Back to the moon? When?

"Sylvia Else" wrote in message
u...
They're not quite as willing to risk killing people this time. Also,
they're still trying to think of a convincing reason for actually going.

B.S. The money simply isn't there to go as fast as we did during Apollo.
NASA had essentially a blank checkbook for Apollo/Saturn development
funding. They don't have that today.

Jeff
--
"When transportation is cheap, frequent, reliable, and flexible,
everything else becomes easier."
- Jon Goff

"D. Orbitt" wrote in message
ups.com...
Also, you have to remember that much of the blueprints, all the
tooling, the assembly lines, and almost all of the people that
designed and built the 60's Apollo hardware, and all their skills, are
long gone or retired and advanced in age.

The blueprints aren't gone. That's an urban ledgend.

Jeff
--
"When transportation is cheap, frequent, reliable, and flexible,
everything else becomes easier."
- Jon Goff

"John Schilling" wrote in message
...
Mostly fear of failure. The surest way to never fail, is to never try,
and while I expect NASA will eventually get around to trying to put a
few more men on the Moon, they are going to delay as long as possible
before starting each new step.

B.S. It's lack of funding. NASA's peak funding was during Apollo/Saturn
development. That level of funding has *never* returned and it *won't*
return. The nation has different priorities today than it had when it was
using NASA to show the world that the US was superior to the Soviet Union.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

Jeff
--
"When transportation is cheap, frequent, reliable, and flexible,
everything else becomes easier."
- Jon Goff

Quadibloc wrote:
D. Orbitt wrote:
Also, you have to remember that much of the blueprints, all the
tooling, the assembly lines, and almost all of the people that
designed and built the 60's Apollo hardware, and all their skills,
are long gone or retired and advanced in age. Even if you know it
has been done before, that's not equal to being able to make it
happen again quickly or easily, if you've lost the capacity to make
those things exactly the same way. You have to reinvent a lot of
the processes, find modern materials to replace stuff that's no
longer available, or stuff that was not as safe (leather gaskets,
anyone?) as modern replacements. You have to lay down a whole lot
of infrastructure and start a flow of precursor materials,
structures, and assemblies, a pipeline of materiel, and train up a
whole new highly specialized workforce with skillsets that have
been largely forgotten or have changed radically over time.

It certainly is true that it isn't possible to start putting
together
F-1 engines at Canoga Falls next week.

If, though, the desire were present to send astronauts back to the
Moon to perform Apollo-like missions again as quickly as possible,
rockets are still being built, and the Space Shuttle Main Engine
could
be pressed into service. The Shuttle, though, achieves thrust
comparable to a Saturn V through the use of solid rocket boosters.
So
a new class of heavy-lift boosters will have to be designed almost
from scratch, and it took time originally to proceed from the Gemini
program's Titan to the Saturn.

After all, rockets and missiles are still being built. Building
something like the Lunar Module could be done without the need for
special knowledge lost in the 1960s.

So, while you have noted an important reason why it's taking longer
than one naively might expect - since we already did it "from
scratch"
in nine years, we should be able to do it now in five. (And, after
all, Titan rockets, like those used in Gemini, are still being
made.)
But a lot of things are not available off-the-shelf.

Other posters have noted that the program is being done on a limited
budget while NASA is busy with other activities. I suspect that is a
larger part of the problem than the obstacle of having to repeat
some
work that was allowed to go to waste. But another part of it is that
there is a desire to do it "right" this time.

What was "wrong" with Apollo was simply its hasty discontinuance,
and
the failure to follow it up. These things weren't inherent flaws in
Apollo itself, but in a way they can be seen as arguments against
simply doing more of exactly what Apollo did, and then stopping
again.

What was "wrong" with it was its being a hang the expense crash
program aimed at achieving prestige and not capability. The Air Force
had a good solid research program going that ended up getting killed
because of Apollo. If the Air Force had continued what they were
doing at Edwards we'd likely have real capability by now.

So the plan is this time to send larger Moon missions, as part of an
effort to build a permanent base on the Moon. And to use the same
hardware to send men to Mars.

But since even the first step is being taken on a 20-year schedule,
the chance of it being cancelled before anything happens... makes it
hard to take it seriously. The fact that G. W. Bush's popularity is
sagging has an effect on those odds.

So the goal is to take at least a small step beyond Apollo - sending
more people to the Moon, and for a longer mission. And to do it as a
side pastime instead of a crash project. The wonder isn't that it's
taking so long; the wonder will be if it ever happens.

No point to it if the effort is not sustainable and at current launch
costs it's not.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

Ian Parker wrote:
:
:Then but not now.
:

Yes, now, too.

:
:This is the whole crux of the matter. I remember
:round about the time of the Apollo landins the firm I was working for
:bought an HP2000 minicomputer. "This computer went to the Moon" HP
roudly told me. This was less than 1/100 the power of a modern chip.
:The HP2000 was not capable of looking at an image and saying - this
:shows evidence of water for example.
:

And nothing now can really do that, either, except for a geologist on
site.

