Slashdot Mirror
Moon Rocket Scrubbed and Blown Dry
loid_void writes "Reutersis is reporting that a giant Apollo moon rocket that never got off the ground is about to get a face-lift after years of rusting away in the Texas heat and humidity at the Johnson Space Center.
Workers will construct a shelter for the Saturn V rocket and give it the equivalent of a "blow dry" in the first steps to preserve the relic of NASA's golden age, said Allan Needell, Apollo program curator for the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
The 363-foot-long behemoth has lain on its side in front of JSC since 1977, a favorite sight of tourists, but also a victim of the elements.
Instead of launching astronauts to the moon as it was built to do, it has become a slowly fading hulk of peeling paint and corroded metal where birds live and plants sprout, Needell said on Wednesday during a visit to the rocket.
"There's a lot of biology growing on there," he said, pointing out streaks of algae staining the rocket's white skin."
How cool would it be to sink a Saturn V rocket as an artificial reef!
You mean we used to go to the Moon?
I have to object to referring to the 1960's/70's as NASA's golden age. Surely, that should be regarded as NASA's infancy, and that NASA's golden age may be yet to come? Maybe it's too optimistic, but I'm a 25 year old astrophysics grad student, and I know how much is out there waiting to be explored and examined -- I don't want to have to live my life in the belief that my industry's best days were before I was born!
I wonder if they'll have any involvement. After all they single-handedly restored the Liberty Bell 7 (their link here. And also helped with the restoration of the Apollo 13 as well. When you tought of Kansas, you probably didn't think of space now did ya?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I'd rather see it broken apart, melted and recycled in more useful form than have a never-used moon rocket sitting in a museum.
Going to the moon may have been the greatest single physical achievement of the human race. There are only three remaining examples of the engine that took us there. This is one of them. I say, let's keep it.
Although I've lived in the US for a few years now, I've never had the opportunity to go see some of this stuff. Seeing this thing cleaned up and in a permanent display will definitely be worth the price of admission.
And we'll we're at it, let's tear down the Washington Monument and make a Parking Garage there! No need to waste all that space and stone when we could make something useful of it...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yeah, because the used rockets make such good museum pieces..
.. I really should add something to make it entirely clear I'm being sarcastic.
But you're right, there's no sense in remembering things from the past. We should have melted down the Spirit of St. Louis, it has no place taking up space in a building.
In fact, that whole Smithsonian thing is such a waste! All that valuable real estate, wasted by useless relics of the past.
"Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it's mistakes." - paraphrased from someone famous.
And in honor of the Saturn V incredible amount of thrust, we'll only serve partially-cooked Mexican food, broccoli and Velamints!
I live in Houston and I've visited JSC a lot of times through the years. The Saturn V is in bad condition, and has been steadily getting worse. Something surely needs to be done.
And to those who have called it a waste of resources, I have only this to say. All the money in the world won't be of any use if we don't create another generation of engineers and scientists. I've personally seen the look in a kid's eyes when they get up close to something enormous and meaningful. You just can't buy that.
I drive past it several times a week (down Saturn Drive for the locals), and it just makes me sick to see it in the shape it's in. Thank God it's finally going to be taken care of and treated as the treasure it is. The pictures don't do justice to the damage being done to the ship.
By the way, as a teenager, I was horrified to hear that they were going to display it on its side. I thought for sure that it was going to be displayed upright. What a dweeb I was (am?). Yeah, that would be great: make it so you could only see the bottom. And then there's the problems it would cause with low-flying aircraft, (lots of them, including those annoying advertizement-pulling planes). Oh, and we get hurricanes down here in these parts.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
These days, it's more like
...
Step 4: Get taken to Guantanamo Bay
Step 5: ????
Step 6: ????
Step 7: ????
Step 8: ????
Step 9: ????
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Years later when I was attending Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, I flew down to Titusville to see a friend. I went by the KSC during the evening (before the post 9-11 lock down), here in that night, I could almost feel the power, it was almost as moving as when I was a kid.
Without the past, people have nothing to aspire to, for most people what's in the books is simply writing, it's no more real than Lord of the Rings, but if you put a kid in the rocket park down there, history comes alive, here is what you are reading about, not just in words, but in towering moments to the men that rode them.
It inspired me, I would gladly pay for them to be around to inspire future generations.
A similar effort is under way at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In fact, they've created a special license plate to help raise funds. Otherwise, the Smithsonian has threatened to take the Saturn V back. (Which would certainly be an interesting sight.) You can see the license plate at the bottom of this page.
What do you think happened to that money? They laminated $100 bills and used that for the skin?
No. A whole bunch of contractor companies were hired to design, build, and test parts of it. Companies that hired people. Thousands of skilled people. People that got paid a good salary for a good days work. People that supported tens of thousands of other people by buying food, clothes, cars, houses.
So it didn't get used. The budget and interest ran out. A shame, but not like the money was wasted.
What would you prefer we have done with that money? Collect taxes and merely give it away?
When I was at Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Al., they used to test the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engines) at a test stand a few miles from my building. I was amazed at the power and noise of the SSMEs until an oldtimer told me what it was like when they tested one of the Saturn V engines: He said your coffee cup would literally bounce off of the desk, and forget talking on the phone during a test fire. And that was just the one engine. Imagine what it was like when they all fired at the same time...
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
There's a good statement to be made here about the implied social contract that a representative government makes with it's citizens. As the US population continues to grow, the percentage of people with no marketable skills will likewise continue to increase. And if our society is going to support the idea that we can keep producing more people despite the fact that there are less resources available for them, we need to find a way to keep everyone happy and feeling productive, without overburdening the government or creating a negative social status (welfare).
Put simply, the government needs to be able to support people who want to be artists, writers, musicians, hobbyists, explorers, naturalists, scientists, inventors, or any other interest that involves individual dedication and creativity. The product of the work those people do would be public domain, benefitting everyone, without consuming many resources or putting taxpayer's money to poor use. Meanwhile, anyone with a line on a normal form of employment or who wished to retain ownership of their works would follow the normal, self-supported way of life we all try to have today. Anybody could choose which path to take, and the cost of the system is not as high as you think - it doesn't take much money to pay someone a basic income to relax at home and write poetry. And by supporting people's interests we would be encouraging people to follow them, rather than paying based on the number of children a welfare family can crank out, as we do today.
Until recently, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities in the UK were completely free for citizens to attend. Graduates of those institutions could go on to hold a post with the government, researching various things for a moderate income for all their lives. This is the way things should be, not requiring students to pay hundreds of thousand of dollars to feed the over-inflated salaries of university administrators and who then must accept positions that often encourage them to bend their ethics for the purposes of a greedy individual or corporation.
The government _SHOULD_ be "wasting" millions of dollars paying people to do things like develop a space program. It has benefited us all and cost us much less than the 'war on terror', which has left us only with degraded individual freedoms, dead men and women from mostly lower-income families and more millions into the bank accounts of the businessmen who engineered the whole thing. Thank you, Cheney.
-Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
I worked at the Johnson Space Center for two years, back in 1976-1978, and I was there when they brought in the Saturn V.
... really annoyed, saddened, and angry that NASA has let this vehicle rot away.
This was actual flight hardware that was supposed to have gone to the moon for the Apollo 18 mission. When they brought it in, it still had red "Remove before flight" tags hanging from various places.
I am