: original Apollo 15 CSM flew on Apollo-Soyuz, the original Apollo 15 LM
is
: a museum exhibit at KSC.

Cite, please, to unravel your logic.

Can you at least PRETEND to know how to use Google?

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary...llo_18_20.html

http://www.myspacemuseum.com/stats2.htm



: When they decided to cancel two Apollos, it made sense to keep as many
of
: the more-capable J-series missions as possible. The timing
unfortunately
: made it impractical to kill more than one H-series mission, since Apollo
14
: was well advanced in planning and training, and the J-series hardware
was
: still being developed.

I am certain you understand this paragragh, but I don't. Again, send me to
a place that backs up what you say, as I'm sure you are correct.

Eric


: --
: MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
: pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...

: When they decided to cancel two Apollos, it made sense to keep as many
of
: the more-capable J-series missions as possible. The timing
unfortunately
: made it impractical to kill more than one H-series mission, since Apollo
14
: was well advanced in planning and training, and the J-series hardware
was
: still being developed.

I am certain you understand this paragragh, but I don't. Again, send me to
a place that backs up what you say, as I'm sure you are correct.

the H-series missions were shorter-duration and didn't feature a Lunar
Rover, among other differences. The J-series missions had all that, so they
were more desirable to fit into the schedule. Kind of like if you are
ordering software and they have v 2.0 out now, but v 3.0 is coming out next
month and your credit card will get charged at teh same time regardless and
you only need one version, may as well wait for the new&improved one.

The original Apollo 15 mission was one of the less-capable H missions, in
many ways just a repeat af Apollo 14 at a different landing site. No rover
(just the hand-cart probably), shorter EVA time, shorter on-moon time,
yadda. So when the higher-ups told NASA that they had to cancel one lunar
mission because there would be one less Saturn V rocket available, they
decided to cancel that last H mission (Apollo 15), rename what had been
Apollo 16 as the "new" Apollo 15, and slide the other two J missions "up" to
16 and 17 so there wasn't a numerical gap between mission numbers. No real
need to renumber except to blur the fact that a mission had been cancelled.

What Henry meant about Apollo 14 was: once it became obvious that another
two lunar missions beyond "15" would be cancelled, NASA would have
preferred to fly the final four as J missions to get more bang for the buck.
Apollo 13 had already flown as an H mission but never landed on the moon.
Fourteen was the next up with Shepard's crew, but it was an H mission. Then
they had room for three of the J missions (15-17) before the program was
shut down.

But at the time (late 1970) the J-mission lunar rover was having problems,
so it just wasn't ready to fly for Apollo 14 in early 1971. Instead of
waiting until all the kinks were ironed out, they decided to let Shepard's
Apollo 14 crew fly the H-mission that Lovell's crew were supposed to do. The
thought probably was that the good PR from Big Al's return to space, plus
*any* successful mission after 13 nearly didn't come home, would be a lot
better and help ensure some kind of future for NASA's manned spaceflight
program, than waiting an indeterminate time until they could fly a J mission
with all the bells and whistles.

Why did they redo the Apollo 13 flight plan instead of just moving on to the
original Apollo 14 mission? More planning had gone into it, and dammit,
we're gonna complete what we started out to do!

HTH,

--
Terrell Miller


"Very often, a 'free' feedstock will still lead to a very expensive system.
One that is quite likely noncompetitive"
- Don Lancaster

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...

: By this measure, NASA's budget started to fall in the 60's and didn't
: significantly increase until the late 80's. The Vietnam War may have
: had some influence on NASA's budget, but it was a minor influence.

What was the major influence?

Garden-variety politics. NASA is a federal agency. And it's a federal agency
that, despite repeated and very public failures, managed to meet its
objective on time. Bunch of smartass nerds...

I'm totally serious about that, btw. Once NASA met JFK's goal then the
knives came out bigtime. If you're the director of whatever HUD was called
back then and you get all these billions to "solve" a fundamentally
unsolvable problem like poverty, or if you're teh FBI director and you've
recently failed utterly to prevent the assassination of three hugely popular
and influential political leaders, then you damn sure don't want any of your
tax-dollar rivals to actually accomplish anything either. Ditto ditto if
you're in charge of defense procurement for the Southeast Asian Games...

