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

Steroids, Hell

[overshoot]

From the description, it's more like "Apollo on Viagra."

Re:Steroids, Hell

[cloak42]

No... Didn't you know? Steroids SHRINK your weiner.

To the Moon, Alice!

[ackthpt]

"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."

What they can find is what was done, but only with the old Apollo engineers can they get some insight into the minds that worked out novel solutions where no obvious ones existed.

I've been hearing a few times over the past weeks how school children can't esitmate. Every mathematical problem has a definite answer presented by a calculator. Ask me what's 250 * 7 and I don't sit down and do math, I figure the first four 250's are 1,000 and the rest are 750. Ask me what's the square root of 27 and I'll say 5 and a bit, because the number squared closest I know is 5. Some kids today couldn't do that. Can today's engineers think on their feet?

In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"

Uh. Don't mention steroids to Congress. They've already got the bee for baseball.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[jbrader]

So you can do mental math, fantastic. But generalising about school children is dangerous. You hang out on slashdot so it's fairly safe to assume you're some kind of nerd and use math in some way on a fairly regular basis. But think about all the people you went to school with. How many of them weren't nerds and didn't go into fields where being able to quickly estimate a sum weren't important? So I bet if you go talk to them they aren't very good at estimating either. I just finished teaching a summer of computer camp and guess what? Nerd children are good at mental math the same way nerd adults are. It's not a generational thing, it's a aptitude/vocational thing.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Chris Mattern]

>> Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.

Which, of course, never make mistakes and never need cross-checking.

  >> Seriously. Who gives a ****?

Oh, I dunno. How about everyone who cares about the massive amounts of lost
money or the *lost lives* that can happen because of a stupid engineering
mistake? Mistakes that are caught by a guy looking at the figures and
and saying, "Wait a minute. That can't be right..."

Chris Mattern

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[mermaldad]

Well, I agree with your first point, an intuitive understanding is vital to spotting a mistake, but I think your second argument favors today's computer-armed engineers. Complicated, multi-disciplinary problems can be seriously mis-estimated using mental math or paper and pencil.

I have enormous respect for what the engineers of the 1960's did with the tools of the day. No doubt there were some brilliant minds working for NASA and its contractors at the time. However, I look at what my kids are learning in school (usually at an earlier age than in my day), and I look at some of the brilliant engineers I know at NASA today and then I look at the tools that they have available to them, and external factors being equal, I'll take today's generation.

Unfortunately for NASA's current mission, external factors are not equal. Without the Soviet threat, there is much less enthusiasm for human space flight now, and I fear that Congress will not have the persistance to see such a program through. I also see a NASA that is more top-heavy, burdened by government regulations, and risk averse. I hope that this initiative will capture the imagination and political support of the public. Mr. Griffin's "Apollo on steroids" comment was unfortunate, because it suggests that NASA is not doing anything new. But the Space Exploration Initiative is supposed to be more than a series "flag and footprints" missions. It's the groudwork for permanent human bases off our world.

Sorry for the long-windedness!

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[maynard]

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.

That's why runtime garbage collection is so important. I mean, do we honestly expect these young'uns to call free() for every malloc()? It's all too damn complex. And we've got astronauts' lives to worry about! I say we just forget these ancient languages and slide rules and have these NASA rocket scientists code everything up in LOGO. It's untyped, has automatic garbage collection, and the little turtle can teach them engineers Lunar Lander to learn the tricks of the rocket science trade!

Damn, I'm good!

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[LWATCDR]

Because you can catch errors if you can estimate.
A classic example was when I was in college I had a physics professor put a simple question on a test.
How tall is the empire state building.
I put down 1000 feet.
Some people put 5000 or 10000 ft.
If you don't have a feeling for numbers you will may make a gross mistake and not catch it.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[The Breeze]

Agreed. Richard Feynman, who was arguably one of the 5 most brilliant men of the 20th century, stated that the only reason he was able to discover as many things as he did was because he could quickly arrive at rough answers by doing mathematical shortcuts in his head, and he was afraid - in the 1980's - that since the coming generations didn't have to learn those shortcuts, they would be a t a great disadvantage compared to the great physicists of the past.

