The missiles were actually quite similar; the conditions were different.
In 1991, we were able to detect SCUD launches almost immediately, which allowed air raid warnings to be issued several minutes before the missile arrived. That's enough to make a big difference; it allows people to get off the street, down into basements, etc. Even 30 sec warning is enough to dive under a desk or whatever-- duck and cover! -- which can give you much better protection from shrapnel. London didn't get advance warning.
Plus, SCUD launches were all at night (to avoid getting bombed by the USAF), when few people were out and about. V2s often came down during the middle of the day.
Much better trauma care in 1991 too.
Armstrong had been a navy pilot during the Korean War, but he was out of the military when he landed on the moon. He had been an X-15 pilot for NASA at Edwards AFB.
Schdmit was the only one who was never military.
The rest still had some sort of commission at the time they landed. More Navy than AF, I think.
Don Rumsfeld was in Congress at the time, and he too was opposed to the whole Moon program. He considered the lunar program and scientific missions in general as a waste of money and a diversion of engineering talent.
He wanted to see the resources instead put into space military systems, such as the Air Force's proposed manned station (MOL), spy satellites, and space-based anti-satellite and anti-missile weapon systems.
On a side note, Mondale's former communications director was the professor for a seminar I was in a couple of years ago. I asked her about the HBO scene, and she said it greatly exaggerated his hostility to the program; he mostly was after the mismanagement that led to the Fire, not opposed to Apollo in general. Mondale was there one day, but not wanting to demonstrate just how geeky I am, I asked him about something else. Nice guy, but he seemed awfully old even in 1998.
NASA administrators were worried sick of having a disaster strike that would embarrass the agency, and thus endanger its future programs. They came close to that with Apollo 13, and did not want to see it happen again. They flatly ruled out some of the more ambitious possibilities for later Apollo -- the far side, or crater Tycho -- and were not eager to keep flying lunar missions at all.
If Congress had been urging them to keep flying, and providing the funding to do so, then sure, maybe we would have seen 18, 19, and 20. But Congress didn't force NASA specifically to cut those missions; it was mostly NASA's choice (with the concurrence of the White House) to take the cuts there.
NASA could have flown 18 - 20 even with the budgets they were given if it had been a priority for the Agency. Almost all the hardware was already built; those Saturn Vs you see at Kennedy or Houston aren't mock ups, they are real flight hardware that were lacking only fuel. But, NASA chose to cancel the later Apollo missions and use the money for Space Shuttle development instead. Safer to keep people busy on the ground than actually risk someone dying up in space!
JFK just said go there and back, after all, not go there and keep going.
I'll take a moment to mourn the passing of OS/2. It was my primary OS from 1992 to 1998, and saved me from ever having Windows 3.1 installed on my machine.
Don't forget that OS/2 came out in 1992! The competition was Windows 3.1. And it still beat Win95 and NT 3.5 (which had the Win3.1 GUI). Wasn't until NT 4.0 (1997?) that something clearly superior for the desktop came out.
- OS/2 offered a 32-bit, multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS, vs the unreliable, rudimentary nature of Win 3.1. With 8MB of RAM, I often ran multiple applications with 200MB of virtual memory in use -- slow, but reliable. Win 3.1 could only use 4x physical RAM iirc.
- OS/2 included a real file system (HPFS). True, not as good as NTFS but more robust and capable than FAT32 -- let alone FAT, which is what windows had until Win95 OSR2 (1997?).
- OS/2 had a true object-oriented and highly customizable desktop in 1992. Win 3.1 was a glorfied program launcher, not a GUI. MS didn't get something comparable until the Win98/2000 interface.
- OS/2 included a full-fledged scripting language, REXX. MS didn't include VBS until the late 1990s. It was especially nice for those of us with IBM mainframe experience -- same language.:)
-- OS/2 was better at games. Many games (like MS FlightSim, or Doom) that could not run at all in Windows 3.1 (you had to boot up DOS and run standalone) would happily run as just another multi-tasking window in OS/2.
-- Much better support. WHen OS/2 crashed it'd give you a whole screen full of info (and could dump to disk), and IBM had a much stronger problem tracking process than MS at the time. They also released frequent patches with clear info on what they fixed. They were also ahead of MS at online distribution (ftp, or web) of patches, drivers, etc.
OS/2 had its faults (horrible installation, for example) but compared to running Windows 3.1, or even Windows 95, it was light-years ahead.
The conventional wisdom is that the actual reversal takes centuries, but some new evidence has geologists wondering if it can happen much more quickly, like weeks.
We see old magnetic fields frozen in cooled lava, sometimes pointing north, sometimes south.
In the last few years, while studying a ~10 million year old basalt flow in the Steens Mountain, Oregon, researchers think they have found a flow that solidified while a reversal was taking place. The bottom portion of the flow points one way, then the orientation gradually changes until the top (middle? -- last to cool) points the other way.
We have a pretty good handle on how fast lava cools, and that whole event should only have lasted several weeks. Hard to believe but no one has come up with a great alternative explanation yet.
So just may happen VERY quickly when it hits the tipping point. Yet another reason to ask for a GPS for Christmas!