It's kind of ironic that many senior NASA managers wanted to stop the "moon
shots" as well. Kraft for one has stated in interviews that if it were up to
him they wouldn't have gone back after A11. Declare victory and move on,
don't keep setting yourself up for a huge failure.

--
Terrell Miller


"Very often, a 'free' feedstock will still lead to a very expensive system.
One that is quite likely noncompetitive"
- Don Lancaster

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...

And of course, we have a very nice historical analogy for this.

"Americans do not like long, inconclusive wars. This is going to be a
long, inconclusive war." -- Ho Chi Minh

Except that the people don't support Saddam, for the most part, and he
has no superpower allies...

he doesn't need any. Uncle Ho had to not only drive us out (and we didn't
have any national memory of being driven off before to do half his work for
us), but he also had to actually conquer the rest of "his" country. The NVA
weren't exactly given a warm welcome in Saigon 1975, f'rinstance. Ho was
actively trying to win the war.

But all Saddam has to do is play for a draw. Just keep ****ing us off and
making things go not-quite-smoothly adn run up the body count on both sides,
and he figures (god I hope wrongly) that eventually we'll give it up and
slink back home. At that point, there's no ARVN to have to defeat just to
gain power, he could just come back out of his hole and start mentioning the
word "Fedayeen" again and mention that the surviving Republican Guard can
start getting paid again, that's all it would take for him and he knows it.

Similar but totally different strategic situation than Vietnam.

--
Terrell Miller


"Very often, a 'free' feedstock will still lead to a very expensive system.
One that is quite likely noncompetitive"
- Don Lancaster

In article ,
Terrell Miller wrote:
Why did they redo the Apollo 13 flight plan instead of just moving on to the
original Apollo 14 mission? More planning had gone into it, and dammit,
we're gonna complete what we started out to do!

And the original science priorities remained valid: dating the Imbrian
Event was *still* central to calibrating the Moon's geological history,
and Fra Mauro looked like the best place to get the samples to do that.

This was actually a rather noteworthy event. It's a sign of actual
planning and organization that when a mission fails, it gets reflown.
That sort of systematic approach -- persisting despite failures, and
following up on successes -- has been conspicuously lacking in most of
NASA's space operations since.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

In article ,
Eric Chomko wrote:
: Apollo 15 flew.
: That was the mission originally numbered 16, the first of the J-series
: Apollos. The original Apollo 15 was the last of the H series. Note that
: both CSM numbers and LM numbers skip one between Apollos 14 and 15 -- the
: original Apollo 15 CSM flew on Apollo-Soyuz, the original Apollo 15 LM is
: a museum exhibit at KSC.

Cite, please, to unravel your logic.

Any decent book on the history of Apollo will discuss this; a good place
to start is NASA SP-4214, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", which is a
history of lunar exploration by Apollo (as opposed to a history of the
program or parts of the hardware). For a table of which CSMs and LMs flew
which missions, try the appendices of "Stages to Saturn".

: When they decided to cancel two Apollos, it made sense to keep as many of
: the more-capable J-series missions as possible. The timing unfortunately
: made it impractical to kill more than one H-series mission, since Apollo 14
: was well advanced in planning and training, and the J-series hardware was
: still being developed.

I am certain you understand this paragragh, but I don't. Again, send me to
a place that backs up what you say, as I'm sure you are correct.

See above. Two Apollos must die, by order of upper management. 14 and 15
are currently H-series, 16 through 19 are J-series. J-series missions are
more capable, so you want to keep as many of them as possible. Ideally
you'd kill the last two H-series and keep all four J-series, but 14 is
already well started, and it'll be a while before you can fly the first
J-series... so continuity of both operations and budget say that 14 flies
as planned. So you kill 15 and 19, and of course you renumber the
survivors.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message
. ..

When an officer orders men to assault a fortified
position, he knows that some of them are likely to be killed or wounded.

That doesn't mean that their lives should be expended carelessly,
casually,
or needlessly...

actually, if you're ordered to take your men and launch an assault it *does*
mean precisely that.

You try like hell to get everybody back in one piece, but the objective
takes absolute priority over the lives of your men. If you have to order
them to their deaths, you do it and they obey your order.

--
Terrell Miller


"Very often, a 'free' feedstock will still lead to a very expensive system.
One that is quite likely noncompetitive"
- Don Lancaster