Why not learn from the russians?

[QuantumFTL]

Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.

We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[geekoid]

which allowed them to win the highest death rate award.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[quanticle]

The urban legend you are referring to has been disproven.

Also, how did you manage to insert a link without Slashcode diplaying the destination domain?

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[Cromac]

Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.

We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.

And how many times exactly did the Russians put people on the moon or orbit the moon? Why should we listen to them instead of former NASA engineers who did send men to the moon?

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[LordoftheLemmings]

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).

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[peragrin]

and by your numbers alone we have launched three times the number of people into space. So the US has a 6% failure rate. versus the russian 4% And if you don't count apollo one as they died during a training accident on the ground, your down to 5%. either way both countries have roughly the same failure rate. it just goes to show you, you can make numbers mean what ever you want them to mean. it also means the shuttle is more reliable than the russian soyuz as it can handle twice the number of people per trip just as safely.

Now cheaper well no, that it's not. The shuttle failed to live up to that part of it's design.

And yes while Apollo one is a tragic accident of the space agency, they weren't launching that day, it was just a pressure test that went horribly wrong. So can you really classify it as a space failure?

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:Space Cowboys

[clarkmoody]

We've gained a huge number of advances in science and technology from NASA. If you consider materials science alone, the cost is worth it. They conduct research on a monumentous scale. Everything from structural design to hydroponics to supercomputing is subject to NASA's research effort. Yes, Velcro too.

The Space Shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built. It's thirty years old. It's time to move on with exploration, and the best way to do that is with existing strategies (a.k.a. Apollo-esque rockets). And they're going to be way better in terms of efficiency and strength, given advanced composites and new engines.

As for private space companies, they simply do not have the money to launch space station components or interplanetary vehicles. Their niche is transporting people. Lifting 4-20 people into a parabolic transport route or into low earth orbit costs way less in terms of fuel, complexity, and R&D than lifting half a million pounds into orbit or to the moon!

And society would benefit WAY more from 'throwing' that money to elementary schools. We should make the best minds compete for jobs teaching the next generation. Education majors shouldn't be the people who can't make it in any other major.

NASA even funds research and projects in universities, so there you are.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Unknown_monkey]

Your friends "follow" the space program, which means they read news. Dan Goldin started the "smarter" NASA when I worked as a contractor at KSC back in the 90's. Crippen pushed safety and cost effectiveness. I worked with some of the best people in the industry, and never have I met a group more focused on a mission. The mission was the mission statement.
And if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, you'd get no more of these:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html Spinoffs.
And I just bet that your house is filled with things that came as a spinoff of the program.
And now you whine "But because I want them they would have been invented anyways" but when? By whom?
And as another poster mentioned, NASA puts lots of money into research that is carried out by Universities and schools.
I'd suggest you get more information from the sources, and less from your "friends"

Re:Space Cowboys

[DerekLyons]

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.

They aren't experts either seemingly. NASA isn't ground in 1960's 'science' (whatever that means) at all. You'll note the use of composites in the structures of the new vehicles. You'll note modern computers (modern by aerospace standards - ancient by geek standards) in use aboard them too... etc... etc... In other things, the state of the art simply hasn't evolved that much. In yet others, decades old solutions are more than adequate and quite well proven. (In the real world with real money and real lives at stake - progress is slow and measured.)
 
 

Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing.

You mean in the X-prize forums? They are bunch of regular joes like you. The guys at the level of Musk/Branson/etc... (I.E. those flying actual performing hardware - everyone else is a wannabee) are largely silent on the issue. (The exception is Rutan - but Rutan hates NASA with a passion. His word on anything about NASA should be taken with a largish grain of salt.)

