WI: Lunar Gemini

As long as we're going to bitch about the trolling and flaming, somebody
here may as well try and drag it back on topic.

So, aaaa-aaanyway:

Let's say they managed to get some LG missions into the budget: a Centaur
flyby mission, an LEO test of the "Langley Lightest" lander, and a landing
or two.

Who do you think gets these flights, and why? I'm guessing that, given the
talk about Slayton wanting to see one of the O7 on the Moon, Grissom will
get the nod to command/fly the lander on the first LG landing flight, but
what about Conrad? Iirc, he was a real agitator for these missions, and
actually flew the Agena-boosted "high flight", but having flown this one,
would he still get to command an LG landing mission? Here's some SWAGs;
keep in mind I've left out "in-between" flights to try and guess a
possible rotation:

Agena "high-flight": Conrad/Gordon, as it happened
(a couple of LEO lander tests later)
Centaur-boosted lunar flyby w/LM descent test: White/Beano; White
flies the lander
(a couple of lunar flyby transstage tests and a manned lunar orbit/
lander descent test later)
Centaur-boosted first landing mission: Grissom/Conrad; Grissom lands/EVA

....after which Grissom dies in the AS-204 plugs-out accident, as it
happened, but not necessarily at the time it originally did.

So, Pete gets his lunar Gemini flight, Gus is first on the surface as Deke
had hoped, then the First Man On The Moon dies in AS-204. Skip all the
usual debate about whether or not it kills the program*; what does
everybody here think the _cultural_ impact would've been, both inside and
outside the program? (I'm imagining Russia at the time of Gagarin's death,
here).






*I like to think that Apollo development would've continued apace, but
perhaps with the initial lunar landing goal achieved, they could've
concentrated more on the extended lunar stay/AAP end of things (and
perhaps Dick Gordon would've gotten his CDR shot, and Musgrave wouldn't
have had to wait for-freekin-ever to fly).

--
"All over, people changing their roles,
along with their overcoats;
if Adolf Hitler flew in today,
they'd send a limousine anyway!" --the clash.
__________________________________________________ _________________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
Mike Flugennock's Mikey'zine, dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

In article ,
om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy... _facility.org says...
On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 05:58:05 GMT, Doug... wrote:

Beano is another story -- had Gemini X had to fly with its backup crew,
Deke was confident that Al would have done a fine job in the left seat.
And Bean wasn't just shunted down into some possible dead-end crew slot
in AAP, he was given a great deal of responsibility in getting that
program to a flyable status. So it seems that Deke had more faith in Al
Bean than he did in Ed White.

...And that may be the actual truth behind Bean's AAP assignment. He
may have been qualified to be LMP or CMP, or even CDR if you get down
to it, but his skills for getting AAP may have actually been *better*.
Because Bean did make the A12 prime crew after Williams augered, he
tends to get overlooked for his work on AAP and what eventually became
Skylab. A lot is owed to his work in the fact that Skylab got off the
ground.

And Al was rewarded with command of the first really long-duration Skylab
flight. I've always felt that Conrad's decision to jump into the Skylab
crew rotation was at least in part based on his talks with Bean and his
sense that Skylab was where the leading edge of the manned space program
was heading. He had done his moon landing, had a great time, but it was
time to start expanding the envelope again, and Al convinced him that
Skylab was the place to go.

I have always been impressed with Al Bean. One of the finest men to ever
wear astronaut wings.

--

It's not the pace of life I mind; | Doug Van Dorn
it's the sudden stop at the end... |

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 05:58:05 GMT, Doug... wrote:

Beano is another story -- had Gemini X had to fly with its backup crew,
Deke was confident that Al would have done a fine job in the left seat.
And Bean wasn't just shunted down into some possible dead-end crew slot
in AAP, he was given a great deal of responsibility in getting that
program to a flyable status. So it seems that Deke had more faith in Al
Bean than he did in Ed White.

