The US lunar module was no less an unknown quantity, though it was known to be at least somewhat reliable because it was tested several times before the actual landing - several times unmanned, then by Apollo 9 (earth orbit) and Apollo 10 (lunar approach but no landing.)
Yes indeed, Redstone was a US Army ballistic missile. It was designed by Wernher von Braun, who also designed the A-4 (V-2) ballstic missile you also speak of. Redstone not only launched two suborbital manned Mercury flights (and accompanying unmanned test flights) but its Jupiter-C variant launched Explorer 1, the first US satellite.
A-4 rockets flew to the edge of space while flying from Germany and France to London, and in later years were modified by von Braun and the US Army for increased performance; they then flew cameras and scientific instruments instead of the original one-ton Amatol warheads.
A winged A-4b variant was also tested in preparation for building a manned A-9 variant, which would have been boosted by an A-10 first stage. Its purpose was to be able to send a warhead to New York City, but development of the A series of rockets stopped before it was ever constructed.
The Soviet lunar program worked fairly well, though of course there were some failures. Their Mars program is another matter; while I can't rattle off how many orbiters or flybys failed from memory, I can tell you that all Soviet Mars landers failed, including one that did successfully transmit from the surface: it had the bad luck to land in a dust storm and stop transmitting 30 seconds later.
The reliable Soyuz rocket in use today was designed by Sergei Korolev, who was a brilliant rocket engineer who, like Wernher von Braun, dreamed of building rockets that could send people into space. He died in the mid-1960s, however, so his second-in-command designed the giant N-1 -- and the N-1's first stage had many, many small rockets powering it rather than a smaller number of large ones, as in the Saturn V. It's believed (according to a mid-90s NOVA program on the Soviet manned lunar effort, and other sources) that the sheer complexity of the N-1 was largely to blame for the failures.
How the cosmonauts really felt hasn't been addressed much if at all in any of the books or web sites I've read, nor have any documentaries.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no; while most of the world heard the news of Apollo 11's landing live, most of the Soviet Union likely did not. Airing the landing would have been an admission by the Soviet government that it had failed to reach the Moon before the United States.
The comments about the safety of the crews was pure propaganda and I didn't read it as the opinion of the poster. After Apollo 11 successfully landed, the Soviet lunar program was classified for many years and not publicly acknowledged until the laet 1990s -- little is known among the general public to this day of the giant N-1 booster (Saturn 5-class), the one-man lunar lander, the design elements in the Soyuz spacecraft that are leftovers from the days when Soyuz would have orbited the Moon, the N-1 launch failures, and many, many more elements of the program.
Why?
Because the Soviet leadership did not want to admit that it had failed to beat Project Apollo to a manned landing. So all those things were hidden, and the Soviets claimed that all along, they had focused on staying safely in Earth orbit, building space stations and sending automated probes to the Moon to drive around and send soil samples back (some probes in the Luna series were sample-return spacecraft) rather than letting humans do those things. Never mind that a human can do so much more on-site than he can in a control room a light-second away...
So please, don't tell the guy to shut up -- do a little reading first. The attitude did indeed exist -- but from the Soviet leadership, not someone commenting on an Internet message board decades after the fact.
Actually, that's depressing. We have several Hubble-type satellites up there that our government just flings up there whenever the hell it wants and it won't save the one that people actually care about!? Argh. As if I weren't furious enough...
I am a space buff and have been most of my life. I am quite angry at what I see as a cop-out and an unwillingness to accept the risks that have always been there as part of space flight. Why are we suddenly afraid to fly the kinds of missions the shuttle was designed to fly, and has performed quite well for over 20 years? Along the reasoning we're getting from these idiots, we might as well not have bothered, and we were insane to have been doing what we were doing for all that time. These people are now saying that if we didn't have the ISS, we would all be sitting here twiddling our thumbs and driving robots around and never going up for ourselves to see what's up there, and that's going to be important. The ISS isn't even in a good orbit for most of this stuff -- it's in the orbit it's in to placate the Russians. (That orbit is apparently a good one to launch into from Baikonur, but it's terrible for Florida.)
Someone needs to fire this idiot and hire somebody who isn't such a pansy-ass like O'Keefe.
