How NASA Brought the F-1 Rocket Engine Back To Life

First time accepted submitter Martin S. writes "How NASA Engineers have reverse engineered the F1 engine of a Saturn V launcher, because: 'every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so. A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."'

Comments

F1 engine

[rossdee]

Bernie Eccelstone is suing for trademark infringement

iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[gbjbaanb]

the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."'

take note modern IT managers - this is agile, not that bastardised process-heavy "agile" scrum-style crap you do today.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[fermion]

Yes, if one is doing a one off project, or a prototype that will then be given to someone else to redesign, the perhaps this is the a good method. But for production work, that will have to be used by average people in the field, maybe not so much. The saturn V was not production, was only reliable with great effort, and with incredible highly skilled and trained people. It did it's job, but at great expense. Something one does not want to have to deal with when trying to make a profit.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except that whole "document" part was done so you could iterate the design, it cost a billion dollars, was literally a "moon shot" and they tested in a live environment every time. It was a hit or miss affair.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

take note modern IT managers - this is agile, not that bastardised process-heavy "agile" scrum-style crap you do today.

Hmm, a process that was bloody expensive as hell, and created 65 unique, poorly documented builds that haven't been used in the last forty years. Finance is going to love that.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[rioki]

That is what you call continuous integration and test first. But what else should they have done, there is so much you can do on paper. Only in the last two decades are we in the position where we can reliably "test" without ever building something physical and even there only on a limited scope. But even there, the effort put into building a digital model is similar in effort than a physical one. The only part you save are the actual resources and maybe an explosion or two.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you ranting for?

The article is a perfect example of what's wrong with that form of agile... lack of documentation.

If you think (rapid) development is the be-all-end-all of IT you probably consistantly fail to create practical product i.e. a program that is desirable, useful, useable, stable... and a host of other examples of why writing code as quick as you can is a bad idea.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[CAIMLAS]

You know, we used to call it simply, "engineering" - back before business school type managers stuck their dicks into the soup and soured the pot for everyone.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[ebno-10db]

Don't be brainwashed by all this "process" crap. These days you have to talk to guys in their 60's and 70's to get the full oral history, but they wistfully recall days when the emphasis was on getting things done and making them work, rather than mindlessly following "process". There were always procedures and so forth to keep documentation straight, but it was a means to an end instead of an end in itself. These days you get more brownie points for following process than you do for making things work. "Process" should be a way to get things done, not a fetish.

Nor was everything simple in the old days. For example, the B-29 project was hideously complex. If they'd injected modern "process" instead of making it work and writing ECO's, everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

"everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now"

Doubt it.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[some old guy]

65 unique, poorly-documented builds?

Sounds like a typical SAP migration to me.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[MetaPhyzx]

The saturn V was not production, was only reliable with great effort, and with incredible highly skilled and trained people.

I agree with the majority of this sentence, save for the first section.

The Saturn V was launched ten times as part of a mission, which would make them all "production". That's a total of fifty F1 engines (5 per each first stage). If I'm not mistaken, two unmanned tests were scheduled; I cannot remember if it was tested on those after the engine became flight rated. With a usage window for the engine in production from 1968 to 1973 (Skylab).

I believe the OP was referring to the process to get the engine flight rated with all the nuances noted, which means his initial heads up to the managers of today accurate.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Hythlodaeus]

I one read an overview of the CMM levels, and what struck me was this:

At level one, it doesn't say the organization is hopeless, doomed to failure, it says "success depends on the skills of exceptional individuals"

The rest of the levels are built on a fantasy it could be otherwise.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Antipater]

Actually, I don't know what this article is smoking. If you talk to guys in their 70's and 80's, you'll find that the Apollo program was a triumph of the "process" mentality. Mercury was a series of poorly-documented one-offs, but that was OK because all the work was done in one place by a small team of people. Anyone who got confused could just yell across the room at whomever and get a quick explanation before they screwed something up. Apollo, with design and manufacturing spread across multiple areas around the country, could not afford that.

In fact, many of the hated design processes these days were actually invented by the Apollo program. They were the brainchild of Gen. Sam Phillips, who was brought in to NASA after the spectacular failures of the Pioneer and Surveyor programs. He had learned process management while leading the Air Force's Minuteman ICBM program, and it was he who dragged the NASA engineers, kicking and screaming, into a world where they had to actually document everything they did. He even wrote a memo a year before the Apollo 1 fire predicting the extreme dangers of the seat-of-the-pants approach Apollo had previously been taking.

A perfect counterexample to Apollo's process system was the European Launcher Development Organization's failed Europa rocket. With six nations contributing engineering work to the rocket and no centralized direction, failure was inevitable.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[rickb928]

Um, we went to the Moon nine times. Six missions resulted in manned landings on the Moon surface, one attempt resulted in an abort (Apollo 13) and merely went around the Moon.

All of these, IIRC, used the Saturn V.

You, know whoever you are, you are wasting your meager talents here. You should be writing for HuffPo. Or Slate.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[rickb928]

A correction, Apollo 7 used a Saturn IB, for an orbital mission, no LM. This was the only Moon mission not to use a Saturn V.

The Saturn V launched 13 times, all successful.

Sheesh.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[fustakrakich]

It was engineering, motivated by that old tactic of, "We're under attack!", during the cold war.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yeah, but I would think that modern computer-based design testing tools are somewhat based on data gathered from those real-world physical tests done that many years ago (also before and since). It's not like the stress point, heat capacity, material wear, and all that came from "just theory" someone had to put these things to test and confirm/refute them...and it would be fed back into whatever system was in place at the time and available for future use.

It's a "standing on the shoulders of giants" kind of thing. Hell, even stacking dwarfs to make a normal size person would do for starters in untread territory.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[tibit]

What were those "spectacular" failures of the Surveyor program? The 5 out of 7 missions were successful. Those were the IIRC the first U.S. lander missions to the moon, BTW. Sure the Pioneer program had a more dismal record.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[ebno-10db]

What they did back then, and what they call "process" today, are two different things. Talk to some old timers. Here on Long Island I've met guys who worked on the LEM (built about five miles from where I grew up). Every engineer hates documentation, but good engineers appreciate that a certain level of formal specs and documentation (of designs, test procedures and test results) are necessary. There's an easy way to determine whether documentation serves a purpose or is just horse shit. Put yourself in the place of some poor slob picking up the documentation 5 or 10 (or even 50) years from now, and decide whether reading what you're writing would be useful to them. If it would be, it's useful. If you'd skip over it as something that was judged by how much it weighed, it's garbage.

I'm mostly a hardware guy. I've worked in places where the documentation was awful and caused many problems. I've also worked in places where there was endless procedure and process, and while the documentatin weighed enough to satisfy project managers and process fetishists, it was often wrong. My favorite was when I worked for a small East Coast subsidiary of a large West Coast (LA area) company. There was a heavy mil influence at the parent, and every drawing had more stamps, signatures and dates than the Declaration of Independence. It was also often wrong. Sometimes I'd hit a schematic I couldn't figure out, and feeling like an idiot, call the designer, only to have him tell me he knew it was wrong! Meanwhile our garage shop (50 people tops) had dead nuts accurate documentation. In some cases I had things like cable drawings on a piece of scratch paper, but they were accurate, had the proper revision and approval info, and were properly logged into documentation control. Ask for the complete set of drawings for one of our satcom terminals, and you'd get a copy of it. The right rev and completely accurate. Documentation and procedures (oops, I mean process) has gone from something that's a means to an end, to a fetish that justifies the existence of buzzword spouters. ISO9000 anyone?

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[ebno-10db]

"everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now"

Doubt it.

Don't be so skeptical. Ever work for a defense contractor? If the same approach was used in the 40's as today, the Arsenal of Democracy would still have been holding meetings while the invasion was underway.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

The saturn V was not production

There were 15 Saturn V rockets, with many spare parts.

was only reliable with great effort

There was not a single F1 engine failure.

and with incredible highly skilled and trained people.

Going to space is not monkey business. highly skilled personnel is also required to operate and service an Airbus A-320, and they have sold *thousands* of them.

Something one does not want to have to deal with when trying to make a profit.

Want to bet that the builders made a buck or two?

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Antipater]

Eep. I screwed up my Lunar probe programs. I meant Ranger, not Surveyor.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[David_Hart]

There's an easy way to determine whether documentation serves a purpose or is just horse shit. Put yourself in the place of some poor slob picking up the documentation 5 or 10 (or even 50) years from now, and decide whether reading what you're writing would be useful to them. If it would be, it's useful. If you'd skip over it as something that was judged by how much it weighed, it's garbage.

Not true. Process and procedures change as technology and organizations change. Hardly anything is useful 5 to 10 years out. However, that in no way invalidates it's usefulness today. I work in networking and a snapshot of the network design today is invaluable when troubleshooting problems. 5 to 10 years down the line, the same documentation would be useless without updates.

I'm mostly a hardware guy. I've worked in places where the documentation was awful and caused many problems. I've also worked in places where there was endless procedure and process, and while the documentatin weighed enough to satisfy project managers and process fetishists, it was often wrong.

This is the crux of the problem with most documentation, inaccuracy and failure to keep it updated. Documentation needs to be periodically reviewed and updated. The problem is that most scientists and IT professionals are results oriented and they give no value to documentation. They then complain when they keep getting interrupted to explain technical details. They don't understand that good documentation goes a long way towards freeing them up for other things. It may take a couple of hours to write up a good document, but they get many more hours back due to reduced support calls.

Documentation and procedures (oops, I mean process) has gone from something that's a means to an end, to a fetish that justifies the existence of buzzword spouters. ISO9000 anyone?

As I understand it, ISO9000 is simply a certification that says that you have a process defined and that you actually follow it. It doesn't say anything about whether the process is good, bad, efficient, inefficient, redundant, etc. Having all of your processes documented makes it easier to spin up new employees, deploy new business management systems (i.e. ERP), etc. Just because it doesn't seem to have any value to you, doesn't mean that it's a means to an end. It could be that you have an imperfect view of the business and, as a result, not understand the use-case scenarios.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[steelfood]

And yet, with today's "processes", an extension of that mentality, nothing seems to be able to complete on time and anywhere near budget.

There's a point when processes are good enough, where they just work, and things are still getting done. Don't forget that processes increase time and effort for the engineers, but produce meta-work that does not contribute directly to the output. Processes are useful only if that meta-work can save the engineers more time and effort in future work, than the meta-work requires. Once past that point, it's just a lot of overhead and time wasting. It's like NASA developing a "space pen" when the Russians used pencils (or so goes the story).

Process is not a bad thing, just like OOP is not a bad thing. But overdo it, and it becomes an impediment that at best will delay the real work from completion, and at worst make working so onerous that real work doesn't even start.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[jbengt]

Put yourself in the place of some poor slob picking up the documentation 5 or 10 (or even 50) years from now, and decide whether reading what you're writing would be useful to them.

Hardly anything is useful 5 to 10 years out.

That is wrong.
There are many computer programs still in active use that are more than 10 years old that could benefit from good documentation.
More than once, I've used documentation over 100 years old (obviously not computer-programming related) that proved to be very useful in designing heating, ventilation, and plumbing for an old building.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[David_Hart]

Put yourself in the place of some poor slob picking up the documentation 5 or 10 (or even 50) years from now, and decide whether reading what you're writing would be useful to them.

Hardly anything is useful 5 to 10 years out.

That is wrong.

There are many computer programs still in active use that are more than 10 years old that could benefit from good documentation.

More than once, I've used documentation over 100 years old (obviously not computer-programming related) that proved to be very useful in designing heating, ventilation, and plumbing for an old building.

Hey, I said "hardly" anything... there are always exceptions... (grin)

BTW, I'll bet that the new heating and ventilation system required updates to the building documentation making the old heating system diagrams obsolete....

