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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (32625)	7/20/1999 2:45:00 PM
From: DScottD	Respond to of 71178

It sure doesn't seem like 30 years ago. I was 9 years old at the time and I have vivid memories of watching the TV coverage of the Apollo 11 mission and the moon landing. We had a black and white TV and the images from the moon were pretty fuzzy, but it sure was an amazing thing for a 9 year old to see. My folks bought the LP record of the mission and I used to listen to it over and over again. Now I don't even know, or really care for that matter, when there is a shuttle mission going on.

To: Ilaine who wrote (32625)	7/20/1999 3:07:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

There was a really nice Nova two-hour episode last week about the Apollo project. And there was a fellow saying "this was never about scientific exploration of space. It was the Cold War, a contest for the high ground." And when the big Soviet N-1 booster (a Saturn-class heavy lifter) blew up twice, it was over. Apollo 15 through 17 got funded by a whisker. Since then all we really had/have is the Shuttle, and it utterly failed to realize the dream of cheap routine space flight. It could be argued that it is in NASA's interest to keep space flight difficult and expensive, since that ensures the continued employment of the 10 000 or so personnel needed to keep the Shuttle flying. Two billion dollars per mission, folks, with maybe thirty tons delivered to orbit. That is about $30000 a pound. Unf....believable. It might be cheaper just to build five Saturns and clean&jerk the Station bits to orbit, and use a coupla Shuttle flights for the Some Assembly Required part. Mars. I don't think we're near ready to do Mars. That'd be a three-year mission in deep space, with a launch-from-LEO mass of a few hundred tons. We need to have a slightly more committed program to deal with life support issues (like the Sovs had with Mir) and we need a more believable heavy booster - a cheap one to operate, ideally single stage to orbit. But there is no pressing political need for such things, not like during the Sixties when it was a national security maneuver dressed in white fiberglass. Maybe the next phase of exploration and space presence will be driven by private ventures, not governments. Question will be how hard the governments will run interference. National security's other side. There was a brief flurry in interest in finding and diverting Earth-crossing asteroids, but that seems to have died. If that revives, maybe governments will see fit again to develop deep-space capability, heavy orbital lifters. Of course the dirty little secret of this whole endeavor will be a revived nuke testing program, because we'll need to optimize explosive yield per weapon mass if we're gonna put enough megatons onto a ten-kilometer lump of iron to nudge it off orbit. A good weapon design gets maybe five megs of yield per ton of weapon mass, and then there is the added mass of attitude thrusters, guidance electronics, and some sort of safety circuitry to keep someone with a garage door opener from doing an Oopsie on the launch pad. :-)