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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.
Your boyhood joy was an illusion. We never went to the moon for the sake of knowledge, it was to prove our industrial might to the world- to prove that capitalism was better then the soviet communism. Knowledge was a product of that and we capitalized on it quite well too. This is the reason China, India and other countries are shooting for the stars too.
The space race was not about gaining knowledge which is why it stopped for a period of time.
Competing with the USSR was definitely part of our reason for going to space, but competing on the power of knowledge is not a problem (although I'd prefer cooperation). The technocracy of Vannevar Bush and von Braun lasted well into the early '70s, before government was taken over by neo-conservative luddites - and you may recall that the Challenger disaster which put the kibosh on R&D was very much the result of a changed ethic in NASA.
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.
"Competing with the USSR was definitely part of our reason for going to space,"
Our Nazis are better than your Nazis.
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
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?