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[ebno-10db]

Ditto for hardware. I've used documentation over 10 years old. Usually the biggest problem is obsolete parts. In fact when I have used stuff that old, it's usually because somebody wants a tweak to some legacy design they're cranking out that still serves their purposes (hence not worth redesigning), and the tweak means working around some part that's no longer available. I've dropped in FPGA's or DSP's to replace some old chip that's no longer made.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[ebno-10db]

ISO9000 is simply a certification that says that you have a process defined and that you actually follow it. It doesn't say anything about whether the process is good, bad, efficient, inefficient, redundant, etc.

Absolutely right, and hence it's completely worthless. The ultimate fetishization, "we don't care what you have as long as it's documented". I wanted to document how to use a Ouija board to make engineering decisions.

Back when "ISO9000 Certified" was the hot thing, loads of time and money went into getting that certification. Lots of people never stopped to ask what it meant. Everyone I knew in engineering knew it meant squat. Oh well, at least it provided a living for a while for some ISO9000 consultants.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[MachineShedFred]

In fact, one of the primary missions of Apollo 12 was to touch down very close to one of the Surveyor probes, so that they could retrieve equipment that had been exposed to cosmic radiation for a number of years, so it could be studied.

They ended up touching down 185m from Surveyor 3.

Not bad for 1969, after flying almost half a million kilometers to get there on less computing power than a modern day feature cellphone has.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[MachineShedFred]

In addition to the actual usage during the flights, there were countless firings of the F1 motors at the rocket stands in various locations around the US for testing and thrust calculations. Those were not production, and early models probably either didn't work, or failed in a spectacular fashion.

The ones delivered to the NASA VAB, which Rocketdyne was confident enough to put 3 humans on top of and then push an ignition button, were.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[SleazyRidr]

These long, thought out and well articulate arguments are why I come to /. I feel like I have a much better understanding of the situation now.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the U.S. isn't facing an imminent invasion right now. The people with common sense will throw out the idiotic managers and their rules if it ever gets down the wire.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[cusco]

Actually both US and Soviet astronauts used pencils at first. Fisher Co. invented a pressurized ballpoint pen on its own initiative, which was eventually used by both country's space programs.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

The rolls royce merlin 12 cylinder engine was also designed by a process that fits the original description. It made a profit and was produced in huge numbers. It was maintained by quickly trained everyday joes with a record of reliability. The process that rolls royce used is what engineers used to call "work." It is a process that is still used today. Modelling works when you operate within available known characteristics. If you don't get to the point where you just don't know what will happen then you aren't pushing the envelope.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and reproducability. The post-mortems and what-if's become far cheaper ... you just have to pray that you don't step beyond the model ... :-)

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[chann94501]

If we still used this iterative process the 787 would STILL be years from production.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is common sense. I hear no mention of scrum. Agile development is a hoax, of course, and has never produced anything that could not have been produced without it.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[romons]

I suppose doctors and airline pilots also whine about the 'process' of using checklists. The results speak for themselves, though.

Nobody likes to be told what to do, but remembering what worked, and making that happen again is what has made our culture possible. That is what process is supposed to be.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's skeptical because "everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now" is ridiculous hyperbole. A Japanese invasion of the US mainland was both unlikely to be attempted and unlikely to succeed.

Japan's goal was to establish itself as the ruler of an Asian empire. Invading and holding US territory? Not in the plans, according to any history of the conflict I've ever read. Japan needed its military resources closer to home to support its local imperial ambitions. And even if they'd tried invading the continental US, they would've failed. It's incredibly difficult and expensive to pull off a cross-Pacific invasion. Particularly in that direction, with no major islands close to the U.S. coast to capture piecemeal for use as local bases. (Look how difficult it was for the Allies to invade continental Europe, even with England as a base of support and Germany's military reeling from losses in Russia and North Africa.)

Also, did you know that the battles which are regarded as the decisive sequence in the Pacific theater, Coral Sea and Midway, took place within 7 months after December 1941? The war didn't end right then, of course, but the loss of 4 aircraft carriers at Midway put the Japanese Navy in a bad position for the rest of the war. The main aircraft types and armament the US used at Midway were all designed pre-war, and lots of it was (and is) regarded as inferior to the Japanese equivalents.

Also. I have actually worked for a defense contractor, on a doomed multibillion dollar project no less. The problems had nothing to do with process or documentation requirements. They were due to politics. In order to distribute pork to as many districts as possible to buy votes for big projects, we get multiple giant defense companies forced into "cooperative" bids on the same project. And by "cooperate" I mean "squabble over the allocation of work, even long after the contract has been signed", since that also determines the allocation of dollars.

There's also insane requirements, once again deriving from an overly politicized process where it's more important to impress Congress than to propose something which will actually work. "This will be the perfect $WIDGET for all applications, and it's going to be cheap and easy to design and manufacture too!" The result is invariably disappointment. (See for example: TFX aka F-111 in the 1960s/70s, and the slow motion F-35 disaster today. And the one I worked on, which I'm not going to name!)

When it comes to the actual engineering work, documentation and process requirements are far less onerous than popularly imagined. The contractors have it down to a science, with dedicated staff who handle most of it for you. As an engineer your main responsibility is to produce material for them to file. You don't end up doing much extra work.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

There was not a single F1 engine failure.

Total failure? No. Problems? Yes, definitely. Saturn V first stage (F1) pogo oscillation was never fully solved during the life of the program, and even caused partial failure of one mission (Apollo 6).

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is a pdp6 involved in running grand coulee. No one knows what it does. So they have six backup hardware replacement pdp6. I figure fifty years.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[cheesybagel]

Actually the F-111 was the brainchild of McNamara who originally came from the industry (FMC) and wanted to reduce the amount of different kinds of military hardware in the armed forces to cut costs. History eventually proved him right when the F-4 Phantom went into use by both the Navy and the USAF. I think the problem is that it is easier to convert a Navy fighter to Air Force use (basically you delete things off the plane) than the other way around.

In the F-111's case we got the USAF insisting on things like side-by-side seating which required the use of an escape capsule instead of ejection seats and other items that eventually stopped being required. The F-15E has tandem seating for example. Navy said it was too large to fit on a carrier. Then the F-14 entered into service with the same dimensions. So it was all a bunch of malarkey from the armed services.

The F-35s problem is the F-35B VTOL variant. It is one step too far in integration. The other variants are in final testing right now. Another problem is that they decided to rewrite *all* the avionics code instead of reusing code from the F-22.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[cheesybagel]

That is because all the contractors are so far away from each other that there is a long cycle time from a design change to an updated prototype.

Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon...

[Anonymous Coward]

The F1 project was all about quality control and very tight spec's, something that doesn't exist in the I.T..... there can't be a chance that it might fail during flight. It had to work every time...again, a philosophy not found in the I.T. world.

Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

This flies in the face of at least history. It also flies in the face of the usual mythology that NASA invented the computer. Which is it?

They had no computers, or they invented them?

It's neither, actually. But by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=_1g1b_EeVHw&NR=1

Why do you think it's called "numerically controlled" and not "digital"? It's because the whole concept is so old that the wording has had time to become obsolete.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[rioki]

I think the article and summary refer to the engineering process. In the 60s you did not have CAD applications. Sure they had computers, on the ship, on the ground and all, but not in the engineering department. Engineers where able to make technical drawings and hand that of to workers building the actual thing. Oh yea and they assisted and oversaw the work done, to correct any misunderstandings. It worked, why add computers.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

They had CAD applications, just not what you think as CAD. Anyways, this is interesting, because when do you think CAD applications started? Did the whole thing just pop into existence fully formed, or were there intermediary steps?

Just on the electronics side, look at something like SPICE. It didn't pop into existence with a GUI on a personal computer, it started as a punch-card reading batch application on a mainframe. Boom, computer aided design.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Overzeetop]

Compared to what we were doing at NASA in the 90s - much less by today's standards - the 60s really were lacking in the barest of computer aids. In hindsight, the assistance of computers was amazingly rudimentary. The ability to do structural analysis was being built "as they needed it" and independently in each group or center - NASTRAN, even in its earliest state, didn't exist yet. These are the people who started developing tools which didn't exist.

You have to remember - this was a time when Battin was using discrete math to plan missions, and a general n-body problem was considered unsolvable (and, afaik, still is in explicit form - but is trivial on modern computers for relevant values of n).

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[ebno-10db]

This flies in the face of at least history. It also flies in the face of the usual mythology that NASA invented the computer. Which is it?

I never heard that myth. But NASA and its contractors were pioneers in some CAD tech, like FEM (finite element modelling), and the computers for Apollo spacecraft designed at MIT/Lincoln labs were marvels of miniaturization for their day.

But by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.

Maybe a tiny amount of it. Don't confuse NC (numerically controlled) with CNC (computer numerically controlled). NC was developed largely in the late 40's and was widely used by the 50's. It used relay logic and so forth. CNC was too expensive until "inexpensive" minicomputers came along later in the 60's, and didn't take off until micros came along in the 70's. The video probably shows a futuristic "we tried it who cares what it costs" type of setup, like Doug Engelbart's WIMP interfaces in the 60's. Good forward looking stuff, but not necessarily ubiquitous, even for NASA.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[dywolf]

whoooosh.
do you even understand what CAD stands for?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

Computer assisted design. Do you understand that when you ask a computer to add numbers for a design, it's computer assisted design? Do you think that they didn't have any of that in the '60s?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

That myth only pops up with a certain subset of people who are utterly convinced that NASA spinoffs include computers and ICs. Even though it's trivial to show that these things existed before and independently of NASA.

"The video probably shows a futuristic "we tried it who cares what it costs""

It is very long, yes, but they show actual parts being designed and built for the B-58 bomber. Besides, wasn't the whole Moon landing a "we tried it and who cares what it costs" type of exercise as well?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

Fair enough. But do you really think the amount of computers NASA was using counts as "barest"? Just look at the amount of 360s they were using.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[kannibal_klown]

I never heard the myth about NASA inventing the computer. And I've heard a LOT of myths about computers and space. I'm not saying the myth doesn't exist, but if it does chances are it's a very rarely said one.

As for "lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids" perhaps they just mean that the design lacked the creation / use of them. Not that there were no aids available for them had they chosen to use them.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[iggymanz]

I have a news flash for you, young man. Numerical solutions, on computers, for the n body problem were being done in the 1950s, S. von Horner being a notable person in the field.

Yes, analytical math can be used to plan orbits, even done today for first passes. my senior year physics project was orbital calculations by both numerical and multi-variate calculus. No reason what I did couldn't be done on say an IBM 701 or 7000 in the 50s...

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[SpzToid]

This is true. Although I am bit too you to remember it. I do recall the black and white vector CAD monitors, and that damn strobing lightpen that we had to tap the glass of the monitor with. Talk about bleeding eyes.

I also remember the thrill when the software went from mainframes, to run on x286 PCs, and it was fast too!

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think they saved those "CAD" files of numbers being added together? Do you think those lists of numbers to be added together would be considered useful to an operator running Pro/Engineer?

Lacking the barest of computer aids seems like a reasonable summary.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

I've only heard that myth a few times myself but when I did I thought I was in a Twilight Zone episode. The usual conclusion to the myth is that since going to the Moon included computers as a spinoff, we should go to the Moon again because who knows what spinoffs will come from it?

History shows it was a mix of mathematics, war and business, industrial and scientific needs that drove computer development. Banks were among the earliest commercial users of computers. Maybe we should open a few more banks and see what kind of computers they order?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Geoffrey.landis]

This flies in the face of at least history. It also flies in the face of the usual mythology that NASA invented the computer. Which is it?

NASA didn't invent the computer. However, in the 1950s computers were room-sized assemblies of hardware. NASA and the Air Force were the only two entities that needed computers that were smaller than that (the Air Force to put in missiles, NASA to put in spacecraft). The Block I Apollo computer was the driver for integrated circuits, and hence the grandfather of all of today's desktop computers (called "microcomputers" back in the old days, when "non-micro" computers meant the Univacs and 1103 and the other big iron of the day.
http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1962-Apollo.html

They had no computers, or they invented them?