....And that may be the actual truth behind Bean's AAP assignment. He
may have been qualified to be LMP or CMP, or even CDR if you get down
to it, but his skills for getting AAP may have actually been *better*.
Because Bean did make the A12 prime crew after Williams augered, he
tends to get overlooked for his work on AAP and what eventually became
Skylab. A lot is owed to his work in the fact that Skylab got off the
ground.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message ...

Budget-wise, I don't see any chance of LG happening unless Apollo was also
cancelled; therefore, Grissom wouldn't have died at all since there
wouldn't have been an Apollo "plugs-out" test for him to die in.

Other than that, I think most of your other choices are plausible, given
the state of the rotation at the time.

When I get ever get done with my Gemini Sim for Orbiter I am planning
to do lunar gemini and other alternate Gemini. In the future history I
sketched out for the scenarios I had Apollo 1 fire occur during a
vacuum test with no crew. The resulting investigation uncovered the
shortcoming of the Block I capsule.

During the resulting delay. Soyuz I was launched and recovered
successfully. Unbeknownest to the US and NASA Komorov nearly died as
the Soyuz was clearly defective. The Soviets now had a similar delay
while they reworked the Soyuz capsule.

But the seemly successful Soyuz flight put NASA into a panic and
quickly put together a circum-lunar flight program of four Gemini
Flights in the fall of 67 and the spring of 68.

A was a unmanned test of a uprated Gemini capsule re-entering at lunar
velocity.
B was a high orbit checkout of the Centaur but with a normal re-entry.
C was a high orbit checkout of the Centaur however the capsule was
boosted to lunar re-entry speeds.
D was the circum lunar flight.


Finally continuing on I had the Apollo 4 flight destroying (by the
pogo problems that happened on 6) itself resulted in serious delays in
the Saturn program. NASA choose to go with a with a Gemini Landing
program followed by later landings with Apollo.

Rob Conley
http://www.orbitersim.com
http://www.alltel.net/~estar/orbiter.html

(Robert Conley) wrote in
om:

"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...

Budget-wise, I don't see any chance of LG happening unless Apollo was
also cancelled; therefore, Grissom wouldn't have died at all since
there wouldn't have been an Apollo "plugs-out" test for him to die
in.

When I get ever get done with my Gemini Sim for Orbiter I am planning
to do lunar gemini and other alternate Gemini.

Cool! I'm looking forward to it.

In the future history I
sketched out for the scenarios I had Apollo 1 fire occur during a
vacuum test with no crew. The resulting investigation uncovered the
shortcoming of the Block I capsule.

snip

Finally continuing on I had the Apollo 4 flight destroying (by the
pogo problems that happened on 6) itself resulted in serious delays in
the Saturn program. NASA choose to go with a with a Gemini Landing
program...

At which point, with the lunar landing goal already accomplished, the
government would have cancelled the troubled Saturn program, and Apollo
along with it.

... followed by later landings with Apollo.

IMO, it never would have gotten the chance.
--
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 21 Jul 2003 20:01:54 -0700, (John
Charles) wrote:

I've read "Deke" and all the other astronaut biographies, but I still
don't know what Bean did that was so good, to make AAP/Skylab flyable,

....And, as I said, that's one of the things that's not all that widely
documented, but if you infer from Deke's assignment, Bean apparently
was the best qualified for running AAP. If Michael Cassutt's out there
and hasn't been run off by the trolls and Maxsons, I'd love to have
his input on this.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

John Charles said:
But--Slayton's recollections aside--does anyone really believe that
any of the astronauts played an absolutely indispensible role in
making Skylab--or Apollo, or Gemini, or Mercury--flyable?

Seriously, I am asking for evidence of any astronaut's contribution
that was superior to lots and lots of non-astronauts, other than the
word of another astronaut.

That's an awfully difficult question to answer. In my own profession,
I've learned that sometimes the best thing to do is ask a difficult
question and let someone else deal with the implications. This avoids
the need to say "you are wrong", and it lets the other guy say "that's
interesting ... you know, if you take that idea and combine it with my
idea ... then you think about....". A single carefully chosen question
can guide someone into thinking deeper about a problem, and devising a
new solution, without the ego-issues of saying "you are wrong, I'm
right".

