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.'"

Comments

Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

The movie doesn't sound so far fetched now, does it?

I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.

Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing. So before I visit a museum, I'd look into varied options from some of today's best minds based upon current or evolving technologies.

Then again, if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, or maybe shelved for a few decades until space flight is cheaper, safer and more feasible, I wouldn't care. We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?

I'd rather throw that money are universities and I bet you money, society will benefit considerably more.

Re:they should patent that idea

[ackthpt]

"learning from past experience" - that has a nice ring to it.

What?!? And break with tradition?

Honestly, when I was a lot younger I thought only new stuff was good, decent quality, reliable, etc. Eventually I learned, after wasting a lot of money, some new stuff is utter crap and some things build in the distant past were done with real craftsmanship and quality.

On another note, there was this great show on Discovery or History Channel or sommat, some years back. Engineers had struggled to figure out how three large stone slabs and been lowered into place in a crypt. No trace of ropes left pinched by the massive slabs, no pole holes, no marks of any kind. How did the bronze age engineers do it, that engineers from the 20th century were left so puzzled by?

Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.

Bygone era

[humankind]

A few months ago, one of the old Apollo monitoring stations went on sale and we went to look at this unique property. A building in the middle of nowhere up on a mountain, with a six-story-high satellite dish. It was amazing and awe-inspiring to crawl through this rusted dinosaur skeleton of a bygone era. There wasn't much left of the place when I visited, but I felt proud just to be standing on the hallowed ground where great minds plotted of men flying through space and landing on the moon. Now on this site, sits a big obnoxious cell tower. It's kind of sad that kids today don't look up at the stars.

I cannot imagine America having the resources to land on the moon successfully now. Our society was different back then. Science was something to revere. Now we are more concerned with American Idol.

Boy I hope so....

[StressGuy]

Wierd that this comes up. Just today, at my latest gig, I had casually mentioned running some rough computation on engine cowl latching loads that showed we might be a little tight on safety margin. However, I needed to see that Nastran load simulation to cross-check the results.

The response I got stunned me a bit...

One of the most senior structural engineers there told me that the loads within an engine core are far too complex and why was I even bothering with hand computations?

It made me immediately think of two things:

1) We were building jet engines long before there was a Nastran (or a NASA for that matter)

2) Complexity!?...NASA brought Apollo 13 home using slide rules and one hell of a pilot. I'm old enough that I remember that. In fact, it's probably why I'm in the aerospace industry.

I hate to sound like an old man, but sometimes I worry that we rely too much on tools that separate the engineer from the analysis. Don't get me wrong, Nastran is great, but if you have no way to cross validate the results, how do you spot an error?

Ya, know...the method I used to evaluate those loads probably came from around the mid 1940's.