Both.

It's neither, actually. But by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=_1g1b_EeVHw&NR=1
Why do you think it's called "numerically controlled" and not "digital"? It's because the whole concept is so old that the wording has had time to become obsolete.

The comment you're responding to was about computer design tools--CAD--not about numerically-controlled milling machines. And for that matter, the numerically-controlled milling machines of 1963 weren't really what you would call general purpose computers.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

What does saving files have to do with anything? What do you think Pro/e does internally except process lists of numbers added together? What do you think a CPU does basically? They had 32 bit mainframes in the '60s, you know. They could process lists of numbers and then use them as part of a fabrication process. Would you like me to link you to early videos of automated IC place and routing? And the resulting layout being plotted on a giant plotter before being photoshrunk for the IC fab process? That's the 1960s at *university* level, never mind "money no object government contracts".

Go read some Sideris books. What they were doing the '60s counts as computer aided design. It was all there. Put in the hands of much more competent people than today.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people on here don't know that in the late 1800's a 'computer' was typically a person.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they did the design work of the Saturn V engines on computers a decade later?

Fat fucking chance.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

They needed them smaller, but banks and businesses needed them cheaper and more reliable. How can NASA be a "driver" for ICs when they were using generic commercial ICs????

The comment you're responding to was about computer design tools--CAD--not about numerically-controlled milling machines."

They designed the parts on computers. They fabricated the parts as part of a computer-driven process. And that comment about the F-1 being hand built... I got news for you kids, how do you think jet turbines are built these days? By hand, one by one.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

That myth only pops up with a certain subset of people who are utterly convinced that NASA spinoffs include computers and ICs.

No, it pops up with two groups: an incredibly small subset of pro-space people who don't know what NASA actually did, and a larger set of people who try to build the first group up into a straw man larger than the actual group. These days, I don't remember the last time I saw someone who actually from the former group, but it seems like every other story involving manned space exploration has someone in the latter group, "preemptively" trying to argue against a group that isn't there or too small to be noticed. Heck, I remember someone not too long ago trolling with a fake post to emulate some one from the first group and then being surprised they got called out for being stupid for what they said.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[ebno-10db]

The myth only pops up with a certain subset of people who are utterly convinced that NASA spinoffs include computers and ICs.

I'll give you that. I've heard the same sort of ignorant worship for many things.

wasn't the whole Moon landing a "we tried it and who cares what it costs" type of exercise as well?

ii Sure it was, but I'm skeptical of NASA using much CNC. It was very rare then and NASA's focus was on going to the moon, not developing manufacturing techniques that were not essential to that effort. NC may be another story, and already widely used. With few exceptions, CNC (and even NC) are more about doing things cheaper than about doing things you can't do by hand. For a handful of units, who cares.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Trax3001BBS]

... by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=_1g1b_EeVHw&NR=1

Unfortunate choice of future technologies to demonstrate, at 4:00 min into the video the V-22 Osprey is shown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1g1b_EeVHwM#t=3m57 starts at that point.

...The V-22's development budget was first planned for $2.5 billion in 1986, then increased to a projected $30 billion in 1988....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-22_Osprey#Controversy

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[beltsbear]

"So Black and Decker were able to use computers to design a small permanent magnet motor, but NASA itself was using what for the F-1? Was NASA ordering envelopes by the carton for their back-of-the-envelope calculations?

Yes.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3022545&cid=40863753

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[kannibal_klown]

Heck, I recall being told that in the 1940's they used a computer for the Census and that was way prior to the push to the moon.

I could see that the push to the moon ADVANCED the computers of the era but definitely didn't create them. Like perhaps a bump in power / clock-speed / utility / etc. Or new architecture or just new ways of thinking. I don't know if that actually happened but it's a valid assumption.

In which case, the general theme of "another moon trip == new advancements" still holds.

Heck, that's a common argument for a lot of big suggested ventures. That the end-product would be more than the trip or widget... the advancements made to actually accomplish said task would be quite interesting. Mars trip, space elevator, another Moon trip, etc. That the fact we got there or built the thing would be "nice" but just doing it would advance our tech in various directions.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

Oh. My. God.

So they were able to use computers in the spacecraft to crunch numbers, just not on the Earth?

http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch1-2.html

http://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html

But adding a few numbers together to help along a design, that never happened? The military was happily using computers to help design parts for the B-58, but NASA was running around with crates of envelopes from Staples?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[LizardKing]

Banks were among the earliest commercial users of computers.

And tea shops.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, everybody that's ever used a calculator to design something qualifies for "computer aided design"? I don't think adding numbers is the minimum, or even close to the minimum for CAD. I used excel to calculate the costs and keep track of the lengths of wood needed for a treehouse. It still isn't a CAD treehouse.

When you think of CAD, no one thinks of what they used to design the F1 engines. Were computers used? Absolutely. Were computers used in a capacity to qualify this as a computer aided design? Not even close.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

Yes, it amazes me that the same people who go around spreading all kinds of myths about NASA inventing every technology on Earth are able to turn around on a quark and say we went to the Moon with the barest of technologies.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

"I could see that the push to the moon ADVANCED the computers of the era"

Sure, and so did every bank or business buying a computer to do payroll.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

"So, everybody that's ever used a calculator to design something qualifies for "computer aided design"?"

When no one else had calculators, yes.

"I don't think adding numbers is the minimum, or even close to the minimum for CAD. "

Then what is? Why were computers developed before they had color displays and stereo sound? Did companies do their payroll on computers for the kicks? For the sound the printer made? What else than to add numbers?

"When you think of CAD, no one thinks of what they used to design the F1 engines. Were computers used? Absolutely. Were computers used in a capacity to qualify this as a computer aided design? Not even close."

Then what else for? Send company wide emails about the company lunch? Early computers did nothing ELSE but numerical stuff.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

"uses electronics technology developed in the Apollo program" is a lot different than saying they invented the computer and ICs.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what does that link prove? I didn't say such people were non-existent, just that it is a very small subset, as in smaller than the number of people trying to bring that up as an example of something that needs to be fought against. I may not have seen or remembered a post from half a year ago, but I have seen quite a few people complaining or repeatedly trying to argue against such things with no one trying to argue for it before or after their rants. If you are trying to make a point that there is some "usual mythology," wouldn't that imply it should be a lot more common and something seen around here more frequently considering how many articles there are about NASA on Slashdot?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the NASA (and contractor) engineers had an electronic calculator at hand, or perhaps a slide rule (that they knew how to use). And a lot of the math was done on those tools, paper, their heads...and then fed into the computer for further testing. I suspect that access to the computer, and running of the tests was rather expensive at the time, and not nearly as ubiquitous as they might have liked and nowhere near what we're used to today,

I'm sure they had access to really amazing state-of-the-art technology. They were designing rockets to go to the freakin' Moon FFS. But, still, most of the software being used at the time was also being created for that purpose as they were needing it, most of it was probably not field-tested or guaranteed to be reliable. If I had had the fortune to be in their shoes, I would be double checking the computer results against my own math until I felt really confident about it.

It *was* computer aided (assited, whatever) design, but not as we understand it today.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

Good, all I ever said was that is was a certain subset. We agree. As for the mythology, it usually reduces to "NASA invented everything because we went to the Moon". Most people don't think it through that far, but yes, there is a TREMENDOUS amount of mythology around NASA and the Moon landings. Not that they happened, they obviously did, but to put it simply: many people think going to the Moon led to all kinds of technologies.

The way I see it is that all kinds of technologies LET us go to the Moon. Everything was there in embryonic form, whether it was from WWII progress, or just the normal course of human development through curiosity, talent and business needs, BEFORE.

Look at the company called BBN. They pioneered a lot of early computer work, but judging by what people are saying here, they never used computers. Look, someone had to be first, and you can't expect it to be at the same level as now, but if you are using computers to solve equations, even if you are just entering the problem in punch cards and the program runs overnight as a batch process, and you get the result back as a ASCII printout, it's still computer assisted design.

OK, so NASA got to spread tons of money around to other companies to develop technologies. Sure, NASA even invented a few new things here and there. But to think that people before were just stupid and no one was using computers is just foolish. Plenty of computer work was being done in the 1960s without NASA.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Outside of military and NASA guidance computers at the time, other computers were not using ICs. Other computers didn't have any particular need for them and they were way too expensive at the time. Although some previous military guidance computers used ICs, the AGC chose a simpler, cheaper and ultimately more reliable approach with their use of ICs. Extensive work was done in standardizing the IC across multiple producers and establishing their reliability. It is interesting to see how over the course of the design work for the computer, from about 1959 to 1964, the change in availability, reliability and price of the IC they were using. At the start, their orders took a long time to produce, were expensive at nearly $1000 an IC, and there were reliability issues and some difficulty getting consistency across different producers. There is a transition from the part being produced custom for orders to being an off the shelf, reliable part, with the price dropping to $20 driven by the military and NASA's demand, study and use of the particular NOR gate IC. At that point it became a commodity item that was then considered for computers that were not strictly designed with size in mind.

It is idiotic to say such development would not have happened without NASA and military use of the parts, as there would eventually be potential and demand for such parts in computers. But it is also idiotic to say their demand and use didn't help push the commoditization and price of the part down, or to take when someone says such work contributed to development and interpret that as them saying NASA was the sole developer of such technology.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

Yes, I think a big problem when discussing subjects is defining the terms of the discussion. I believe that computers existed in the 1960s and were used to assist the design process. I also believe NASA didn't invent computers as computers already existed before, and even in the early 1960s there was already a private sector computer industry that had nothing to do with space. NASA did use many computers, yes, a lot of them were commercial machines of the 360 variety.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

The IC used in the AGC was a NOR RTL gate commercially available at the time.

In the early 1960s there was at least one hobby magazine of the "Mechanics Illustrated" variety that showed how to build your own solid-state radio out of one of these RTL logic gates. This means these gates weren't the exotic parts you think they were.

A RTL gate is basically a pre-biased network of bipolar transistors and can be used in the linear mode... You can still get these today at digikey, look for what they confusingly call a digital transistor.

I mean, you people would argue with NASA itself.

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/hrst/archive/1716.pdf

They picked an IC that was already available in large quantities! They say so themselves! I mean what else can I do to convince you? NASA used EXISTING OFF THE SHELF COMMERCIAL PARTS THAT ALREADY EXISTED. And the IC was *obsolete* by the time Apollo 11 landed on the Moon! Why? Because commercial and industrial markets were already WELL underway on the digital computer path, without NASA, and without space!

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't think we agree. The issue I have is not with the claim that some dumb people exist that have that particular belief, but that such people are rather insignificant and small in number compared to the descriptions and adjectives you are attaching to things. Others seem to drag this up time and time again, beating a dead horse over something that isn't really relevant. By volume and time, it seems such people fighting this "tremendous amount of mythology" clog up comments and impede other discussion a lot more than the few pushing such mythology.

Why doesn't every Slashdot article on the food industry get posts pre-emptively explaining why cannibalism is bad? Cannibals do still exist and show up in the news from time to time, so lets spend a lot of time in every other Slashdot article fighting the logic, or lack there of, people might use to become cannibals.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[kannibal_klown]

Agreed - for the most part. Banking and Financial-Trading are probably pushing networking and data-processing to the limit.

But I mean for the Moon / Mars / Elevator... the technology in general evolves (not just computers). Materials, manufacturing processes, various gadgets. Sure, toy manufacturers + car manufacturers + etc. push lots of new tech, but going to space means more out of the box thinking which can lead in advancements going in new directions instead of further along the same direction.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to remember that what we think of as computers simply didn't exist back then. Your iPhone is more powerful than the most powerful computer that existed in 1972. A little history from wikipedia:

Some of the mathematical description work on curves was developed in the early 1940s by Robert Issac Newton from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Robert A. Heinlein in his 1957 novel The Door into Summer suggested the possibility of a robotic Drafting Dan. However, probably the most important work on polynomial curves and sculptured surface was done by Pierre Bézier (Renault), Paul de Casteljau (Citroen), Steven Anson Coons (MIT, Ford), James Ferguson (Boeing), Carl de Boor (GM), Birkhoff (GM) and Garibedian (GM) in the 1960s and W. Gordon (GM) and R. Riesenfeld in the 1970s.