Mike Collins hints that he did this as a test pilot in Carrying The
Fire.

Wally's "I'm cooler than you, let's light this candle" might be an
example of this.

There is a classic example of this in From the Earth to the Moon where
Armstrong is in the LM simulator and just says almost nothing during a
simulated landing. The descent rate it too high and the simulated LM
crashes. By saying nothing, Armstrong manges to get Mission Control to
think about what they are doing and resolve some incorrect attitudes.

Wasn't there an Assimov story that dealt with the least possible change
to create a desired effect? There is an almost occidental philosophy in
saying almost nothing to generate the desired effect. If we assume the
astronauts were bright, they could have done this in a way that hid
their contributions.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

We'd spend the remaining time trying to fix the engine.
-- Neil Armstron

Kevin Willoughby wrote in message ...
Wally's "I'm cooler than you, let's light this candle" might be an
example of this.
I believe that was Al Shepard in 1961.

Anyway, if I interpret the answers received so far, then it appears to
me that some of us really do believe that the astronauts made it all
happen, and the non-astronauts (administrators, program managers,
bean-counters, engineers, technicians, what-have-you) just sort of
marked time until an astronaut appeared on the scene.

Honestly, not the answer I was hoping for.

John Charles
Houston, Texas

In article ,
says...
Kevin Willoughby wrote in message ...
Wally's "I'm cooler than you, let's light this candle" might be an
example of this.
I believe that was Al Shepard in 1961.

Anyway, if I interpret the answers received so far, then it appears to
me that some of us really do believe that the astronauts made it all
happen, and the non-astronauts (administrators, program managers,
bean-counters, engineers, technicians, what-have-you) just sort of
marked time until an astronaut appeared on the scene.

Not at all. The astronauts were engineering test pilots, and as such did
have a fair amount of input to various of the system development
processes for Gemini and Apollo. Gus Grissom designed much of the
cockpit layout for Gemini, and Pete Conrad did the same thing for the
Apollo Lunar Module. They were brought in before any metal was cut and
arranged paper switches, dials and read-outs on plywood cockpit surfaces
to optimize the usability of the cockpits.

Mike Collins had a large amount of input to the design of the hand-held
maneuvering unit used on Gemini IV and his own Gemini X. He also had a
lot of input on the EVA suit design.

Nearly all of the Mercury astronauts made design suggestions that were
incorporated into later Mercury spacecraft, including the window. They
also worked with designers to modify the cockpit instrumentation to
optimize its use.

In addition, astronauts had a *lot* of influence on the procedures
followed within the spacecraft. They had to fly the things, after all.

These are just a few well-known examples of astronaut inputs to hardware,
software and procedures designs. There are lots more.

This is exactly the same kind of input that engineering test pilots have
brought to airplane development and testing programs. These weren't just
pilots, most of them had engineering degrees and were just as qualified
to have design inputs as a guy who spent his entire career flying a
drafting table.

The question I have is why do you have a problem with astronauts being
given credit for the work they did when they weren't preparing for or
flying missions? What's your agenda?

--

It's not the pace of life I mind; | Doug Van Dorn
it's the sudden stop at the end... |

I think a lot of this has to do with the astronaut being the practical
voice. How many times have you heard the phrase "engineers don't use
what they design."

I hate to do another FTETTM reference, but in "1968" there's a great
scene where Borman is in the design room at Downey talking about
redesigning the hatch. The new hatch is put on and Borman sees what
they're doing and says "wait a minute ..." He then grabs a chair and
sits in the CM skeleton like he's seated and then shows the engineers
why their design isn't going to work PRACTICALLY.

I think this is the kind of input the astronauts gave. They saw where
the engineers were going and then said "okay, let's look at this from
the astronaut's" perspective ...