I know the parent post is a joke and/or troll, but I wanted to reply anyway.
IF a planned re-entry is done, the scope will be guided into the middle of an ocean, preferably the middle of the largest open space available, just as Mir was. (Mir de-orbited sooner than planned, but even so, it hit the water.) The 1979 Skylab crash over Australia was entirely unplanned since it was supposed to have been reboosted by the Shuttle, but delays in the Shuttle program combined with expansion of the upper atmosphere caused it to re-enter earlier than expected instead of being rescued.
Another reason is that the sensors aren't built to look at something as bright as Earth, so they'd be blinded permanently.
The KH-12 satellite is reportedly a modified Hubble (that might even be the other way around) that IS designed to look at Earth, though, so it's been done already. Here's a picture - tiny, but the resemblance is there. Notice that the dish antenna is in a different spot, if this picture is accurate.
The two on the 'far side' haven't really been used in years for much, though tests were done recently to make sure the crawler could still get to them once the crawlerway to one of them was rebuilt.
"Memorials make sense only if they remind us of things that exist today."
Okay... but with that logic, since smallpox has been eradicated, why keep publishing research about it?
Because if we forget how to deal with it, and smallpox or any other disease caused by a similar poxvirus (there are many), we might not be able to develop a cure in time.
And that's just one example of a way in which the past can shape the future.
So there's plenty of reasons to remember the past. Our future depends on it.
Soyuz 1. The main and reserve parachutes became entangled with each other and/or were involved in a similar failure. Soyuz 1 hit the ground travelling several hundred kph. Vladimiar Komarov, the capsule's sole occupant, died instantly.
Yep, correct on the Saturn 1B assembly. The parent post was about sacrifices in the Apollo program in general.
As for the VAB... well, maybe it wasn't. Originally the Vandenberg pad for shuttle flights was designed for the stack to be erected on the pad, just like most other rockets are. However, it was found that due to tight tolerances, an enclosed assembly building was actually required, to protect from the wind and so forth. Therefore, such a building was built, increasing the cost of the polar orbit program. After the 51-L disaster in '86, the entire thing was scrapped, and it went through a lot of failures (some say SLC-6 is cursed), finally launching a few small Athena rockets and now soon to launch Delta IVs.
So depending on how tight the tolerances were on the Saturn 5, it might actually be a necessity.
Ed White, Roger Chafee and Virgil (Gus) Grissom died in a fire during a pre-launch test of Apollo 1 on January 27, 1967. Their capsule was filled with pure oxygen and its hatch was a two-part affair which was difficult to open quickly. It is believed that a wiring fault located under one of the seats caused a spark, which in the pure-oxygen environment of the spacecraft became an inferno within seconds; the crew had no chance of escape.
An investigation found shoddy workmanship by the CM contractor (North American) and a number of design flaws; this led to a redesign of the spacecraft (including a switch to a more rounded-rectangular one-piece hatch) within about 1.5 years. The next manned flight was Apollo 7 (there were unmanned test flights in the interim, including the Apollo 4 Saturn V test launch which appears in the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth").
The Saturn V Center at the Cape is beautiful (the rocket there is the best-preserved of the three that survive). It was space-geek nirvana for me.
It has been disassembled for many years. This effort is to save it and possibly reassemble it for future exhibit, rather than melting it down or otherwise destroying it.
I have not read this linked article, but I am a space buff and have read about this on several other in-depth space news sites, so I'm familiar with this tower and just how long it has been lying there.
Sometimes we need to remember what once was to inspire us to do it again. I find the mental image of this tower standing, alone, with no rocket beside it, to be a sad one... but also a silent voice asking me to bring it something to launch. I find it inspirational and sad at the same time, that we once could do so much and turned away from it when there was so much potential before us. We went for political reasons... but there are so many reasons to have kept going.
There is little left of the Apollo hardware in its original form. While there are three Saturn Vs still in existence, they are lying on their sides in museums, leaving little real impression of how big the Saturn 5 truly was compared with today's spacecraft. (They are in Houston, Huntsville, and Titusville.) Not until the fiberglass replica was erected in Huntsville (where one of the original rockets still lies to this day) did I really comprehend its size, even though I am a space buff and intricately familiar with many of the details of this vehicle, including the size specifications for it (and today's Space Shuttle.)