Re:Space Cowboys

[DynaSoar]

Enderandrew (866215) sez (out of order):

> We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue,
> and what have we gotten in return?

NASA has a technology transfer system set up specifically to give the things it invents away.
See http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/guide.htm#NASA
It doesn't actually give away its patents and such for free. It is allowed to sell them for the cost of operating the technology transfer system.

If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo. We know how much NASA would have made, because we know who picked up those balls and ran with them, and how much they made. And that's just 4 areas. NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds, and someone has made something off of most of them. That's contributed far more to the economy than the taxes taken out to fund the program in the first place. As for you personally, I'd bet an inventory of your home would show a number of things that either wouldn't be there, wouldn't be as good, or would cost a lot more, if it weren't for the contributions of NASA. And when it comes to number of lives saved by the various technologies that NASA contributed to, we're well beyond talking about profit and loss.

> How much more do we know about the universe?

Aw geez, seriously? Don't you read any science news? We know tons more about the universe because of NASA programs and their participation with other programs. The Science and Discovery Channels are always running that stuff.

> 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.

In large part your friends are correct. NASA has become a corporate welfare system for the aerospace industry. There have been many, many tried and proven technologies and even space transportation systems that were started by NASA, R&D funded by NASA to the aerospace companies, and cancelled when enough people had made enough money. There were also many spaceworthy systems developed by others that were far cheaper than what NASA had the aerospace companies crank out, and those never saw the inside of a hangar. It is only the large number of recently very rich people willing to gamble on space that have created visibility for the private space business upstarts. There have been many in the past that died on the vine. Read up on Robert Truax for example. People were so convinved he'd be the first person into space without a government program behind him that they even made a TV show based on him (Salvage I).

NASA and the aerospace industry it exists in symbiosis with (they live off NASA, but NASA lives off the money it gets to give them) do not stand to gain from the sort of massive forward movement such as we saw from 1960 to 1970. They stand to gain more by the same stepwise, incremental improvement such as has been happening in the consumer computer/electronics industry for years. This definitely slows the pace of progress, but not the amount of R&D done by NASA which gets passed into the US economy. That remains.

When engineers ran the space program, we got "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13)
When bureaucrats ran the space program, we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (Challenger)

Frankly, regardless of the success or failure or sheer bullheaded political wrangling or welfare status of NASA and its corporate children, I'd throw in with the likes of Burt Rutan, and anyone else who tackles the job without any help from NASA. Those

Re:Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

I don't follow the X-prize forums, but I've seen interviews with no less than 3 people who've had successful projects, and all were extremely critical of NASA and their approach. It isn't about the material of the shuttle, but the concept of the shuttle and how it is launched.

We are using the same shuttles, theories and propulsions systems we were using 40 years ago. Considering the exponential rate that this technology rate has evolved, that is plain silly.

But NASA was a huge money-sink, with the promise to Congress that the money involved would last decades and decades. To start over on any level would be unacceptable to those writing the checks.

Re:Space Cowboys

[AsnFkr]

Yes, Velcro too.

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'."

...from Wikipedia


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.

Re:Space Cowboys

[DerekLyons]

I don't follow the X-prize forums, but I've seen interviews with no less than 3 people who've had successful projects,

Considering that there has only been *one* person with a sucessful X-prize project (Rutan), that's flat-out impossible.
 
 

and all were extremely critical of NASA and their approach. It isn't about the material of the shuttle, but the concept of the shuttle and how it is launched.

You need to understand the alt.spacer mindset - part and parcel of it is the rock solid belief that Evil NASA has, with malice aforethought, held back the development of space in the same way oil companies do gas mileage enhancers. They (the alt.spacers) are the Brave and Plucky Lone Heros fighting against great odds to Save Humanity - just like in the Heinlein juveniles they read back in fifth grade. (I'm sympathetic with their goals, but that doesn't blind me.) Worse yet, it's largely rote noise - very few in the alt.space movement actually understand the complex web of politics, technology, and sociology that lead first to Apollo, and then to the Shuttle. (Building a small rocket doesn't make you an expert on all rockets any more than building a bridge of Lego bricks qualifies you to build one of steel and concrete.)
 