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The missiles were actually quite similar; the conditions were different. In 1991, we were able to detect SCUD launches almost immediately, which allowed air raid warnings to be issued several minutes before the missile arrived. That's enough to make a big difference; it allows people to get off the street, down into basements, etc. Even 30 sec warning is enough to dive under a desk or whatever-- duck and cover! -- which can give you much better protection from shrapnel. London didn't get advance warning. Plus, SCUD launches were all at night (to avoid getting bombed by the USAF), when few people were out and about. V2s often came down during the middle of the day. Much better trauma care in 1991 too.
Armstrong had been a navy pilot during the Korean War, but he was out of the military when he landed on the moon. He had been an X-15 pilot for NASA at Edwards AFB.
Schdmit was the only one who was never military.
The rest still had some sort of commission at the time they landed. More Navy than AF, I think.
Don Rumsfeld was in Congress at the time, and he too was opposed to the whole Moon program. He considered the lunar program and scientific missions in general as a waste of money and a diversion of engineering talent.
He wanted to see the resources instead put into space military systems, such as the Air Force's proposed manned station (MOL), spy satellites, and space-based anti-satellite and anti-missile weapon systems.
On a side note, Mondale's former communications director was the professor for a seminar I was in a couple of years ago. I asked her about the HBO scene, and she said it greatly exaggerated his hostility to the program; he mostly was after the mismanagement that led to the Fire, not opposed to Apollo in general. Mondale was there one day, but not wanting to demonstrate just how geeky I am, I asked him about something else. Nice guy, but he seemed awfully old even in 1998.
No, it was NOT only Congress.
NASA administrators were worried sick of having a disaster strike that would embarrass the agency, and thus endanger its future programs. They came close to that with Apollo 13, and did not want to see it happen again. They flatly ruled out some of the more ambitious possibilities for later Apollo -- the far side, or crater Tycho -- and were not eager to keep flying lunar missions at all.
If Congress had been urging them to keep flying, and providing the funding to do so, then sure, maybe we would have seen 18, 19, and 20. But Congress didn't force NASA specifically to cut those missions; it was mostly NASA's choice (with the concurrence of the White House) to take the cuts there.
NASA could have flown 18 - 20 even with the budgets they were given if it had been a priority for the Agency. Almost all the hardware was already built; those Saturn Vs you see at Kennedy or Houston aren't mock ups, they are real flight hardware that were lacking only fuel. But, NASA chose to cancel the later Apollo missions and use the money for Space Shuttle development instead. Safer to keep people busy on the ground than actually risk someone dying up in space!
JFK just said go there and back, after all, not go there and keep going.
I'll take a moment to mourn the passing of OS/2. It was my primary OS from 1992 to 1998, and saved me from ever having Windows 3.1 installed on my machine.
:)
Don't forget that OS/2 came out in 1992! The competition was Windows 3.1. And it still beat Win95 and NT 3.5 (which had the Win3.1 GUI). Wasn't until NT 4.0 (1997?) that something clearly superior for the desktop came out.
- OS/2 offered a 32-bit, multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS, vs the unreliable, rudimentary nature of Win 3.1. With 8MB of RAM, I often ran multiple applications with 200MB of virtual memory in use -- slow, but reliable. Win 3.1 could only use 4x physical RAM iirc.
- OS/2 included a real file system (HPFS). True, not as good as NTFS but more robust and capable than FAT32 -- let alone FAT, which is what windows had until Win95 OSR2 (1997?).
- OS/2 had a true object-oriented and highly customizable desktop in 1992. Win 3.1 was a glorfied program launcher, not a GUI.
MS didn't get something comparable until the Win98/2000 interface.
- OS/2 included a full-fledged scripting language, REXX. MS didn't include VBS until the late 1990s. It was especially nice for those of us with IBM mainframe experience -- same language.
-- OS/2 was better at games. Many games (like MS FlightSim, or Doom) that could not run at all in Windows 3.1 (you had to boot up DOS and run standalone) would happily run as just another multi-tasking window in OS/2.
-- Much better support. WHen OS/2 crashed it'd give you a whole screen full of info (and could dump to disk), and IBM had a much stronger problem tracking process than MS at the time. They also released frequent patches with clear info on what they fixed. They were also ahead of MS at online distribution (ftp, or web) of patches, drivers, etc.
OS/2 had its faults (horrible installation, for example) but compared to running Windows 3.1, or even Windows 95, it was light-years ahead.
The conventional wisdom is that the actual reversal takes centuries, but some new evidence has geologists wondering if it can happen much more quickly, like weeks. We see old magnetic fields frozen in cooled lava, sometimes pointing north, sometimes south. In the last few years, while studying a ~10 million year old basalt flow in the Steens Mountain, Oregon, researchers think they have found a flow that solidified while a reversal was taking place. The bottom portion of the flow points one way, then the orientation gradually changes until the top (middle? -- last to cool) points the other way. We have a pretty good handle on how fast lava cools, and that whole event should only have lasted several weeks. Hard to believe but no one has come up with a great alternative explanation yet. So just may happen VERY quickly when it hits the tipping point. Yet another reason to ask for a GPS for Christmas!