The Vehicle Assembly Building, transport crawler, and launch pads still exist but today service the Space Shuttle (and the original red launch towers have given way to the much shorter gray Shuttle towers), leaving only the VAB's sheer size to give a hint of what once was.
I believe this is important to keep. We once took pride in the fact that we could send people to touch the Moon if we chose to. We need to remind ourselves of that, and of the fact that we one day will do it again.
The miniaturization of modern computers was originally done so that the Lunar Module could be fitted with a computer to allow it to reach the lunar surface. This computer had to process data from the landing radar as well as allow the astronauts to control the spacecraft.
Apollo 11 very nearly did not succeed in landing when the rendezvous radar (meant to be used only during rendezvous with the orbiting CSM) was accidentally left on, triggering a computer overload; these are the famous 1201 and 1202 alarm codes that you can hear called out in audio recordings of the final descent.
Yeah -- in Europe -- that's the problem. All sorts of goodies come on European models that never make it over here. Those mirrors are an example; others, though this is VW-specific since that's what I'm most familiar with, are the in-dash nav system (here you have to get an Audi or the Touareg/Phaeton to get that), xenon headlights, a four-door Golf GTI, I think they may also have a parking-assist radar in Europe on some models as well, integrated cell phones, etc. etc. Fortunately, many of those things can be installed by yourself if you know what you're doing, or by a good shop or tuner outfit that works on that make of car a lot.
I also have European lighting code headlights ("E-codes") and they light up a lot more of the road than the original US spec headlamps did. Ironically, they're made by Valeo -- the same company that makes the device being discussed in the main article. (They also come with electric levelers adjustable using a thumbwheel located on the dashboard.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty informative! Can you point me to a good book or other source (web etc) to read more?
Hmm, perhaps it wasn't talked about as much in the West. I know I heard relatively little until about 1995.
I'd love to see that museum. I've seen some photos of the stuff there. Full-scale engineering replicas, I think? I'd be in space-nirvana in there.
The US lunar module was no less an unknown quantity, though it was known to be at least somewhat reliable because it was tested several times before the actual landing - several times unmanned, then by Apollo 9 (earth orbit) and Apollo 10 (lunar approach but no landing.)
I'm 99 44/100% sure you're kidding...
but just in case...!
Yes indeed, Redstone was a US Army ballistic missile. It was designed by Wernher von Braun, who also designed the A-4 (V-2) ballstic missile you also speak of. Redstone not only launched two suborbital manned Mercury flights (and accompanying unmanned test flights) but its Jupiter-C variant launched Explorer 1, the first US satellite.
A-4 rockets flew to the edge of space while flying from Germany and France to London, and in later years were modified by von Braun and the US Army for increased performance; they then flew cameras and scientific instruments instead of the original one-ton Amatol warheads.
A winged A-4b variant was also tested in preparation for building a manned A-9 variant, which would have been boosted by an A-10 first stage. Its purpose was to be able to send a warhead to New York City, but development of the A series of rockets stopped before it was ever constructed.
The Soviet lunar program worked fairly well, though of course there were some failures. Their Mars program is another matter; while I can't rattle off how many orbiters or flybys failed from memory, I can tell you that all Soviet Mars landers failed, including one that did successfully transmit from the surface: it had the bad luck to land in a dust storm and stop transmitting 30 seconds later.
The reliable Soyuz rocket in use today was designed by Sergei Korolev, who was a brilliant rocket engineer who, like Wernher von Braun, dreamed of building rockets that could send people into space. He died in the mid-1960s, however, so his second-in-command designed the giant N-1 -- and the N-1's first stage had many, many small rockets powering it rather than a smaller number of large ones, as in the Saturn V. It's believed (according to a mid-90s NOVA program on the Soviet manned lunar effort, and other sources) that the sheer complexity of the N-1 was largely to blame for the failures.
How the cosmonauts really felt hasn't been addressed much if at all in any of the books or web sites I've read, nor have any documentaries.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no; while most of the world heard the news of Apollo 11's landing live, most of the Soviet Union likely did not. Airing the landing would have been an admission by the Soviet government that it had failed to reach the Moon before the United States.