 

We are using the same shuttles, theories and propulsions systems we were using 40 years ago. Considering the exponential rate that this technology rate has evolved, that is plain silly.

Here in the real world not all technologies have evolved at an exponential rate - and some simply can't. Take liquid rocket engines for example - by the 60's they were already near their maximum theoretical efficiency, and have made only modest incremental gains since then - they can't do any better without repealing the laws of physics and chemistry. We can make 'em a bit lighter now a days, and bit better in some other areas, but that's about it. In other cases, there simply isn't enough to be worth sinking massive amounts of R&D dollars into research.
 
 

But NASA was a huge money-sink, with the promise to Congress that the money involved would last decades and decades. To start over on any level would be unacceptable to those writing the checks.

I've parsed this about three different ways - and it makes no sense. NASA never promised Congress anything with regards as to how long money would last.

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.

Re:they should patent that idea

[Humming Frog]

Some stuff is crap, some stuff is good. The proportion doesn't really change as time goes on, but hindsight allows us to tell the difference between the two.

Back in my day...

[Kesch]

...we had to get to the moon in foot deep snow, and it was all uphill, both directions!

Heh

[andreyw]

...Idiots. They've basically watched their entire knowledge base die, disintegrate and retire of the past 30 years, and only /NOW/ they're doing something about it.

Re:Heh

[humankind]

...Idiots. They've basically watched their entire knowledge base die, disintegrate and retire of the past 30 years, and only /NOW/ they're doing something about it.

Hey, look on the bright side... back then those poor people only had one kind of Coca Cola. Now we have Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, Cherry Coke and more! We're still exploring the horizons. They've just dipped a little lower.

Re:Joke...

[R3d M3rcury]

Actually, my favorite was the guy I saw in Florida who had a Challenger license plate with the inscription "KABOOM."

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.

Re:Bygone era

[geekoid]

"Science was something to revere. Now we are more concerned with American Idol."

nothing has changed. While people where plotting to get us to the moon, others where goggling their current american idol, Elvis.
The only thing different is that now they're googling american idol.

Why go to the Moon?

[NotQuiteReal]

Why should we go to the Moon with a bunch of expensive little space ships that can only bring back a few pounds of material for study?

Why don't we just put some big rockets on the dark side and push the whole thing down here were we can get at it easily?

We could land it where it came from in the first place - the location of Atlantis.

Anyhow, dropping the Moon onto the Earth should would shut up a lot of whiners.

Re:they should patent that idea

[ackthpt]

Some stuff is crap, some stuff is good. The proportion doesn't really change as time goes on, but hindsight allows us to tell the difference between the two.

I seem to be finding more things today are engineered to be profitable, that is, to the minimum tolerances and material cost to do the job.

You can still find high grade things, but they're proving to be very, very expensive.

What would happen to NASA if they sourced components to a company which considers 30% failure rate, off the assembly line, to be "good enough"? The end customer doesn't often see the failures, because the parts are usually caught and dumped, but it can eventually show up, because the weaknesses in the manufacturing process which makes 30% failure possible will slip through within tolerances or when the part is intermittent. Rather, I imagine, like those O-Rings years ago.

Reaching for his tin foil hat...

[kiwipom]

With the advances in CGI there's no need to dust off those old studios, the moon landings can be faked entirely in a computer.

Sorry, it had to be said ;-)

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.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[StressGuy]

First off, obtaining a consistent result via two independant methods is an excellent way to cross-check your work.

Secondly, testing is a good way, but the only way. At some point, you have to make you best accessment without the benefit of testing.