It is argued that a turning point was the development of the SKETCHPAD system at MIT in 1963 by Ivan Sutherland (who later created a graphics technology company with Dr. David Evans). The distinctive feature of SKETCHPAD was that it allowed the designer to interact with his computer graphically: the design can be fed into the computer by drawing on a CRT monitor with a light pen. Effectively, it was a prototype of graphical user interface, an indispensable feature of modern CAD.

The first commercial applications of CAD were in large companies in the automotive and aerospace industries, as well as in electronics. Only large corporations could afford the computers capable of performing the calculations. Notable company projects were at GM (Dr. Patrick J.Hanratty) with DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computer) 1964; Lockheed projects; Bell GRAPHIC 1 and at Renault (Bézier) – UNISURF 1971 car body design and tooling.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

While computers had been invented and were in use for design purposes in the time frame Apollo was being developed, Staples was not. They weren'tt founded unitl 1985.

WHO DOESN'T KNOW THEIR HISTORY NOW?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[iggymanz]

I find these urban legends amusing. NASA had IBM mainframes circa 1960, the 7090 at AMES for example

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Lawrence_Bird]

Wow dude.. get a grip. "NASA engineers worked in an air conditioned room" would be translated to you to mean "NASA engineers were using life support systems" "NASA accountants used adding machines to see if the project was in cost" = "NASA used computers to do the project!"

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that the comment you are replying to refers explicitly to 1959-1964, while the document you link is talking only about the tail end of that, when things were converging on the part being reliable and off the shelf. If you go back a year or two, such as this document covers via discussing purchase orders for the IC, you'll see things changed rapidly over a couple years. Orders from various companies had to be canceled at times because they could not deliver the part on the time schedule they gave. Some of which were able to come back in a couple months or year after revamping their processes and try again, usually at a cheaper price too. The early orders there show prices on the order of $40 an IC, but they drop to about $10 an IC. The document doesn't discuss much before 1962, but if you go back another year or two, the prices were hundreds of dollars, and originally $1000 an IC. Lead times were months and sometimes more than a year. NASA pushed to companies to get their stuff in order and made some realize they weren't as good at producing the ICs as they thought.

A couple years here makes a big difference, so when you talk about something from 1965 or "the early 60s" that may be missing a huge part of the story. I know some fellow ham hobbyist can go overboard, but I don't know of many that would spring for $7000+ (adjusted price) IC for building a radio or recommend that is something to write up in a magazine about. But if it were And yes, the parts were RTL. Some earlier guidance computer made use of DTL instead, and used less common, more difficult to source combinations of ICs, and presented several problems in their design and production. Other ground computers at the time were starting to testing out the switch to RTL, but not RTL ICs, as it too expensive and not worth the savings in assembly complexity and size.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Reality Man]

You got me. So who *was* the supplier of NASA's envelopes?

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[DerekLyons]

NASA didn't invent the computer. However, in the 1950s computers were room-sized assemblies of hardware. NASA and the Air Force were the only two entities that needed computers that were smaller than that (the Air Force to put in missiles, NASA to put in spacecraft).

And the Navy (to put in missiles as well as shipboard), and the Army (to put on missiles and mobile launching equipment), and all four services to put on aircraft...
 

The Block I Apollo computer was the driver for integrated circuits, and hence the grandfather of all of today's desktop computers (called "microcomputers" back in the old days, when "non-micro" computers meant the Univacs and 1103 and the other big iron of the day.

Well, yes... and no... Integrated circuits were originally developed for the DoD, which refused to become an early adopter for various reasons, so their availability to NASA was something of an accident. Not to mention the Block I AGC was based directly on the Polaris MKII Guidance Computer...

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, I recall being told that in the 1940's they used a computer for the Census and that was way prior to the push to the moon.

A counting machine is a lot simpler than a 'computer'. A mostly mechanical thing, counting features on census punch cards. Saves a lot of time over hand counting, but hardly a 'computer'. In 1940, a 'computer' was a person who could do mathematical calculations reasonably fast and reliable. A person. A line of work obsoleted by calculators.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Ultracrepidarian]

The 1890 census was done using automated punch card equipment. Were they computers? I'd say we have a continuous spectrum from the Jacquard Loom to what we have today.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a news flash for you, young man. Numerical solutions, on computers, for the n body problem were being done in the 1950s, S. von Horner being a notable person in the field.

Yes, analytical math can be used to plan orbits, even done today for first passes. my senior year physics project was orbital calculations by both numerical and multi-variate calculus. No reason what I did couldn't be done on say an IBM 701 or 7000 in the 50s...

Yes, but we did put a man on the moon without so much as a desktop calculator. Computers did exist, but not in the same form we take for granted today.
Engineers working on the program were still using a slide rule. Amazing stuff.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairchild was close to failure but nasa contracts enabled the company to continue. The computer already existed. Fairchild was instrumental in making the computer what it is today.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[iggymanz]

NASA had mainframes in 1960. Sad but true. I can post links to pictures if you require proof.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[hinckeljn]

your eyesight is 20/20.

Kind of like..

[Anonymous Coward]

So, kind of like how slashdot is developed?

Agile Developement

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like my engineers in Kerbal Space Program. But instead of having massive failures where the whole rocket explodes, they have more controlled ones.

Mentioned this last week

[T.E.D.]

I mentioned this in a comment last week. Manned spaceflight in the USA is essentially a matter of history, not something we know how to do today. If we wanted (for whatever reason) to go back to the moon, we'd bascially have to start over from scratch. It would probably take as at least as long as the original Apollo program, and cost far more.

After the fall of the Roman empire, knowledge of concrete was lost, and for about 500 years Europeans were walking around Roman buildings and upon Roman roads that they had no idea how to recreate. Right now all our Apollo engineers are dead or dying, and the Astronauts will soon follow suit. Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world. Then we will know just how those Medieval Europeans felt when we go look at our old Apollo relics in the museums.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[h4rr4r]

Why would we not just put people in a dragon capsule? If we really cared about having a sack of mostly water on site.

Why would we go to the moon? Why not send robots?
It seems pointless to send humans to do something a machine can do better.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Reality Man]

It just goes to show that putting people on the Moon isn't even as useful as a Roman road. You could at least walk on them, and have other people walk to them so you could show them. Going to the Moon was more about creating a mythology. This is why you can never get rid of the idea like you can get rid of old computers or steam engines. Going to the Moon is less about anything concrete, it's more of an ideal.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Aqualung812]

Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men.
-Gus Grissom

This was also proven in several instances where manual human intervention saved a mission when automated systems failed.

Before you counter, yes, there were also man-made mistakes that caused problems during a mission. (Example Lovell's mistake in Apollo 8, which he manually corrected, and then used the skill on Apollo 13 when he didn't make a mistake).

I'd also agree that sending the Mars automated rovers were the best first step, rather than jumping right to a manned landing.

I think the thing we must accept is that both manned and unmanned missions are useful and different in their abilities & goals. Calling one "better" is over-simplifying.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Scutter]

>It seems pointless to send humans to do something a machine can do better.

Because PR. People can relate to a human stepping foot on the Moon/Mars/Asteroid/etc. and get excited about it. Excited people will want to spend more money doing it. It's good for the whole program. Now, whether that is worth the extra expense is obvious up for debate, but you can't deny that there is a benefit to having a human go to these places.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

Concrete was a useful technology. I'm not sure that's true of manned space flight. For a fraction of the money you can send a robot.

As someone who grew up as an enthusiastic proto-nerd on the Gemini and Apollo programs, I hate to say that. I still feel privileged that I lived at the time in history where I could watch the first man walk on the moon. But amongst the things we learned is that manned space flight is hideously expensive, and our robots have gotten a lot better since then too.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

You said "start over from scratch". Something you're missing is that re-engineering is much simpler; it has been done already towit to go to the moon build a saturn V, a LEM an Apollo capsule. That's why pukey little countries like the DPRK and Iran can build 'The BOMB" when there's noone in the entire country with half the brains of a Robert Oppenheimer.
Didn't that Elon Musk thing register with you? Space X does what the Gemini program does for a fraction of the cost.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[h4rr4r]

Robots are cheaper, send more of them to do different tasks.

So far PR is the only reason I have ever seen for sending humans.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[DerekLyons]

I mentioned this in a comment last week. Manned spaceflight in the USA is essentially a matter of history, not something we know how to do today. If we wanted (for whatever reason) to go back to the moon, we'd bascially have to start over from scratch.

Except - this story reveals your claim to be bullshit. We have (literally) tons of documentation on how they did it, and that's just the beginning...
 

After the fall of the Roman empire, knowledge of concrete was lost, and for about 500 years Europeans were walking around Roman buildings and upon Roman roads that they had no idea how to recreate. Right now all our Apollo engineers are dead or dying, and the Astronauts will soon follow suit. Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world. Then we will know just how those Medieval Europeans felt when we go look at our old Apollo relics in the museums.

In some fantasy world where we had stopped rocketry and spaceflight development and operations... you'd be right. But here in the real world, we're still flying rockets, we're still developing engines, and electronics, and materials, and... well... pretty much everything required for a moon flight. (In fact, there's a lot of Apollo components that will never see the light of day again because they're obsolete... long since replaced with something better.)
 
One might as well complain about how nobody has built a Wright Flyer in over a century and how everyone who ever designed of flew one is dead.
 
(Seriously, how does drivel like this get modded "Insightful", when it's clueless bilge?)

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

This was also proven in several instances where manual human intervention saved a mission when automated systems failed.

As technology marches on though, wouldn't the frequency of needing such a fix drop? And how many of those interventions were to save things related to life support or things that wouldn't be necessary without the crew?

Of course we can't build a perfect space craft yet and there will still be problems for time to come, and some of those may be fixable by a human if it were a manned flight. But how many times more expensive will the manned option be than the automated option? At some point, it is a lot cheaper and more productive with resources to build something that might or does fail, and then just send a patched second (or third, or forth one) then trying to build one that can be repaired in situ.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Aqualung812]

Robots can only do the tasks we imagined they would need to do when we get there.

Humans can use their imagination to change what they do based off of the new information received.

In addition, the technology of getting off this rock is a worthwhile pursuit. As Dr. Hawking pointed out recently, we have to get off this planet & colonize somewhere else to increase our chances of survival.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[MBGMorden]

It seems pointless to send humans to do something a machine can do better.

Cheaper, but far from better. We've learned a lot from the Mars rovers for example, but in all the years they've been driving around up there, a geologist on-site could have learned more about the planet in a weekend of study there.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

several instances where manual human intervention saved a mission when automated systems failed

Sure, they used the shuttle to put spectacles on Hubble but only because they already had the shuttle. Do the overall economics make sense? Unmanned missions are so much cheaper that you can just send another if the first fails. A bit embarrassing but no dead astronauts.

I'd also agree that sending the Mars automated rovers were the best first step, rather than jumping right to a manned landing.

For a fraction the price of a manned mission, we could send fleets of ever more advanced rovers. Probably even bring samples back to Earth. And go to even more interesting places, like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[h4rr4r]

Supporting humans costs and arm and a leg.

Without the ability to survive at that location there is no value gained in going there. If you are still stuck waiting on supplies from Earth there is no survivability gained.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men. -Gus Grissom

Gus was biased by his desire to go there personally. I don't blame him, but he wasn't planning to buy his own ticket. He also said that back when robots were incredibly primitive.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[h4rr4r]

Cheaper is often better. That means we can actually afford to do it.