The comments about the safety of the crews was pure propaganda and I didn't read it as the opinion of the poster. After Apollo 11 successfully landed, the Soviet lunar program was classified for many years and not publicly acknowledged until the laet 1990s -- little is known among the general public to this day of the giant N-1 booster (Saturn 5-class), the one-man lunar lander, the design elements in the Soyuz spacecraft that are leftovers from the days when Soyuz would have orbited the Moon, the N-1 launch failures, and many, many more elements of the program.
Why?
Because the Soviet leadership did not want to admit that it had failed to beat Project Apollo to a manned landing. So all those things were hidden, and the Soviets claimed that all along, they had focused on staying safely in Earth orbit, building space stations and sending automated probes to the Moon to drive around and send soil samples back (some probes in the Luna series were sample-return spacecraft) rather than letting humans do those things. Never mind that a human can do so much more on-site than he can in a control room a light-second away...
So please, don't tell the guy to shut up -- do a little reading first. The attitude did indeed exist -- but from the Soviet leadership, not someone commenting on an Internet message board decades after the fact.
No need to search for me! Here I am! :)
(yes, I'm a space buff, so yes, it's THAT Buran I had in mind)
Google for 'kh-12' and 'hubble' together, or 'kh-11' and 'hubble'.
1 2. htm
j sd011017_1_n.shtml
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question529.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/kh11.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/kh-
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/jsd/
Actually, that's depressing. We have several Hubble-type satellites up there that our government just flings up there whenever the hell it wants and it won't save the one that people actually care about!? Argh. As if I weren't furious enough...
I am a space buff and have been most of my life. I am quite angry at what I see as a cop-out and an unwillingness to accept the risks that have always been there as part of space flight. Why are we suddenly afraid to fly the kinds of missions the shuttle was designed to fly, and has performed quite well for over 20 years? Along the reasoning we're getting from these idiots, we might as well not have bothered, and we were insane to have been doing what we were doing for all that time. These people are now saying that if we didn't have the ISS, we would all be sitting here twiddling our thumbs and driving robots around and never going up for ourselves to see what's up there, and that's going to be important. The ISS isn't even in a good orbit for most of this stuff -- it's in the orbit it's in to placate the Russians. (That orbit is apparently a good one to launch into from Baikonur, but it's terrible for Florida.)
Someone needs to fire this idiot and hire somebody who isn't such a pansy-ass like O'Keefe.
I know the parent post is a joke and/or troll, but I wanted to reply anyway.
IF a planned re-entry is done, the scope will be guided into the middle of an ocean, preferably the middle of the largest open space available, just as Mir was. (Mir de-orbited sooner than planned, but even so, it hit the water.) The 1979 Skylab crash over Australia was entirely unplanned since it was supposed to have been reboosted by the Shuttle, but delays in the Shuttle program combined with expansion of the upper atmosphere caused it to re-enter earlier than expected instead of being rescued.
Another reason is that the sensors aren't built to look at something as bright as Earth, so they'd be blinded permanently.
The KH-12 satellite is reportedly a modified Hubble (that might even be the other way around) that IS designed to look at Earth, though, so it's been done already. Here's a picture - tiny, but the resemblance is there. Notice that the dish antenna is in a different spot, if this picture is accurate.
The two on the 'far side' haven't really been used in years for much, though tests were done recently to make sure the crawler could still get to them once the crawlerway to one of them was rebuilt.
"Memorials make sense only if they remind us of things that exist today."
... but with that logic, since smallpox has been eradicated, why keep publishing research about it?
Okay
Because if we forget how to deal with it, and smallpox or any other disease caused by a similar poxvirus (there are many), we might not be able to develop a cure in time.
And that's just one example of a way in which the past can shape the future.
So there's plenty of reasons to remember the past. Our future depends on it.
Soyuz 1. The main and reserve parachutes became entangled with each other and/or were involved in a similar failure. Soyuz 1 hit the ground travelling several hundred kph. Vladimiar Komarov, the capsule's sole occupant, died instantly.
The photos of the crash site are quite horrific.
Yep, correct on the Saturn 1B assembly. The parent post was about sacrifices in the Apollo program in general.