Finally, you have no idea what specific analysis I was doing so have no basis to say it was too complex to do by hand.

I suggest you research the origin of the term "back of the envelope calculation", you will learn the story of one "Sir Geoffrey Taylor". Then come back and tell me again what is too complex to do by hand.

You are a perfect example of the problem I was trying to present. No ingenuity, just reliance on machines....pity you don't seem to understand how dangerous that can be.

I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage...

[MerkX]

As a child and into my young adult years I was so proud of NASA and looked so forward to the future of manned space exploration. Sure, I began to become disappointed in the '90's that NASA wasn't doing much and that no Shuttle replacement was even on the horizon.

However, this whole CEV concept is "One Giant Step Backward for Mankind" - I don't care how they spin it. It represents a failure of nerve before the Universe and reflects a "tuck tail and run" policy of our nation as a whole.

Freeking politicians are screwing the whole thing up and NASA is a massive beuracracy maintaining jobs for the "less than creatives". Long live Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and their crews - poke the crap out of NASA's eye!

Re:I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage..

[DerekLyons]

Freeking politicians are screwing the whole thing up and NASA is a massive beuracracy maintaining jobs for the "less than creatives". Long live Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and their crews - poke the crap out of NASA's eye!

Oh, yes... replicating something that NASA did 45+ years ago is really a poke in their eye. (And NASA did it time, after time, after time - for nearly a decade. Branson & Rutan haven't flown in over two years - after only flying a handful of times.)

All Blueprints's and Jigs were..

[TheHawke]

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.

Re: Highest death rate?

[elakazal]

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.)

Lesson #1

[tverbeek]

Bring duct tape. Plenty of duct tape.

I thought the originals *were* on steroids

[r_jensen11]

With as many deaths from accidents/errors/mishaps/fuckups on both sides (US and USSR,) I thought that the original Apollo missions *were* on steroids

My bad, I guess they were on speed.

Re:Space Cowboys, Feasible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apollo went to the moon. If I wanted to learn how to go to the moon, I'd look at Apollo, even if I thought I had something better or perfect.

The biggest thing about this is that some things that made Apollo successful aren't common knowledge, or worse, they aren't written down anywhere. Some of the guys that did Apollo are dead, and there's a chance they carried unique knowledge to the grave with them. New engineers and scientists really should be taking this opportunity to refresh that knowledge and store it, now that we have computer technology to store it with.

We don't need to wake up 50 years from now and wonder why a support bar on the lunar lander that should've been perfectly straight has a slight bend to it, especially if the design documents and blueprints all specify a straight bar.

Read some of the stories about the nuclear doorstop, especially one quote from here:

The United States has not built a nuclear warhead since 1991. The government spends about $5 billion a year maintaining the weapons, and engineers have patched problems by opening up warheads that were never meant to be opened. The accumulation of tiny engineering changes meant the bombs moved incrementally away from their original designs, with unknown effects.

Anytime humanity loses knowledge, it's a bad thing.

Blueprints should still be around somewhere

[starseeker]

See, for example - http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five _000313.html There are most likely microfiche archives in a number of locations (NASA, National Archives are probable starting points for hunting them up) but they are of limited utility unless you want to machine up the entire support structure required to make all of those parts again. I think most of the "the government destroyed the Saturn V blueprints" comments trace back to some claims made by John Lewis in "Mining the Sky" in 1996 - I haven't seen too many others making that claim that sound authorative.

That said, it would be one heck of a project to get ahold of them, as being buried in government archives is sometimes very much like sticking a needle in a haystack (insofar as the public is concerned, at least.) I would very much like to see the full blueprints to all parts and aspects of the Saturn rockets made available, modernized, and released to the world. In many respects the Saturn V represents a social and technological milestone the likes of which we probably still don't fully appreciate - it is an achievement unique to mankind, a tremendous triumpth of science, technology, and exploration. I think the full details of how this was achieved should be stored online and made available as widely as possible. I don't know what it takes to convert microfiche to svg or some other modern vector graphics/blueprint ready files (I'm sure it's nothing trivial) but why not make it a community project online? Scan the buggers, and gradually make them into modern blueprints. Then we can publish them far and wide, which is always the best way to preserve knowledge over long historical timespans.

