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NASA Learns Anew From the Apollo Program
solitas writes "NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time." From the article: "Some old Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with the young folks, some of whom were not even born when the Saturn V was flying lunar missions. The new manned exploration project, called Constellation, is deliberately drawing upon lessons from the past as the space agency works to meet a congressional deadline of flying the Ares rocket ... In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"
which allowed them to win the highest death rate award.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.
First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.
Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.
Seriously. Who gives a ****?
In this case, mostly the taxpayers and the astronauts.
destroyed by Boeing, Grumman, and the various subcontractors on orders from the Gov't due to them being worried that some Bad Guy was going to try to duplicate the feat. As if someone had the money and resources to do that!
The Saturn Project held so much promise as an general-purpose heavy-lift vehicle. I just hope that some plans escaped the shredders and reside in someone's collection that would be a hefty bonus to the new HLV program.
I'll bet that they will take over the Kansas Cosmosphere for a month or two, reverse engineer the Apollo CM and SM they got there, not to mention pick over the LEM as well.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Actually, if you're willing to count deaths to others besides astronauts themselves, the Soviets had a much higher kill rate, because of a bad track record on launches. You're excluding:
(1960) The "Nedelin Disaster", in which an R-7 rocket undergoing repairs on the launchpad exploded. Estimates of the dead vary a lot, but the least I've seen is 100 people. Unquestionably the worst space disaster yet.
(1961) Cosmonaut Bondarenko dies in simulator accident
(1969) The N-1 launchpad explosion. The N-1 rocket was supposed to be the USSR's Saturn V, but it failed repeatedly, and took out 5 people and the launchpad on the final attempt.
(1973) Kosmos 3M explodes on the pad, 7 dead
(1980) At least 50 people die when a rocket explodes during refueling.
Including these sort of things adds the one casualty caused by a Titan launch crane accident.
I suspect Brazil is in second place in the casualty race, since their launchpad explosion in 2003 killed twenty-odd people. (I seem to recall India having a recent space-related accident, but I can't remember what it was.)
Little history lesson here from wikipedia: As of November 2004, 439 individuals have flown on spaceflights: Russia/Soviet Union (96), USA (277), others (66). Twenty-two have died while in a spacecraft: Apollo 1 (3), Soyuz 1 (1), X-15-3(1), Soyuz 11 (3), Challenger (7), Columbia (7), totaling 18 astronauts (4.1%) and 4 cosmonauts (0.9% of all the people launched). So actually the americans hold the award. The russians are still using the same rocket (the R-7) that they used to launch sputnik up with. It is a proven, reliable, and cheaper alternative to the space shuttle (in terms of launching people).
Yes, Velcro too.
...from Wikipedia
Actually...
"The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the Burdock seeds which kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur on their daily walk in the Alps. De Mestral named his invention "VELCRO" after the French words velours, meaning 'velvet', and crochet, meaning 'hook'."
But hey....I agree with your fundamental argument that NASA pushes development in general, plus I'm a huge Apollo dork so this is all cool news to me.
adventure-today.com
The ealry NASA engineers probably learned to use sliderules - http://www.hpmuseum.org/sliderul.htm and therefore learned how to approximate real well.
If you punch numbers into a calculator and hit the wrong buttons and don't know how to approximate... well you don't always realize your answer is off.