Apollo missions
 

I have been watching the Apollo.stuff on History channel and Sci-Fi. Three things have stuck with me.

1. The Saturn V burned 15 tons of fuel a second and generated over 1.5 million hp.

2. They had a manual override so if the evidence went out the commander could fly it manually.

3. The fuel was so corrosive that the.engines had to be.entirely rebuilt after each test. Think about that for a second. The engines that went to space were never tested after they were rebuilt.

The whole thing is bloody amazing when you think about it. Strap your self to a 300ft rocket. Fly for 3 days and 240,000 miles. Land on a satellite that no one has ever been to. Stroll around a bit. Blast off the moon and rendezvous with the command module. Fly back another 3 days and 240,000 miles to get to this little blue marble. Crash into the atmosphere and hope the heat shield that has not been tested either. Then parachute to the ocean.

All this was built and designed by nerds with slide rules and calculators with exponentially less power than the cell I am typing this on.

We had the best nerds back then.

If you've ever been to the Air & Space Museum and seen the L.E.M and Command Module on display . . . you'd be in awe as well. The L.E.M looks like it was built as a science fair project.

The command module is tiny as well.

We went to the Johnston Space center in Houston a few years ago. The have Apollo 18 there horizontal on the ground and separated in to the various modules. The size of that thing is just insane and to think it flew into space is just mind boggling.

When you see it with your own eyes you can only be in owe with the balls those guys had to strap them selfs in the Apollo Command Module and wait for takeoff...

http://i662.photobucket.com/albums/u...er_display.jpg

http://i662.photobucket.com/albums/u..._schematic.jpg

As far as I can remember, no part of the Saturn vehicles was reused. That was one of the revolutionary things about the shuttle project was that the vehicle and SRB's were recovered and reused after each mission.

For those who don't know about slide rules---they are mechanical, analog computers, but they are only good to 3 significant digits, and you had to estimate the third significant digit. That is the purpose of the magnifying lens with the line scribed onto it.

What I heard that I never heard before was that the gimballing of those 5 Saturn engines, and the effect they had on the booster could be felt way up in the capsule. They had to keep that tall booster on trajectory. One of the astronauts remarked that he feared hitting the launch gantry, the movement felt so great.

Apollo 11
 

My Cousin worked at Harris and created the computer that made the final decision for the landing on the Moon. His design told them which of the 3 computers to believe in the final minutes.
The night they landed, we were watching it in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park in NYC. I remember the look of pride on his face when Armstrong said "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed...".
He later worked on Skylab and the Shuttle. His final project was for Locomotive Communications and Control systems for GM.

To look back, we had a generation of very well trained Engineers and Technicians but we also learned from the mistakes we made. Apollo 1 was an example of getting too complaicent in our success. So was the Columbia.

According to folks whom I know that worked at NASA and elsewhere, the SRB recovery was a PR stunt to make the "reuseability" concept palitable. The cost of recovery vs cost of just replacing them never worked out. My Brother in Law worked at Hill AFB in Utah and knew folks at Morton Thiokol (they made the SRB's) and said that the amount of refurb needed after use never made sense and they believed the wear and tear was going to bite them one day.

Well it did...

My next door neighbor I had when I lived out there retired from MT. He told me the same thing...the cost of recovery and reconditioning was higher than building new, but the public liked the idea. He told me that the worst day in his life was the day the SRB failed and the shuttle exploded. To know that something you worked on failed and killed people in the process is a heavy weight to carry...and he was still carrying that weight over 2 years ago.

Large steam turbine generators can produce an astounding amount of electrical energy 24/7 and don't need an overhaul too often, but they are massive and of no use for moving vehicles.

For vehicles, you want smaller and lighter powerplants that produce lots of horsepower and thrust, but these wear out more quickly. The trick is to design it and test it until you are confident that it won't wear out until just after you are finished with it. ;) Then, just replace the worn out bits that got you where you wanted to go and do it again.

An F1 race car, Top Fuel dragster and the Space Shuttle were all high-performance vehicles, and are all reusable if you have the right budget. :D

I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. I know after use in flight they were toast. I am saying that when they assembled the engine they did not test to make sure it worked before they put the engine in the launch vehicle and then launched it. The test occurred in flight when they needed it. hey could not test the engine because the fuel was to corrosive.

Back when that happened, I had a subscription to Aviation Week. In the aftermath, according to AW, one of MT's competitors offered up a solid one piece version of the SRB's - they apparently had a casting pit large enough and deep enough to cast four SRB's in one shot - doing away entirely with the joints and o-rings.

Also according to AW, NASA rejected this proposal for monetary reasons - it was felt they had too much money already invested in MT's design and existing hardware to just simply scrap it all.

Although I've no doubt there was a lot of politics involved in that as well.

I get it, good point.