Meat-based Robots Are Not the Answer

[Dr. Mu]

Meat-based robots (a.k.a. humans) are ill-suited for duty on remote worlds. They're incredibly fragile, hyper-sensitive to cosmic rays, require hugely expensive support systems, consume energy constantly — even while idle — and generate noxious waste products. Not only that, they are difficult to program, and memory dumps are unreliable at best. Interaction among multiple units on long missions can be a challenge as well, sometimes leading to erratic and even harmful behavior. But the worst part is, they can't simply be left at their destinations when their missions are complete: they have to be brought back to Earth — at tremendous expense.

By the time we are ready to send more of these units to the Moon and beyond, their silicon-and-metal counterparts will have advanced to such a point as to render them obsolete for such missions. It seems to me a much better use of our national resources to advance the cause of our metallic, compliant brethren, develop their capabilities to the fullest, and save a ton of cash in the process. By pushing their new Meat In Space program, our government is once again pandering to jingoistic sentimentailty rather than the needs of hard science.

Re:they should patent that idea

[mangu]

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.

Rather obvious, to anyone who works with engineering. I have seen so many reports on how "smart" those ancient people must have been to think of those masterful methods... Only problem is that, if you work in solving that kind of problem day to day, you eventually come to think of new ways to do it, all by yourself, only to find out other people have thought the same way before.

My favorite problem is the "original straight edge". When I was 12 I asked my dad, who was a mechanical engineer, how could one create a straight edge without anything to compare it with. He showed me a book, "Engineering Tools and Processes" by Herman C. Hesse (not *the* Herman Hesse, but another guy by the same name) published in 1941. To create a straight edge from scratch, you use three pieces, a, b, and c. You make a as straight as you can by eye. Then you make b fit a exactly, and make c fit a exactly. Make b fit c. Since both b and c fit against a, the only way b and c can match is if all three are perfectly straight, so start over, each step will get you closer to a perfect straight edge.

This method has been known for many centuries, there are references to that in ancient Egypt, yet it has been patented a few times in the last hundred years.

Actually the early NASA engineers had Slide Rules

[Name Anonymous]

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.

Back of the Envelope

[StressGuy]

Search Wikipedia again for "The Buckingham Pi Theorem". Sir Taylor, considered by many to be one of the greatest physicist of the 20th century, was invited to witness the first US ground test of an atomic blast. Moments before the blast, he pulls an old envelope out of his coat and starts scribbling some computations on it. Just before the blast, he tore the envelope up into small fragments and tossed them in the air as the shock wave went by. He then paces off the distance they flew through the air and made of rough estimate of their time of flight. Based upon that, he makes an estimate of the blast energy that was almost in exact agreement with what US would determine several weeks later using the best computational methods of the day.

By the way, what he came up with on "the back of that envelope" is now known as "Taylor's equation".

This is my understanding of the origin of that expression.

Re:Back of the Envelope

[dcam]

In the article I referenced in Wikipedia attributes that (the bits of paper) to Fermi not Taylor. A quick googling would seem to confirm this.

According to the wikipedia article on the Buckingham Pi Theorem, Taylor is commended for his calculations on the energy from the atomic bomb based on the videos. This is a similar story to the Fermi one, but there appear to be two distinct stories here.

I will give you the secret.....

[StressGuy]

You ready? Here it is:

Mathematics in not a science, it is a language

Let me explain....

Many people think in terms of using mathematics to figure out how nature behaves. What I propose is a slight change of philosophy. All your life, you've experienced and observed nature in action. Let your instincts and understanding of nature guide you to what you think is going on first, then use math to describe it.