I doubt that geoligist would agree, and even if he did it would cost more to land him there than we spent on exploring mars so far. Nevermind the cost of keeping him alive for the weekend, no returning him.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

Another example where "forget those fragile humans" makes sense, and has been used without many tears shed, is extremely deep ocean research. If you wanna look a few miles under the sea, forget bathyscaphes and ultra-deep submersibles, and just send a "fish". I don't think anyone considers doing otherwise these days, even though men once visited the bottom of the Marianas trench.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[DerekLyons]

Concrete was a useful technology. I'm not sure that's true of manned space flight. For a fraction of the money you can send a robot.

Sure, a robot is cheaper, but you get what you pay for. Steve Squyres (you know him, he's the guy in charge of Spirit and Opportunity) once noted that what the rovers had accomplished in five years could have been done by humans in a mere five days. (In fact, the total mileage covered by both rovers is less than one days traverse by one of the lunar rovers.) Robots are great when you want to mindlessly collect great heaping mounds of the same data, day after day... But at anything much more than that, they're still far inferior to people. (Which is why all three rovers to date aren't actually robots - they're teleoperated.) And there's nothing on the horizon to think that'll change anytime soon.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Aqualung812]

Don't underestimate lag time.

An HD camera that is sending real-time video back on a ROV that is being controlled by a human in real-time is a far cry from the long delays of planet to planet communication.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[MickyTheIdiot]

That's if you limit your definition of "knowledge gained" to JUST what was discovered on the trip itself!

What about all the knowledge gained by figuring out how to do it? That's where the real gains came from.

We really are in the "corporate era" aren't we? We believe as a society right now that nothing is worth knowing unless there are immediate financial gains involved. It's not healthy. Eventually there won't be any platform of new fundamental science to grow the "practical" stuff from, so it's self defeating even by when looked at a narrow corporatist perspective.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[robot256]

Hence why our Mars rovers have progressively greater amounts of automatic navigation functions (some being uploaded years into operation). The lag doesn't matter so much if the robot can get from point A to point B all by itself. The humans just have to decide where to send it and what to look at when it gets there. They are even working on autonomous geologist programs designed to identify interesting rocks and photograph them without human intervention. Robots will only get smarter. Humans need just as much food, water, and air as they ever will.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Rich0]

I have to agree. If I wanted to plan for the long road of human survival off-earth I'd focus first on figuring out terraforming, or operating sealed self-supporting environments (something that you can do just fine on the ground on Earth).

Once you can create completely self-sufficient and reliable environments with nothing but solar power input, then you can talk about sticking those up in space. I see no reason to stick those down on some planet at the bottom of yet another gravity well - just stick them in space. If you spot a killer comet headed your way, just expend a few grams of propellant and nudge your orbit out of the way instead of trying to move something the size of Mount Everest halfway across the solar system. If you need materials send a probe to some asteroid or comet or just move your entire habitat there - they're made out of the same stuff as the planets anyway.

Before sending people out in space, give them someplace useful to go to...

Re:Mentioned this last week

[powerlord]

So go use robots and other more automated vehicles to create the means necessary for human survival.

For instance, send a robot to Mars ahead of future human exploration and set up a habitat, start making oxygen, water, and foodstuffs.

No need to wait till we get there to start terraforming/colonizing a small piece.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Rich0]

I have to agree with this. If 20% of your robotic missions fail due to the inability to adapt, and each mission is 1/50th the cost of a manned mission, I'd call that a big success for robotics. How many Ranger probes did we crash into the Moon before we actually got useful data from them? Even so, in total they cost a fraction of what the first Apollo landing cost.

If we spent on robotic missions the way we spend on manned ones we'd have probes launching every other Tuesday, and we'd lose probes a few times a year, and we'd get a lot more done all the same.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Miamicanes]

> So far PR is the only reason I have ever seen for sending humans.

And PR is what generates public (and ultimately political) support for NASA's budgets. If NASA decided to reinvent itself as an agency focused exclusively on pure science, and eliminated everything you might regard as "PR Fluff" from its mission, it wouldn't *have* a mission within 10 years. It would end up on the chopping block and get cut the next time there was any kind of budget crisis. Oh, ok... it might not get abolished and defunded *entirely*... it would probably get reassigned to some other agency, then get progressively starved to death until it was little more than a name with a director and a few university grants to manage per year.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[dpilot]

Your definition of "defeat" may be erroneous in your referenced context. Keep in mind that in the "corporate era" the goal of corporations becomes that which has so far been assigned to nation-states and governments - to perpetuate. (Profit being secondary to perpetuation.) From the perpetuation point of view, "new fundamental science" is really a big hassle, because it opens to door to disruptive technologies, and disruptive technologies tend to unseat comfortable incumbent corporations.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[hackertourist]

If you read TFA, you'll see that the design process for the F1 was basically to try almost random variations until they found one that worked. These days, we have a much better understanding of what happens in a rocket engine, and much better tools to help with the design of a new engine. So if we did start from scratch, we'd arrive at a working design much sooner. Compare SpaceX' relatively trouble-free entrance into the launcher market with the explosion festival that was NASA's early years.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[chihowa]

In may ways, though, reverse engineering a design is more difficult than starting from scratch. To re-engineer a design and continue production without notes explaining the design rationale, you basically end up recapitulating their entire design process. You have to try to rationalize design errors that they made and decide whether you can fix (what appear to be) suboptimal design choices. Major design decisions may have been based around materials deficiencies that we don't have today, but if you don't have their notes, it's difficult to decide if there were other reasons behind their choices. Aside from the materials aspect (which has seen vast improvements since the 40's), "THE BOMB" is a relatively simple concept. Rebuilding the Manhattan Project bombs would be harder than just designing a new one from scratch.

Re-engineering an extremely complex project is not much simpler, it's an incredibly convoluted and frustrating process.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Miamicanes]

>Without the ability to survive at that location there is no value gained in going there.

It's a good thing King Ferdinand & Queen Isabella didn't share your view. In a more recent context, I suspect there are quite a few people in Las Vegas and Dubai who'd beg to differ (not to mention Antarctica, undersea, the summit of Mt. Everest, and South Florida around August & September).

If you were exiled to what's now Las Vegas 500 years ago, and had to somehow live off the land without external supplies or support, how many days do you think you'd have survived under the best and most optimistic possible circumstances?

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

So far PR is the only reason I have ever seen for sending humans.

I call this: willingness to cough up funding. How many "Real Americans" want to see a Chinese astronaut plant the Chinese flag on Mars before the "Good Ole Stars and Stripes" has been planted there first? I think we can safely discard the ESA/Russians for now, but the Chinese... keep an eye on them.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[nozzo]

"Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world."

This. A call to arms for the next gen space explorers.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[swb]

It seems pointless to send humans to do something a machine can do better.

I think this somehow ties into nerd personality -- dehumanizing things because they can't relate to the human element of it. Nerds have weak social skills and just can't relate to things which have a social value.

Part of the reason for sending humans into space is because exploration of the unknown is part of the human experience. You can rationalize the practical end of it as advances in engineering and science (life support systems, etc) but the real reason to do is the human experience.

A lot of nerds don't get this -- all they think about is in terms of "data" and "gathering data" -- and they just don't understand the human component of this.

I was at the Kennedy Space Center with my dad last week and in the building dedicated to the early days of space flight I asked my dad if he remembered the early days of space flight and landing the man on the moon (I was too young to remember).

Dad said it was a pretty amazing moment -- people stopped what they were doing and watched TV or listened to the radio, en masse. Something incredible was happening and the world stopped.

We've taken that out of space flight, partly with so much focus on ISS and the shuttle, but mostly by so much focus on robotic hard science. And correspondingly, people have stopped caring and budgets aren't what they used to be.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[bored]

Why would we go to the moon? Why not send robots?
It seems pointless to send humans to do something a machine can do better.

This has been answered a hundred times before by people who can do a much better job. Still...

Its not so much the destination that's important, but the technology to get there and survive. Neither is it about packing up a bunch of stuff from earth and taking a vacation on the moon. Its about building sustaining environments that don't require resupply from the earths biosphere. That is part of why there are so many "biology" experiments on the ISS.

If as a species we wish to survive, at some point we will have to learn how to live outside of the earths biosphere. Now is as good a time as any to learn how to do that because the future is not clear. It is entirely possible that in 50-100 years this planet won't support human life any where near the scale it currently does. If we manage to survive climate change without huge population loss, then there are dozens of other catastrophic things that may do us in.

Having the knowledge of how to survive in a man made biosphere is _NOT_ easy, and may be the key to our future on this planet even without the space aspects. Building power sources that don't involve the sun or carbon cycles is the future as well. Neither of which is particularly useful farther out in the solar system.

The problem with the ISS, is that it exists in a vacuum. There aren't any raw materials to use that haven't come from earth. We need an ISS on an asteroid, or the moon.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[delt0r]

If the rovers mass budget and cash budget where comparable to a manned mission, they too would have got the job done in five days. Apples and Oranges.

And added bonus, NASA doesn't get shut down for a investigation for years when something goes wrong either. Lets not also forget that there are a huge amount of assumptions in that "a human could have done it 5 days". Like say no need to wear a space suit. We were on the moon for a lot of days. And quite frankly didn't get much done at all.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots can only do the tasks we imagined they would need to do when we get there.

Humans can use their imagination to change what they do based off of the new information received.

In addition, the technology of getting off this rock is a worthwhile pursuit. As Dr. Hawking pointed out recently, we have to get off this planet & colonize somewhere else to increase our chances of survival.

In general, it is more efficient to build a new robot that has the capabilities you found the first one lacks and send it than it would to have sent humans in anticipation of an unexpected setback.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[DerekLyons]

If the rovers mass budget and cash budget where comparable to a manned mission, they too would have got the job done in five days. Apples and Oranges.

In some fantasy universe where the main limits on robotic performance is cash and mass, sure. But that's not the universe we live in. Here in the real world, the limitations on robotics are technological - despite the fact that over many decades, by many organizations, many, many, times to amount that's been spent on manned space has been poured into computation and robotics research.
 

Lets not also forget that there are a huge amount of assumptions in that "a human could have done it 5 days". Like say no need to wear a space suit. We were on the moon for a lot of days. And quite frankly didn't get much done at all.

Yes, there's huge assumptions there - like "humans will perform to their usual and proven standard". Doubly so, since those standards have been proven repeatedly - even in space suits. For example - forty years ago, men could travel over ten times as fast as the rovers. They didn't need to stop for days to figure out a way around a rock, or how to approach a target, or how to get unstuck (and the humans *did* get stuck). And as far as not accomplishing much? That's just further evidence of your ignorance, or bias, or both.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Without the ability to survive at that location there is no value gained in going there.

Until we go there we'll never develop the technologies that allow us to stay there. We have to start somewhere.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[h4rr4r]

I think that says more about our culture than it does about NASA or manned space missions. NASA should be doing just that, but cannot just to keep the idiots happy.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[h4rr4r]

So to keep idiots happy we should send men up? That is what you are saying.

I weep for humanity.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[delt0r]

In some fantasy universe where the main limits on robotic performance is cash and mass, sure.

Then you compare walking speed to rover motion speed. Both things are easily solved with mass and budget. And we are talking about a massive increase in both mass and budget here. In fact half of the this very slow progress is NASA over abundance of caution. Oh and the fact they don't have the energy budget for better computers on board because of mass constraints.

Yes, there's huge assumptions there - like "humans will perform to their usual and proven standard".

What proven record? On earth doesn't count. For mars there is the trip to consider, with both physical and psychological effects. And the suit they are going to need. Also a lot of life support. Since we have not proven to be even able to make a life support system that lasts that long without resupply, so its far from proven.

That's just further evidence of your ignorance, or bias, or both.

For the budget the Apollo program was pitiful. You know it.

I am far from ignorant. We use to chat on usenet back in the day. You were a lot more objective as I recall. And also a bit more clued up on just what mass means for something like a trip to mars.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

Nerds have weak social skills and just can't relate to things which have a social value.

What a ridiculous stereotype. We have no trouble at all socially, as long as we can socialize via a keyboard.

