"Space Race": OK, Bad or Terrible?

"Brian Thorn" wrote:

wrote:

So, the story was 'untold' before, because it was
only now made up? Ed, can you list a few of your
favorite howlers?

They didn't come out and say so, but they strongly implied Apollo 6
(not 4) was the first Saturn V flight.

Tons of factual errors. One that was particularly annoying was the statement
the Russian N1 "moon rocket" generated a whopping 4500 pounds of thrust (it
actually was rated over 10 million lbs of thrust). Also, it always bugs me
when they use archive footage of wrong rockets and spacecraft for specific
missions. Worse of all though, is the insane squashing of footage to fit in
a 16:9 widescreen format. Ugh.

The format of the program basically spent 3 of 4 hours leading up to the
first manned spaceflights, then crammed basically the entire manned space
race to the moon into the final hour.

T.B.

Jim Oberg wrote:
So, the story was 'untold' before, because it was
only now made up? Ed, can you list a few of your
favorite howlers?

"Ed Kyle" wrote
A little poetic license is one thing, but the outright factual errors were
too
much for me. Some parts were interesting, but the errors made the
total result terrible, IMO.

- Ed Kyle

The program said, more than once, that a Saturn V weighed
"over 12 million pounds"!

The program script also said that:

Apollo 8 would have been "lost forever" if its engine had not
fired to put it into lunar orbit.

One hundred people died in the N-1 pad explosion.

Mission Control was in Houston during Alan Shepard's flight.

R-7 had 20 main engines (Henry Spencer says this one is
debatable, of course. :-) )

Visual problems included showing more than one Jupiter-C
launch, with all of the rockets labeled "UE" (only Explorer 1's
Jupiter-C had that identification).

I also did not like the oversimplification's used to turn the
show into a race between Korolev and von Braun. Were the
F-1 engines really "von Braun's engines"? Etc..

- Ed Kyle

Or how a scowling KGB-type would glare and threaten Korolev
after every failure.

Or how every early test launch was "Korolev's last chance", or
words to that effect.

Or how Korolev and Glushko glared at each other like competing
soap opera wives during every shared scene. (Yeah, we know
they didn't like each other, but come on!)

- Ed Kyle

On 7 Jun 2006 16:48:59 -0700, "Ed Kyle" wrote:

The program said, more than once, that a Saturn V weighed
"over 12 million pounds"!

Just goes to show you how amazing the Saturn V was - it could lift
12.5 megapounds on only 7.5 megapounds of thrust!
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Ed Kyle wrote:

Or how a scowling KGB-type would glare and threaten Korolev
after every failure.

Or how every early test launch was "Korolev's last chance", or
words to that effect.



Oh, that may well have been the case... Khrushchev was a lot more
forgiving than Stalin in that regard.
One of the reasons Korolev died on the operating table was that they
were unable to get the anesthesia and oxygen tube into his mouth
properly, due to the fact that his jaw had been broken in the gulag by
some of Stalin's crew, and he couldn't open his mouth very wide.

Or how Korolev and Glushko glared at each other like competing
soap opera wives during every shared scene. (Yeah, we know
they didn't like each other, but come on!)



In actuality the way Russians do it isn't glaring, they get very cold
and dismissive in an obvious way toward those they don't like, sometimes
resorting to excessive formality in an obvious show of contempt. And
even if you don't understand Russian, you can pick up on this right off
the bat... I saw several examples of it while I was over there, mainly
between women.
Chelomei and Korolev weren't exactly buddy-buddy either.

Pat

- Ed Kyle

The F-1 was an Air Force project before NASA took it over.


Ed Kyle wrote:
I also did not like the oversimplification's used to turn the
show into a race between Korolev and von Braun. Were the
F-1 engines really "von Braun's engines"? Etc..

- Ed Kyle

The highest point of the orbiter will come down and the craft will
eventually leave the atmosphere swing around and re-enter again. It
will keep doing this until the apogee (highest point) come down low
enough to be effected by the atmosphere. Then after that it gets a
little complex depending on how the initial re-entry was set up.

Understand that deceleration will be occuring all along the portion of
the orbit that is in the atmosphere so not only the apogee will be
lowering it will shifting clockwise or counter-clockwise in relation to
the original orbit.

The big problem is the substained heating the space craft will
experience. You will have a low peak heating tempature but a lot longer
time at that tempature. Also if you are using abaltive heat shield you
may have the conditions needed for the abalation effect to occur which
mean your heat shield is soaking up the thermal engery directly

To steep and you exceed the peak heating tempature of the heatshield
To shallow you will cause substained heating and overload the thermal
capacity of the heat shield


Is this correct or a mistake, when they are talking about reentering
from Earth orbit. If it is too steep it will burn up or be crushed,
if it is too shallow it will skip off the atmosphere into a higher
orbit. I know that returning from the moon, that would be the case.
But in Earth orbit, if the angle is too narrow, will it skip off the
atmosphere and go into a higher orbit?

NGs "Space Race": OK, Bad or Terrible?
How about absolutely insane, as well as whatever their GOOGLE/NOVA
teams of rusemasters or partners in crimes against humanity can manage
to pull off.

Besides all of their nonstop picture takings (obviously doable because
they had such rad-hard Kodak film and of apparently nothing better to
be doing), I see that the xenon lamp worth of illumination spectrum
instead of the raw solar skewed spectrum, of their unusually **** poor
DR(dynamic range) and of such otherwise poorly focused images, as well
as their having video/movie recordings of falling moon debris that's
transpiring as though affected by a 9.8 m/s/s worth of gravity isn't
sufficiently bothering these rusemaster folks one damn bit. Amazing
how such blatant evidence is getting ignored and/or banished as though
it doesn't exist, or doesn't count if having been based upon replicated
hard-science and of those pesky regular laws of physics.

As otherwise, one might have to conclude we hadn't actually walked as
moonsuit butt naked upon that terribly gamma and hard-X-ray moon that
was also a bit windy at times and oddly looking as though being of a
very terrestrial form of a remote guano island setting that was
recently covered with a thin dusting of locally ground guano, portland
cement and cornmeal.

Would you folks like to know of which moonscape like guano island it
most likely was?
-
Brad Guth


Stan Marsh wrote:
A lamentable waste of 4 hours, in my opinion.

And I'm not referring to all the condescending commercials depicting BP as
responsible corporate citizens...

The producers paid painfully little attention to fact checking, chock full
of easily avoidable mistakes. Gee, I didn't know that Mission Control had
live TV of the LM descent phase!

National Geographic isn't very picky about what they attach their name to
any more, what a shame. How the formerly proud have fallen.

On 8 Jun 2006 11:41:40 -0700, "Robert Conley"
wrote:


The highest point of the orbiter will come down and the craft will
eventually leave the atmosphere swing around and re-enter again. ...

Thanks for the answer.
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I don't get National Geographic on my cable, but my SO does on her
DirectTV, so I just saw both nights on tape last night.

Simply an awful show. They started losing me from where von Braun
didn't have his arm in a cast when captured by the Allies. I finally
gave up when we were shown Alan Shepard's addition of an in-cabin video
system back to *Houston*'s MCC.

What's wrong with NGS nowadays? Is it that difficult to do *simple*
fact-checking for a dramatic series?