:
:Lunokhod was ven cruder. In fact
:in the solar system you really don't have to do this. You can transmit
:a picture back in JPEG. There is after all no limit to the time that
:can be spent on the Moon.
:

This isn't magic. Bandwidth, power, time delays, etc. People are
still orders of magnitude better.

Ian, I really wish you'd learn something about what is actually
possible given the current state of the art. It would keep you from
posting oh so many silly things.


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

In article ,
"Erich Kohl" wrote:

First and foremost, let me just say that I do believe that the United
States was actually on the moon.

Kind of a silly thing to say. Of course we were, six times.

However, I am in a debate with someone who wants to know why it's
taking us (or anyone else for that matter) so long to go back there.
After all, if it was done once before with 1960's technology and
know-how, what's causing the delay in the expedition this time?

Money. The Apollo program was an enormous expense, cancelled by the
Nixon administration for exactly that reason, and it's never been
politically viable to spend that much again (and still isn't now, which
is why it's taking 20 years to do what was done in less than 10 back
then).

My theory is that it must have something to do with politics and
budget, combined with the fact that it might not be as high of a
priority as it once was when the U.S. was in an overt space race with
the Soviet Union.

You pretty much nailed it.

Best,
- Joe

--
"Polywell" fusion -- an approach to nuclear fusion that might actually work.
Learn more and discuss via: http://www.strout.net/info/science/polywell/

Jeff Findley wrote:
"D. Orbitt" wrote in message
ups.com...
Also, you have to remember that much of the blueprints, all the
tooling, the assembly lines, and almost all of the people that
designed and built the 60's Apollo hardware, and all their skills,
are long gone or retired and advanced in age.

The blueprints aren't gone. That's an urban ledgend.

Are the design drawings actually well preserved somewhere?

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

On 9 Nov, 15:35, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:

:
:Then but not now.
:

Yes, now, too.

:
:This is the whole crux of the matter. I remember
:round about the time of the Apollo landins the firm I was working for
:bought an HP2000 minicomputer. "This computer went to the Moon" HP
roudly told me. This was less than 1/100 the power of a modern chip.
:The HP2000 was not capable of looking at an image and saying - this
:shows evidence of water for example.
:

And nothing now can really do that, either, except for a geologist on
site.

I have some news for you Google is in fact developing software which
will help to classify pictures. As I said on the Moon this is largely
academic. You can communicate a decision in 3 secs. On my recent
hol;iday in Syria I saw cliffs from the coach. To a geologist these
mean one thing water in the past. In fact the name of your most recent
mess comes from such a cliff "Al Iraq". If I were to put "Al Iraq"
into a search (we assume it understands Arabic) it would find all the
places were there had been water (or methane in the case of Titan) at
some time in the past. This is now under developmrent. As I said for
most purposes this is academic although interesting. Transmitting the
picture and having a decent attenna is a much more cost effective
solution.

However the question of how we test a hypothesis is interesting. Can
we, for example, run a series of simulations and come up with a
hypothesis that would explain the shape of rocks? Well in a sense we
have. Start off with a black hole and some gas and hey presto we get a
galaxy. We have indeed tested our hypothesis.

BTW - The only geologist ever to fly on an Apollo mission was Harrison
Schmidt. Geologists were at mission control, as they would be for a
robot.
:
:Lunokhod was ven cruder. In fact
:in the solar system you really don't have to do this. You can transmit
:a picture back in JPEG. There is after all no limit to the time that
:can be spent on the Moon.
:

This isn't magic. Bandwidth, power, time delays, etc. People are
still orders of magnitude better.

But 3 secs is not long for a decision. Bandwidth (from the Moon) is
easily HDTV. From Mars you have a delay. still a geological assessment
is possible in a timely way. Anyway are you seriously twelling me that
the best geologists would be on Mars.

Ian, I really wish you'd learn something about what is actually
possible given the current state of the art. It would keep you from
posting oh so many silly things.

You say a lot of silly things too. While we are on the subject of
cliffs can anyone explain to me why Americans are capable of winning
Nobel Prizes yet are such gits when it comes to managing their
affairs. How can America time after time get itself involved in the
messes it does? Yet win Nobel Prizes?
--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Yes there is nothing beyond 3KPa according to Bush. How can America
have such a leader?


- Ian Parker

On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:17:19 -0800, in a place far, far away, Ian
Parker made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

You say a lot of silly things too. While we are on the subject of
cliffs can anyone explain to me why Americans are capable of winning
Nobel Prizes yet are such gits when it comes to managing their
affairs.

Yes, Ian. We'll explain that to you right after you explain to us why
you continue to bugger little boys.

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:17:19 -0800, in a place far, far away, Ian
Parker made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

You say a lot of silly things too. While we are on the subject of
cliffs can anyone explain to me why Americans are capable of winning
Nobel Prizes yet are such gits when it comes to managing their
affairs.

Yes, Ian. We'll explain that to you right after you explain to us why
you continue to bugger little boys.

Is that the standard republican conservative response to intelligent
debate now?