I asked my dad if he remembered the early days of space flight and landing the man on the moon

As a kid, I remember seeing the first man walk on the moon on TV and seeing the launch of Apollo 17 in person (only night launch of a Saturn V). Great stuff, but how much are people willing to pay for the voyeuristic human experience of having a few people bounce around on Mars? Apollo was cheap compared to what will be, as the moon is practically next door. As it is the majority of the American people never supported the cost of the moon program.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

Its about building sustaining environments that don't require resupply from the earths biosphere ... It is entirely possible that in 50-100 years this planet won't support human life any where near the scale it currently does. If we manage to survive climate change without huge population loss, then there are dozens of other catastrophic things that may do us in.

If that's the object, then it would make more sense to build "escape shelters" in places with a benign environment, like deep abandoned mine shafts (ala Dr. Strangelove) or the South Pole (ala The Thing). Both are far more benign than space, the moon or Mars. Mild temperatures, plenty of oxygen and water and easy supply routes until they become self-sustaining. With the right construction, and a little diversity to hedge our bets, they ought to survive global climate change, an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, a meteorite impact of the scale that wiped out the dinosaurs, plague, nuclear war, you name it. Until the sun grows so much that it boils off the seas in a half-billion years or so, it should be good.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[bored]

Maybe, but do you really think the fallout model would work, when people know that all they have to do is dig through a couple feet of concrete and they will have food and a chance to survive?

There are lots of projects like this already, including a number more focused on science than building a bomb shelter. Which is where most of the planet based projects like this stop. They stock up supplies for a while and figure that is all they have to do because they can re-emerge in a couple years to the garden of Eden.

Besides, being stranded somewhere, tends to bring out the creative resources a lot more than being in a glass dome, where all you have to do is break the glass and your safe. Humans do best in situations where they are dying pushing some boundary forward. How much do you think we would know about scurvy, etc if everyone was content to only sail a couple miles off shore.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[DerekLyons]

Then you compare walking speed to rover motion speed.

Why would I compare minimum performance of one to the maximum performance of the other? I'm seeking to perform an honest comparison, not to handwave, bullshity, and blow smoke - while simultaneously making myself look even more ignorant with each sentence I type. That's your schtick, and you've got it down cold.
 

Yes, there's huge assumptions there - like "humans will perform to their usual and proven standard".

What proven record?

I gave an example of just that - but those examples are inconvenient to you as the prove the falsehood of your thesis. So you snipped them.
 

I am far from ignorant. We use to chat on usenet back in the day. You were a lot more objective as I recall.

If you're not ignorant, you're doing a damn fine job of doing everything possible to make yourself appear to be so. You have yet to supply any evidence of lack of objectivity, which is pretty much par for the course... Like most ignorant loons, you snip away the parts inconvenient to you (those that prove you false), and just repeat what you said before, just with more smoke and handwaving.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots take hours or days to accomplish a task that would take a human a few minutes. Take MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) for example. It would probably take a human a few days to complete the entire MSL science workload that has taken it around 8 months to accomplish. And after that few days they could go on to do FAR MORE exploration, digging into the landscape, taking soil borings, etc, Don't get me wrong I love robotic exploration, it is a great pathfinder. But it has a LONG way to go before it replaces a human on site.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a place something like 100 miles from there where I might live.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[MachineShedFred]

We did send robots to the moon before people. Then, we went there with people too.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_Program
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_program

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

If you were exiled to what's now Las Vegas 500 years ago, and had to somehow live off the land without external supplies or support, how many days do you think you'd have survived under the best and most optimistic possible circumstances?

Personally I'd give up hope if I couldn't get a cold drink in an air conditioned hotel. Hardier souls though have lived there for 10,000 years. It was a popular spot precisely because of the fresh water supplies. Unless you're a cold weather lover like me, it's very much a spot suitable for human habitation.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ebno-10db]

being stranded somewhere, tends to bring out the creative resources a lot more than being in a glass dome, where all you have to do is break the glass and your safe

Mars is not somewhere you can say "no timber, maybe we can make shelter out of sod" or "some of these berries must be edible - you try them first". Almost anywhere on Earth is a paradise for human habitation compared to Mars. You can literally catch your breath for a few minutes while thinking of what to do - try that on Mars!

Moreover, most of the basic techniques for surviving in various Earth environments were developed in prehistory. The European explorers generally copied what the natives were doing or paid the price. Eventually they'd modify things by bringing over the crops, livestock and building techniques they were used to, but that's about it.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[ChrisMaple]

One might as well complain about how nobody has built a Wright Flyer in over a century and how everyone who ever designed of flew one is dead.

If someone did, he'd be wrong. They've been recreated and flown within the last 10 years.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[kamapuaa]

Complete nonsense. Of course we have the documentation and the general knowledge to go back to the moon. Start over from scratch? There's a huge body of knowledge about rocketry that didn't even exist in 50 years ago, not to mention advances in computers, material science, etc.

Having people who have been to the moon is not critical to any future moon mission. It wouldn't even be an important component to a future moon mission, were we to start preparing for one immediately.
   

Re:Mentioned this last week

[DerekLyons]

That sound you heard is my point whooshing over your head.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[delt0r]

Why would I compare minimum performance of one to the maximum performance of the other? I'm seeking to perform an honest comparison, not to handwave, bullshity, and blow smoke - while simultaneously making myself look even more ignorant with each sentence I type. That's your schtick, and you've got it down cold.

So you are comparing the performance of a robotic mission that cost less than a thousandth of a manned mission. And that being optimistic for the manned mission. Logic is clearly not your strong point.

All we need is a another deluded space nutter troll on the internet.

Re:Mentioned this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm trying to find the quote from a geologist about the Mars rovers .... and how in the several years of operation, they've done "a good afternoon's work".

Every IT shop...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if one is doing a one off project, or a prototype that will then be given to someone else to redesign, the perhaps this is the a good method.

Every mid to large sized IT shop I've ever seen or worked in (dozens) has basically been a "one-off project" when viewed as a whole. Yes sure, every one is basically built out of off-the-shelf hardware and OSes, but there is so much customization and scripting, customized apps and databases and communication software, and other various "glue" bits holding these microcosms all together, but after you examine the innards of any decent sized IT shop that's been running a while, the place as a whole is actually a giant hodge-podge Rube Goldberg contraption that has evolved and taken final shape over time and iterative development.

We've not building Henry Ford assembly line Model Ts here.

Re:Every IT shop...

[fustakrakich]

There is no 'final shape'. It is an undulating blob. Eventually the mass of cables becomes so great that a black hole forms, collapsing the entire building in on itself.

Why?!?

[porcinist]

Just because we don't understand how the F-1 engines were built, doesn't mean we do not understand how rocket engines are built. Why is NASA trying to reverse engineer an engine that was designed without modern computer aided design and without access to modern materials? Do they really think those engines were perfect and you can't possibly do any better? No, they seem to think they will "save money" by using the old design. How can it be easier to try and reverse engineer all the design requirements from an existing engine than to create a new design where you know the design requirements? This philosophy is why big aerospace is having such massive problems. This is why SpaceX has delivered supplies to the ISS twice, while the Antares rocket (Orbital Science Corporation) is still sitting on the ground. SpaceX designed their rockets from scratch, while OSC is using rockets designed in the 1960s.

Re:Why?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or because Orbital started over a year later with half the government seed money for the rocket ????

Re:Why?!?

[Chrisq]

They explain why, so that the engineers can get an understanding of large liquid fueled rockets. Understanding the latest attempt seems to be a reasonable step before designing the next one. Also, since they have an engine with known qualities and are building a computer model of it, this will verify that the model simulation is basically correct. If it does not predict known facts (unstable exhaust gas without baffles, expected thrust, etc.) then they cannot trust the simulation on new designs.

Re:Why?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't knock Orbitalthey were the first nuspace company before nuspace was nuspace. They built their own launch vehicle to launch satellites because there were none of the Government derived vehicles available that met their needs long before it was "cool".

Re:Why?!?

[tibit]

Why? Because sometimes reverse-engineering something that has been shown to work is cheaper than going through the entire development process from scratch. The fact that F-1 engines were built manually and designed without the use of electronic computers doesn't mean that they are much worse for it. Why the heck do you think a lot of Chinese products were reverse-engineered western designs?

Re:Why?!?

[sycodon]

From another article linked in the original:
---
Adam.S wrote:
The F1 was unquestionably an amazing engine when it was built, but is the F1B the best engine that can be made of this scale today? So much has changed since - they didn't even have CFD (computational fluid dynamics) back then. I'd like to understand why they chose to modify an old design, rather than creating an entirely new engine from scratch, using all the technology available today.

Response:
Because the cost and effort to eke out few fractions more efficiency are far outweighed by the costs savings of being able to use a simple, cheap, well known and understood, yet highly effective booster that's just going to get dropped off the rocket 2 minutes into the flight anyways. The RD-25 (the Space Shuttle Main Engine) is probably still the most advanced, efficient, and reliable engine of it's size ever made (and possibly that will ever be made), but it's also massively expensive to produce and over engineered. Then again, it had to be because it needed to run continuously from the ground all the way to orbit, and on top of that it had to be throttleable and reusable.

Re:Why?!?

[nojayuk]

The RD-180 engine, a LOX/LH2 engine like the F1, is available off-the-shelf today and has a significantly higher Isp figure (311s sea-level) than the F1 ever had had (263s sea-level). I'd rate that as more than a few fractions more efficient. Its parent engine, the RD-170 and the current RD-171 are both more powerful than the F1 at about 1.8 million lb as compared to the F1's 1.52 million lb. and the RD-171 can similarly be bought off-the-shelf today. Of course they're Russian ex-Soviet designs which gives them cooties in the eyes of some Americans.

Re:Why?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The RD-180 engine, a LOX/LH2 engine like the F1, is available off-the-shelf today and has a significantly higher Isp figure (311s sea-level) than the F1 ever had had (263s sea-level).

Bolded your mistake. The F-1 is not a LOX/LH2 engine. It's a LOX/RP-1 (kerosene) engine. I am no rocket scientist but as far as I know LH2 generally offers higher Isp than other liquid propellants, so it's not unexpected that the F-1 "loses" this comparison.

I'd rate that as more than a few fractions more efficient. Its parent engine, the RD-170 and the current RD-171 are both more powerful than the F1 at about 1.8 million lb as compared to the F1's 1.52 million lb. and the RD-171 can similarly be bought off-the-shelf today. Of course they're Russian ex-Soviet designs which gives them cooties in the eyes of some Americans.

You're going off in the weeds. There were reasons why the Saturn program chose a relatively low-Isp RP-1 engine for the Saturn V first stage. It wasn't because they had no idea how to build LH2 engines -- the S-V second and third stages used Rocketdyne J-2 LOX/LH2 engines after all. (With an Isp of 421 sec, if wikipedia is accurate.)

I've read a few histories of the Apollo program and from what I dimly remember, Isp wasn't the only figure of merit used to select a fuel and engine for the S-V first stage. RP-1 offered much higher volumetric efficiency: even when liquified, hydrogen is still not very dense compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Holding rocket stage volume equal, a RP-1/LOX stage will offer more Delta-V than a LH2/LOX stage, even though it's heavier and less efficient (less Delta-V per unit mass). For reasons which I'm not quite remembering (probably just the sheer size of the whole vehicle stack?), this property made RP-1 a good choice for the S-V first stage, even though it didn't offer the best efficiency.

It was more important to optimize the efficiency (Isp) of the upper stages, though. It's good to minimize the dead weight the first stage must move off the ground and through the lower atmosphere in addition to its own. So, the Apollo program chose LH2/LOX for those stages.

It's entirely possible that the reasons RP-1 made sense for the S-V first stage still apply to some modern heavy launch vehicle proposals, making it worthwhile to revisit that engine.

Re:Why?!?

