[AR] Re: Apollo (was Re: SSTO)
- From: "John Dom" <johndom@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 15:46:34 +0100
Were multiple Saturn V launches considered inadequate for building the ISS
and why? Was Saturn only a Moon rocket? Could the Rusk vertical return
strategy have worked for the first two Saturn stages?
After Apollo it became NASA 's prime objective to build the Shuttle as the
Saturn V follow-up. The administration threw away their Apollo toy like kids
do with toys they got bored of.
Also I find hard to swallow Saturn V could not be rebuilt if the will was
there. Budget pressure? there have been more expensive wars after Vietnam.
Just unimaginable they did not keep orderly records to rebuild it. It should
have been an order, they had time enough to plan this preservation
thoroughly before Apollo 17 ended it all.
Maybe even the Saturn V and its precious F1s lying protected in the
Canaveral museum hangar (anywhere else?) could be revived an multiplied now.
They did something equivalent with a (Bossart type) Atlas which had been
standing outside the Smithsonian in wind and rain for 15 years or so ! I
looked at that one in 1969. After the fix, it flew successfully. Why? They
had run out of Atlases because the military had ordered them bulldozered,
just like that, at least 50 of them after it was declared an obsolete
weapon. Did they do the same with Titan IIs?
Whatever, they should have kept Saturns I and V on the ready like Russians
did with Soyuz until this day. IMO. Kick out SLS.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Henry Spencer
Sent: maandag 19 februari 2018 1:44
To: Arocket List
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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