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."

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!

[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!

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

[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

[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:Why not learn from the russians?

[geekoid]

which allowed them to win the highest death rate award.

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.

Back in my day...

[Kesch]

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

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.

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!

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.

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: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.

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.

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.