[nojayuk]

Yep, my mistake, a simple brain fart on my part but the RD-180, the RD-171 and its predecessor the RD-170 are all LOX/kerosene like the F-1. They produce 20% more thrust for the amount of fuel and oxidiser they burn and they are available off the shelf. The RD-171 produces more 300,000lb thrust than the last version of the F-1 and it can be tilted and swivelled unlike the old fixed F-1 motor design. I'm not sure if the RD-17x family and derivatives can be throttled; the Saturn V tended to beat up its crew as the first stage emptied at a maximum acceleration of 4G just before separation and a throttleable engine such as the Shuttle had could smooth out the ascent somewhat.

You're right about the mass fraction. The tankerage required for a staging LOX/LH2 rocket would be quite bulky and expensive in terms of launchpad mass. Vehicles like Ariane and the Shuttle ran their main engines nearly all the way to orbit assisted by strapons for the early part of the ascent. I think the Delta 4 with RS-68 engines is the only rocket that takes off and discards a LOX/LH2 stage in flight, trading the very good Isp figure for the mass of the extra tank volume.

A machine isn't always better.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not yet possible for a machine to repair itself - once it is damaged, it is permanent, nothing to fix it.

A man on site could repair that machine, even if it took wire and duct tape - it would work long enough to get a job done.

A machine (at least ALL current machines) have very poor eyesight. A person looking at a scene can identify events that machines overlook. They get curious and make a closer look. A machine that has to be scheduled to look takes so long to get scheduled that the closer look itself is overlooked.

Re:A machine isn't always better.

[tibit]

It is certainly possible for machines to have capability to repair themselves. For robotic space exploration, though, it's simply cheaper to design a machine that can tolerate some likely failures while still completing the mission, while taking the chance that some other failures will end the mission. Remember: those kilograms delivered safely to Mars's surface are very expensive.

Zomg!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The biggest engines we could buy for our model rockets was the D. This F is awesome!

And it's just the F1 !

Re:Zomg!

[dpilot]

But could an F-1 even lift its own weight? After all the venerable D was at least a D-13, and even the C series was typically a C-6. At that scaling I would have expected the F to be something like an F-50.

Perhaps the solution is that we're using a "new engine scale", kind of like ST:TNG moved to the new Warp scale instead of the old W**3 of ST:TOS. And of course since it's a first-stage booster, it would be an F-1-0. (I wonder what the ejection charge delay would be for a single/upper-stage version.)

Best it was on paper, not computers

[ebno-10db]

A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids.

Thank goodness for that. People still know how to read paper drawings. If it was computerized, we might be able to read the media if it survived (1/2" mag tape or punch cards) but would probably have to spend a lot of time reverse engineering obsolete CAD formats.

Re:Best it was on paper, not computers

[Anonymous Coward]

i guess you didn't read the part, in either the article or the summary, where the paper drawings were basically useless also.

if it were as simple as recreating the engine from the drawings they wouldn't have to go through all this effort.

Re:Best it was on paper, not computers

[Rich0]

There is much truth here. I remember when my advisor in grad school pointed out that we have stone tablets from a few thousand BC which we can read today, but he has tapes up on a shelf that he couldn't read without essentially re-engineering the systems used to create them.

Re:Best it was on paper, not computers

[dpilot]

There is a company doing archival documentation work, and their solution is to etch small characters onto a metallic wafer. To read, you need a microscope - and know how to read the language it was written in.

Re:Best it was on paper, not computers

[steelfood]

Paper will never die.

Imagine Da Vinci had stored his notes on magnetic media. I wonder how much of it would have survived and been restorable for general consumption (hint: probably none).

Digital storage makes duplication and sometimes modification much easier. But all it really does is commoditize the knowledge that's being stored. I.e., only the worthless stuff really qualifies to be stored digitally.

And how is this different than the F-35 JSF progra

[PortHaven]

We constantly test, and call it good enough. The difference is the fighter is going to cost more than the Saturn missions...go figure.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

This reads to me like We have no idea how these rockets work, his secrets lost in a sea of details. The result a non repeteable prototype. We cant build another one wihout reinventing it.

This is amazing

[RabidMonkey]

These are the types of Articles I still come to Slashdot for ... and for the comments, which have (sadly) diminished in quantity in the last decade. Amazing engineering work, amazing science.

Time to watch Apollo 13

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the biggest space boner right now.

Re:Time to watch Apollo 13

[MachineShedFred]

I know you're being a smartass, but if you want to watch something from the same production crew that did Apollo 13, but is more focused on the entire manned spaceflight program of the late 50s to early 70s, watch HBO's excellent From the Earth to the Moon.

They go beyond the usual tale of the actual spaceflight and have an episode about the engineers working on the lunar lander, spend a serious amount of time on Apollo 1, etc.

It's quite well done.

SPICE [Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids...]

[Geoffrey.landis]

They had CAD applications, just not what you think as CAD. Anyways, this is interesting, because when do you think CAD applications started? Did the whole thing just pop into existence fully formed, or were there intermediary steps? Just on the electronics side, look at something like SPICE. It didn't pop into existence with a GUI on a personal computer, it started as a punch-card reading batch application on a mainframe.

SPICE dates to 1972. The Saturn V had been designed, built, flown, and out of production for years by the time SPICE was released to the public.

To be fair, SPICE derived from CANCER ("Computer Analysis of Nonlinear Circuits, Excluding Radiation"). But that was also not released to the public ready until the early 70s (the paper describing it was dated 1971: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1050166 )

Boom, computer aided design.

"Boom," just in time to be ten years too late to be used in the Apollo program.

Some things are far easier now--computers help

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Hello,

    Some people are claiming that all spaceflight knowledge in this country has been lost and it would cost far more (in constant dollars?) to re-do what was done in the 60's to get us to the moon. I'm not so sure.

    I'm working in an engineering field (not rocket science) which was dominated by experimentation/prototyping when it was "hot" (WWII and shortly thereafter). Giant teams of people (100s or more) would be doing what our very small team is today (3-ish).

    Granted, we have their shoulders to stand on, but instead of doing a WHOLE LOT of prototypes, we run supercomputer simulations and "try out" thousands of designs. And when we build them, they work--the first time.

    I would say we re-do (sort of, actually we're pushing today's technological boundaries) the equivalent of what our fathers and grandfathers had done, faster, cheaper, better, and with stupider, less-skilled people (I'm including myself) --because we have better tools to extend our minds and bodies with today.

    So I am not so sure that re-engineering the Apollo program would cost anything like the original development program. I think it would depend on what kind of modeling tools and other tech developments are available now that didn't exist then.

    What's more, we're currently executing what I would call an "archaeology" project, reviving a 40-year-old design. The existing documentation is lacking, but it's still helping us a lot--we'll probably get this thing built for 1/10th the cost "back when" thanks to what our ancestors have left us and thanks to the tools we have today. And we might even build it better than they could ever have done, thanks to being able to use supercomputers to search for an optimal design.... But that remains to be seen.

--PeterM

ECAP is older, but no CAD for Saturn V

[Anonymous Coward]

The Saturn V was designed with paper and slide rules, and very little computer work.

As far as circuit simulation goes, ECAP is probably the first full circuit simulator. I have a copy of the manual for the 1620 version, but it's dated 1970, but there are earlier versions. All written in FORTRAN. I'll bet that almost no computer simulation was done for the electronics on the Saturn V.

For thermal and mechanical FEM analysis, NASTRAN started in 1964 and was delivered in 1968 Not used for Apollo, but used for Shuttle.

Drafting wise, Sutherland's Sketchpad was in 1963, and was pretty much the first "drawing" tool on a computer, and it used custom hardware, and was hardly usable for actual drafting.There were some specialized tools for splines and such in the car industry, but "real" drafting on a computer probably didn't exist until the 70s. (Drafting or Technical Drawing was still a course you took in high school in the mid-70s.)

Re:And how is this different than the F-35 JSF pro

[Rich0]

We constantly test, and call it good enough. The difference is the fighter is going to cost more than the Saturn missions...go figure.

Well, there is no doubt a ton of waste in the fighter programs, but do consider that the Saturn V did not have to deal with people trying to shoot it down, only had a run of a dozen or two units, and each unit only had to work one time on a single day, only spending a few days outdoors. That means that you could have a complex series of tests/checks/etc that all take place up until launch which are good for only that one launch. You can't exactly design an F-35 so that you need to reassemble the thing from components before every mission, or dictate that if it is a rainy day you'll just postpone the mission until the next day, or that the fighter would throttle up the engines exactly once, slowly reduce thrust as fuel is burned off, shut them off, and never use them again.

You can buy up to a "G-80" nowadays....

[Ellis D. Tripp]

, and if you pass a certification test, commercial motors up to an O-8000 are available if you have the cash:

http://www.pro38.com/products/pro150/motor.php

Model rocketry has come a LONG way since cardboard Estes rockets in the schoolyard....

Slide rules, not computers [Re:Lacked the bare...]

[Geoffrey.landis]

They needed them smaller, but banks and businesses needed them cheaper and more reliable.

Correct. NASA was the driver for small computers, where "small" meant "smaller than a room." Pretty much all other applications-- such as the banks and businesses you mention-- used timeshare on big mainframes. Or, for the early 60s, sent the punch-cards to the mainframe to be entered.

By the way, in 1963 banks mostly didn't use computers. You youngsters are too young to remember when a bank "passbook account" meant a physical object that the teller wrote in by hand.

How can NASA be a "driver" for ICs when they were using generic commercial ICs????

They paid the companies to develop those products in the first place, because they didn't exist until the NASA contracts to develop them. The IC was developed with Air Force and NASA funding, because at the time, those were the two customers for whom integrated circuits were an enabling technology.

The comment you're responding to was about computer design tools--CAD--not about numerically-controlled milling machines."

They designed the parts on computers.

Wrong.

They fabricated the parts as part of a computer-driven process.

Wrong.

Look, learn something about 1963 before posting so confidently about how engineering was done with computers back in the early 60s, OK? Do you even know what a slide-rule was???

Re:Slide rules, not computers [Re:Lacked the bare.

[Reality Man]

Absolutely false, every one of your statements. YOU should go grab a book about the 1960s. Just because clerks and people still had paper bank books doesn't mean computers weren't used to crunch numbers... I had paper bank books in the 1980s, does that mean banks had no computers in the '80s? The first hard drive in the 1950s was called RAMAC. You know why?

Random Access Method of Accounting and Control

IN 1956.

First of all, we need to define what I mean by designing parts on a computer. Were they sitting in front of personal computers with a mouse, color graphics, stereo sound and brazilian tranny porn? No. But are you claiming they never ever used computers to run numerical simulations for critical parts?

You ever hear of Messier Dowty? This is a company in Quebec that built the landing gear for the LEM. Guess what they used to help design them? Early computers and software at the Polytechnique.

If you ask a computer to solve an equation that's needed to help guide the design of a part, what is that but computer aided design? So sorry it was all on punch cards. Still a computer.

Computers not in routine use in engineering in '63

[Geoffrey.landis]

SPICE was a combination of earlier programs...

Right. Specifically, what I said was "SPICE derived from CANCER ("Computer Analysis of Nonlinear Circuits, Excluding Radiation")."

So, you think they didn't use computers to solve numerical problems in 60s? Problems related to design? Is this what you are claiming?

The article said that the F-1 engines were not designed with computerized design aids. That is correct. CAD was just being developed-- in fact, it used to be called "Computer Assisted Drafting", long before it became a design tool-- and was not being used at MSFC back then.
http://www.cadbuilt.com/cad-drafting.html

I don't think you have much of a memory of what engineering was like in the 1960s. You might try some of these:
http://history.nasa.gov/monograph45.pdf
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/saturn_apollo/documents/F-1_Engine.pdf

nice if we had a reusable engine

[k6mfw]

F1 is a engineering marvel but shame it's only used for three minutes then dumped into the ocean. Think of all the design, craftsman machining, and all the horrible bureaucracy of documentation from parts selection, materials testing, assembly checks, auditing of special tools (and each tool has tons of paperwork). Armies of technicians and engineers working on just one engine. And many are built, and very $$$expensive$$$. Imagine if booster can be recovered, engines reused, the only thing lost is the propellent. But then Saturn V had a purpose to beat the Reds to the moon, performance at any cost. It may be very expensive but damned the costs if the Soviets beat us to the moon, plant the hammer and sickle flag that will enslave the world in communism. Meanwhile back in the 21st century, everyone is arguing about SLS. Like the Soviets that failed to reach the moon mainly because they never really committed to landing a cosmonaut on the moon. Many argued about N1, politicos never gave it full funding, many engineers argued among themselves. Substitute SLS for N1... well going OT. Then there is SpaceX knowing value in recovering launch vehicles to save those engines. And the Soyuz marches on!

