Slashdot Mirror
RIP, NASA Moon Landing Engineer John C. Houbolt
The Houston Chronicle reports the death of John C. Houbolt, whose ideas helped guide the U.S. moon-landing programs. Houbolt died on Tuesday at the age of 95, in a nursing home in Maine. Says the Chronicle's obituary: "His efforts in the early 1960s are largely credited with convincing NASA to focus on the launch of a module carrying a crew from lunar orbit, rather than a rocket from earth or a space craft while orbiting the planet. Houbolt argued that a lunar orbit rendezvous, or lor, would not only be less mechanically and financially onerous than building a huge rocket to take man to the moon or launching a craft while orbiting the earth, but lor was the only option to meet President John F. Kennedy's challenge before the end of the decade."
I was a teenager when they reached the moon, but it makes me feel so old to think back to those days. I'm beginning to feel like we're getting dumber all the time, and I'm pressed to imagine how they conceived of such an approach.
Now all of this high-tech stuff has led to Facebook? Give me a break. Please. If we don't give Facebook to the Chinese, they'll be building the first lunar colony, the way things are going nowadays...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I mean, what fun is there in flying a spacecraft without dramatic approach and docking maneuvers? ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
Yuri Kondratyuk to Tom Dolan to John Houbolt. These guys were pioneers. We stand on the shoulders of giants. RIP Mr. Houbolt. You sir are one steely-eyed missle man.
- Jack
...not because they are profitable.
SpaceX has ruined my boyhood joy of a mankind which reaches for the stars for the sake of knowledge, not to worship at the altar of the Invisible Hand. I salute gentlemen like Houbolt, and remember that because we did it once, maybe one day we'll do it again. If not, at least China will.
A nice dramatization of this is in the 1998 HBO special "From The Earth to The Moon 5: Spider". You can get it on Netflix.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
To the credit of NASA, the SLS seems to be on schedule and budget. Congress doesn't want to pay for much in the way of payloads though. I would argue that the james webb space telescope is a bigger engineering challenge than the saturn v.
If I am not mistaken, one of the reasons the Soviet Union gave up the moon race is that the rendezvous-at-the-moon approach was considered too complicated for their electronics of the day, so they tried for the "big rocket" approach instead.
However, the shear size of the thing was too much to manage, creating a giant explosion in tests that killed key researchers.
Table-ized A.I.
That when someone dies who was key to one of the greatest achievements of man to date, all we can muster is a bunch of snide comments and jokes. Oh, the Facebook generation...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The "giant" Soviet N-1 moon rocket was about the size of a Saturn V moon rocket, and it used the same basic idea as Apollo (it had a lunar lander for one man instead of two). Their real problems were [1] political and [2] lack of a big engine. Unlike the Saturn V which used 5 huge F-1 engines in its first stage, the Soviet rocket used 30 smaller engines in its first stage. The large engine count was a nightmare to control with the primitive computers of the day (would be fairly straight-forward today) and it was not really a problem of the design of those NK-33 engines (which were mass-produced for that program and surplus units were sold to the American firm Orbital Sciences post-coldwar. Orbital now uses them in its Antares rocket to send supplies to the ISS). The control problems on the N-1 lead to every vehicle launched failing to reach Earth orbit. Had the N-1 gotten over the problems reaching Earth orbit, it's quite possible the Soviet Union could have put a man on the moon and it would have looked similar to the way the US did it.
Your answer seems to imply that one could resurrect the N-1 today, add computer controls to it, and have a decent heavy lift rocket. But I wonder (I'm not pretending to be a steely-eyed rocket scientist, i.e. I'm not trolling): With 30 engines, there must be a huge number of moving parts (turbines, valves, gimbals on at least some of the engines, sensors,...). Wouldn't it be better to have a smaller number of engines (like five), and therefore a smaller number of moving parts?