As for the VAB... well, maybe it wasn't. Originally the Vandenberg pad for shuttle flights was designed for the stack to be erected on the pad, just like most other rockets are. However, it was found that due to tight tolerances, an enclosed assembly building was actually required, to protect from the wind and so forth. Therefore, such a building was built, increasing the cost of the polar orbit program. After the 51-L disaster in '86, the entire thing was scrapped, and it went through a lot of failures (some say SLC-6 is cursed), finally launching a few small Athena rockets and now soon to launch Delta IVs.
So depending on how tight the tolerances were on the Saturn 5, it might actually be a necessity.
The Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville wanted to build a launch tower to go with their replica. Why not use the real tower there?
Ed White, Roger Chafee and Virgil (Gus) Grissom died in a fire during a pre-launch test of Apollo 1 on January 27, 1967. Their capsule was filled with pure oxygen and its hatch was a two-part affair which was difficult to open quickly. It is believed that a wiring fault located under one of the seats caused a spark, which in the pure-oxygen environment of the spacecraft became an inferno within seconds; the crew had no chance of escape.
An investigation found shoddy workmanship by the CM contractor (North American) and a number of design flaws; this led to a redesign of the spacecraft (including a switch to a more rounded-rectangular one-piece hatch) within about 1.5 years. The next manned flight was Apollo 7 (there were unmanned test flights in the interim, including the Apollo 4 Saturn V test launch which appears in the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth").
The Saturn V Center at the Cape is beautiful (the rocket there is the best-preserved of the three that survive). It was space-geek nirvana for me.
It has been disassembled for many years. This effort is to save it and possibly reassemble it for future exhibit, rather than melting it down or otherwise destroying it.
I have not read this linked article, but I am a space buff and have read about this on several other in-depth space news sites, so I'm familiar with this tower and just how long it has been lying there.
Sometimes we need to remember what once was to inspire us to do it again. I find the mental image of this tower standing, alone, with no rocket beside it, to be a sad one ... but also a silent voice asking me to bring it something to launch. I find it inspirational and sad at the same time, that we once could do so much and turned away from it when there was so much potential before us. We went for political reasons ... but there are so many reasons to have kept going.
There is little left of the Apollo hardware in its original form. While there are three Saturn Vs still in existence, they are lying on their sides in museums, leaving little real impression of how big the Saturn 5 truly was compared with today's spacecraft. (They are in Houston, Huntsville, and Titusville.) Not until the fiberglass replica was erected in Huntsville (where one of the original rockets still lies to this day) did I really comprehend its size, even though I am a space buff and intricately familiar with many of the details of this vehicle, including the size specifications for it (and today's Space Shuttle.)
The Vehicle Assembly Building, transport crawler, and launch pads still exist but today service the Space Shuttle (and the original red launch towers have given way to the much shorter gray Shuttle towers), leaving only the VAB's sheer size to give a hint of what once was.
I believe this is important to keep. We once took pride in the fact that we could send people to touch the Moon if we chose to. We need to remind ourselves of that, and of the fact that we one day will do it again.
The miniaturization of modern computers was originally done so that the Lunar Module could be fitted with a computer to allow it to reach the lunar surface. This computer had to process data from the landing radar as well as allow the astronauts to control the spacecraft.
Apollo 11 very nearly did not succeed in landing when the rendezvous radar (meant to be used only during rendezvous with the orbiting CSM) was accidentally left on, triggering a computer overload; these are the famous 1201 and 1202 alarm codes that you can hear called out in audio recordings of the final descent.
Yeah -- in Europe -- that's the problem. All sorts of goodies come on European models that never make it over here. Those mirrors are an example; others, though this is VW-specific since that's what I'm most familiar with, are the in-dash nav system (here you have to get an Audi or the Touareg/Phaeton to get that), xenon headlights, a four-door Golf GTI, I think they may also have a parking-assist radar in Europe on some models as well, integrated cell phones, etc. etc. Fortunately, many of those things can be installed by yourself if you know what you're doing, or by a good shop or tuner outfit that works on that make of car a lot.
I also have European lighting code headlights ("E-codes") and they light up a lot more of the road than the original US spec headlamps did. Ironically, they're made by Valeo -- the same company that makes the device being discussed in the main article. (They also come with electric levelers adjustable using a thumbwheel located on the dashboard.)