Re:nice if we had a reusable engine

[ebno-10db]

But then Saturn V had a purpose to beat the Reds to the moon, performance at any cost. It may be very expensive but damned the costs if the Soviets beat us to the moon, plant the hammer and sickle flag that will enslave the world in communism.

Sure that was a lot of the political motivation for the space race, but it was a lot better than devising new and improved ways to turn the planet into a pile of radioactive rubble.

Meanwhile, Space-X builds the Falcon Heavy

[Animats]

Meanwhile, Space-X is building the Falcon Heavy, with twice the payload of the Space Shuttle. The Falcon Heavy is three Falcon-9s. The Falcon-9, which is in current production and has been launched successfully several times, uses 9 Merlin engines. The Merlin engine is in current production, and about 400 a year are being manufactured. The first Falcon Heavy launch is scheduled for this year. For an actual commercial customer.

So why is NASA trying to build a big booster again?

Re:Meanwhile, Space-X builds the Falcon Heavy

[barjam]

Saturn V program had payload to LEO of 120,000kg. Falcon Heavy 53,000kg.

Re:Meanwhile, Space-X builds the Falcon Heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the Falcon Heavy is a Low Earth Orbit cargo barge to the SLS's translunar (and beyond) missions.

Re:Meanwhile, Space-X builds the Falcon Heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA has a big booster. It rattles and bangs and shudders its way to orbit but they like it because it's full of pork. I am of course referring to the Shuttle SRB.

Re:Meanwhile, Space-X builds the Falcon Heavy

[cheesybagel]

Sure. But if you can launch three Falcon Heavies for under the price of a Saturn V then which rocket is better?

It is still over twice the payload of a Russian Proton. So it can launch whole station modules in a single launch. It can send astronauts around the Moon and back. With a dual launch it can put people in the Moon and get them back. It has the same payload as the Saturn C-3 which supposedly was capable of a lunar mission using EOR.

That "process crap" is vitally important

[sjbe]

Don't be brainwashed by all this "process" crap. These days you have to talk to guys in their 60's and 70's to get the full oral history, but they wistfully recall days when the emphasis was on getting things done and making them work, rather than mindlessly following "process".

All that "process crap" is exactly how any successful engineering project is done. The space program in the 60's and 70's was no exception. Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes. A process is nothing more than a set of procedures used to accomplish a task. If the task has to be communicated to someone else or cannot be overlooked or is just plain complicated, documentation becomes a vital aspect of the process. You can't build something as complicated as a space ship without a huge amount of extremely robust processes and accompanying documenation. Developing effective production processes isn't mindless busywork - it is among the most challenging and important things we do. The best manufacturing companies spend a tremendous amount of resources on process development because without them they would be unable to function.

If you want to ensure that a rocket blows up, by all means ignore developing processes and don't worry about documenting or communicating the procedures used. Just be a cowboy and "get it done". When you have no way to discover what went wrong, who was responsible, when you were supposed to do it or how to do it again you might begin to understand why process is important. My company makes wire harnesses and we've made products that have gone into space. For even the simplest cable with a crimped terminal on one end we typically have about 15+ pages (and often much more) of assembly instructions, QA instructions, machine setup instructions, QA logs, shipping and packaging instructions, manufacturing orders (how many to build and when to build them), bills of material, training documentation, defect logs, packing slips, and invoices. And every bit of that documentation is genuinely important. Without robust processes in place it would be complete chaos to try to make even the most basic products, never mind something as complicated as a F1 engine. All that "process crap" lets us build a high quality product (repeatedly if needed), diagnose and correct any problems that may arise, and make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do and when they are supposed to do it.

Re:That "process crap" is vitally important

[gbjbaanb]

Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes

I think this is key - it was developing the process that worked for them, not following a cookie-cutter process that had worked for someone else that they followed blindly and dogmatically. No-one says you should not have any process, or documentation, or similar essential stuff.. but it has to be there to contribute to the end, not be an end in itself.

someone once told me that to do agile you have to be tremendously disciplined, its not chaos (or if it is, you're going to fail) as you have to be in control of yourselves.

Re:That "process crap" is vitally important

[Capt.Albatross]

All that "process crap" is exactly how any successful engineering project is done. The space program in the 60's and 70's was no exception. Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes.

It wasn't all about developing processes. It also required a lot of seriously knowledgeable people doing some seriously clever things.

The problem with process adoption in IT and software development is the widespread tacit belief that you can get all the benefits just by adopting better procedures, without regard to the technical issues that make the problem non-trivial. This failure of understanding is often amplified by the expectation that you can cheat on the process and still get the benefits.

CMM level 1 is perhaps the ultimate expression of this self-delusion. Both IT and software development need effective processes, but just saying that's what you are doing doesn't get the job done.

But, can they build it for less?

[Anonymous Coward]

A decade ago, I would have been delighted for a modernized Saturn V, now I think, how can they possibly do cheaper than SpaceX?

SpaceX started a decade ago, with Elon Musk's money, and veteran TRW rocket engineer Tom Mueller. They then recruited an elite team of experienced rocket engineers. They designed the rocket from scratch for manufacturability, and had the benefit of four decades of rocket engine history, and the low cost fastrack rocket engine. SpaceX benefits from the hundreds of engineers at Tesla Motors, with modern, robot heavy, car manufacturing expertise.

At the end of the day, the manned space program is pork driven. Orrin Hatch will not let the liquid boosters replace solid, or the Falcon super heavy see the light of day.

Why computers? Because they help. A LOT.

[sjbe]

Sure they had computers, on the ship, on the ground and all, but not in the engineering department. Engineers where able to make technical drawings and hand that of to workers building the actual thing. Oh yea and they assisted and oversaw the work done, to correct any misunderstandings. It worked, why add computers.

Why add computers? Because it makes the lives of us engineers who do what you are describing (I am one) VASTLY easier. I've worked on a drafting table and I know how to use a slide rule. I've designed products and overseen their production. While it can be done without computers I don't really relish the thought of going back to the days without them. People who pine for the "good old days" when we didn't have computers to help with the work almost invariably never had to actually do real engineering without them. Trust me, it sucked.

Do you have any idea how much labor is involved in updating a set of work instructions and ensuring only the most recent version is distributed? Have you ever done a complicated product drawing on paper and then had to do it over again because of a revision? It's possible to do these things without computers but I can assure you from first hand experience that you don't really want to. It's much easier to edit a CAD model of a part and then print out the new revision. It's is FAR easier to use a versioning system to keep documentation up to date and distributed to the right places. We don't use computers just because we can. We do it because it makes us far more effective and faster at our jobs.

Re:Computers not in routine use in engineering in

[Reality Man]

Yes, books written in 2006 and not specifically about computer use in the 1960s are the best you can do? Weak sauce, man.

in war...

[Anonymous Coward]

when you really have to you can make miracles (and cut corners with a calculated risk), look at all the airplanes, tanks etc. that was build during the ~5 years WWII
today it would be hard to just design, let alone build and test a single airplane in that time frame

the spacerace was a kind of war, jsut on skills instead of kills

Re:SPICE [Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids...

[Lawrence_Bird]

They used freakin slide rules back then dude. What passed for computers in the early 60s was shit. Get over it. Go do some CAD/CAM on your TI calculator - it is probably an order of magnitude more powerful.

Re:Slide rules, not computers [Re:Lacked the bare.

[Bob the Super Hamste]

By the way, in 1963 banks mostly didn't use computers. You youngsters are too young to remember when a bank "passbook account" meant a physical object that the teller wrote in by hand.

I had one of those when I was little in the 80s. At that time the teller didn't write in it by hand but it had printed entries from the dot matrix printer the teller would put it into. I had forgotten about those accounts until you mentioned it.

Blueprints? anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The design was made, in the 1960's by blueprint, and each change would be made by another blueprint. And the copies sent to the fabrication/shop floor for use, and pitched if no good, but pitched from the shop floor. In one of my earlier jobs I was in tool and die for a major producer. We had only the latest iteration of a design on the floor, so as to not confuse the process for creating the tools to make the parts to be installed on the next greatest.... amazing how we had better designs then, then now.....heehhh

Re:What a joke, but this is NASA to a tee

[tkrotchko]

"Russia did it better on less than one hundredth of the budget,"

Russia never landed a human on the moon.

Re:Computers not in routine use in engineering in

[Anonymous Coward]

Go fuck off. You haven't shown a single reference to indicate the level of computer design done in the 60s. So all things considered, the books he mentioned are far better than anything you've suggested.

Re:Slide rules, not computers [Re:Lacked the bare.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because clerks and people still had paper bank books doesn't mean computers weren't used to crunch numbers... I had paper bank books in the 1980s, does that mean banks had no computers in the '80s

You seem to keep running what everyone says through some filter that adds hyperbole, and then freak out and respond to something more absolute than what was said. There is a huge difference between someone saying they mostly didn't use computers for day to day operations, and you interpreting that to mean they didn't have computers.

Re:Slide rules, not computers [Re:Lacked the bare.

[Algae_94]

If you ask a computer to solve an equation that's needed to help guide the design of a part, what is that but computer aided design? So sorry it was all on punch cards. Still a computer.

It is a huge stretch to call that computer aided design. You are talking about a big calculator.

Re:Why computers? Because they help. A LOT.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's much easier to edit a CAD model of a part and then print out the new revision. It's is FAR easier to use a versioning system to keep documentation up to date and distributed to the right places. We don't use computers just because we can. We do it because it makes us far more effective and faster at our jobs.

And how relevant is that to the 1960s? Either way you would end up with a team working for you, whether inputting things into the computer or updating and managing drawings... just which team would be bigger, slower, and more expensive back in the time period being referenced in this discussion?

Since you seem to have been around for a time before computers were used for such work, what year did you switch over from the manual process to computer based processes?

M-1 Preferred

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw the F-1. They should resurrect the M-1; that thing was AWESOME.

Aerojet's M-1 was the largest and most powerful liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket engine to be designed and component tested. The M-1 offered a baseline thrust of 6.67 million N (1.5 million lbf) and 8 million N (1.8 million lbf) as its immediate growth target. If built, the M-1 would be larger and more efficient than the famed F-1 that powered the first stage of the Saturn V rocket to the moon.

Re:Computers not in routine use in engineering in

[Geoffrey.landis]

Yes, books written in 2006 and not specifically about computer use in the 1960s are the best you can do? Weak sauce, man.

These are about the Saturn F-1 engine development, not about computers. There are other books, including some memoirs. The ones I linked have the advantage of being easily available on the web.

I wasn't trying to claim that computers didn't exist in 1960!

Re:And how is this different than the F-35 JSF pro

[PortHaven]

Oh true, but the F-35 was supposed to be the cheaper cousin to the F-22. Now the F-22 is cheaper than the F-35 per plane when total longevity is factored.

What's wrong with that...

We might as well, restart the F-22 program. Cancel 90% of the F-35, and simply create the VTOL Marine/Carrier version of the F-35 for the Marines. And cancel all others.

Re:And how is this different than the F-35 JSF pro

[Rich0]

The F-35 is also needed for the Navy. I agree you could ditch 1/3 versions from a US perspective, but would that really save much money? The Air Force variant of the plane is likely the cheapest anyway (though why they can't just use the carrier version I do not know).

I am pretty impressed that they managed to drive the cost of the "cheap" plane above that of the "expensive" one...