[AR] Re: Apollo (was Re: SSTO)
- From: "Hugh Blair-Smith" <hugh.bs@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2018 22:18:45 -0500
The other factor that came close to putting the Russians first, at least in
manned circumlunar flight, was the energetic and brilliant leadership of
Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, a sort of combination Wernher von Braun and
Max Faget. In *Two Sides of the Moon,* written in partnership with David
Scott, Alexei Leonov describes the effect of Korolev's early death in 1966,
evidently due to his having been arrested (on false accusations) in 1938,
then tortured and broken in the grimmest corner of Stalin's Siberian gulag.
Had he lived, Leonov suggests, he might have solved the design problems of
the N-1. Korolev's successor, Vasily Mishin, was an indecisive alcoholic,
vindictive, divisive, risk-averse--in no way competent to lead the effort.
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Henry Spencer
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2018 7:44 PM
To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [AR] Apollo (was Re: SSTO)
On Wed, 14 Feb 2018, Uwe Klein wrote:
[Apollo had] Two objectives.
A: get a grip on the uniformed mad men that think nuclear war is winnable.
B: sidetrack mil expenditure with "Science" expenditure.
Nope, sorry, neither. Apollo simply had nothing to do with A (and the
"uniformed mad men", incidentally, included the entire leadership of the
Soviet Union -- the idea that nuclear war would be the end of everything,
and therefore unwinnable, was almost completely a Western belief). And
Apollo was never large enough to divert major amounts of funding from the
military, which in any case generally had higher priority. (The end of
Apollo happened partly because of budget pressure from the Vietnam War.)
The objectives of Apollo were:
1: Impress the world's uncommitted nations, and show that the US really was
still the greatest power on Earth -- that recent Soviet space firsts were a
temporary historical accident rather than a sign of a fundamental shift in
technological superiority.
2. Impress the US's voters that Eisenhower's Republicans had screwed up,
letting the US fall behind on missiles/space issues, and that Kennedy's
Democrats had fixed it.
C: select a "sporty competition" project for A and B --> D
There was nothing "sporty" about it; this was a propaganda battle in the
Cold War, not a game. For example, the original requirements for the Apollo
navigation system specified a completely autonomous on-board system, not
relying on so much as a voice link to Earth, because of fears that the
Soviets might attempt to jam radio links. Despite occasional naive rhetoric
at the time, this was war, not sport.
The Soviets were trumpeting their achievements in space as a sign of their
growing superiority and US decline. An effective response was necessarily
an impressive space achievement, difficult enough and long-term enough to
give time to overcome the Soviet head start. (In fact, the US was probably
wrong about a manned lunar landing being far enough away -- if the Soviets
had promptly matched Kennedy's commitment, the first man on the Moon might
have been a Russian. Instead Khrushchev took over three years to authorize
a matching effort, and it never had Apollo's blank-check funding and
national-crisis priority.) Once that achievement appeared imminent, Apollo
gradually lost its priority, and also the funding needed for follow-on
efforts.
Henry
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