Obama sux

Some of this stuff (especially from the flight manual) is really cool to look through while watching a launch video. For instance, when those mighty F1's start belching smoke and fire, it's really cool to have some sort of reference of what's going on.

Here's another one, "perceptible events". Basically a list of things happening from the time the astronauts are tucked in until the vehicle is released from the pad.

Thrust on Shepard's entire Mercury-Redstone was 78,000 lbs. The Launch Escape motor on Apollo Saturn alone was about 147,000 lbs.

On a side note, I went to Cocoa Beach a few years ago, hoping to find some vestige of the glory days...thinking there might still be space-age motels or themed bars...or at least weathered old signs. But unless I was looking in the wrong spots, I was sorely disappointed.

Too hard.  No capability or knowledge exists to build them or even most of the critical parts.  You'd be starting over from scratch.

In working on new spacecraft and booster designs they're reduced to disassembling parts at the Smithsonian trying to figure out how the Apollo hardware worked and was put together.

We buy Kerosene/LOX rocket engines from the Russians because we don't have the institutional or industrial knowledge to build them anymore.  They have done a lot of research in the last few years on the F1 engine from the SatV to try to figure out how to make something comparable for the new heavy lift booster.

The nature of NASA (and other government programs) is that when they are ended, they are ended hard, and the soft knowledge and skills that had to be learned and invented to create the program is lost.

All they got was their new area code.  That may well be all that remains of the American space program.  


And SpanishInquisition may have made the post of the year on Page 1

Yeah, the thing that amazes me the most about Apollo is that we went from pretty much nothing to sending men to the moon in a span of a decade. We did all of that with slide rulers and real paper drafting, no CAD. At any rate, those were the day's when American ingenuity and pride were at their zenith.

Dirty little secret:  Rocket engine design is an artform.  Both solids and liquids, the F1 was a tempermental beast, they settled to know how to tame it for just long enough to launch a rocket.
The guys in Utah will tell you its a 'science', they told us that back in 1993.  Thats why Thiokol is a leading manufacturer today (sarc, heavy, bad sarc)

When I built solid rocket motors we were not allowed to fail.  I read all the Test Reports I could find from the 60s.  Those guys were allowed to fail on the test stand.  THATS where you learn where the limits and boundaries are.   The old liquid guys did the same thing I bet you.  

Now we'd be going in not knowing where the limits were at, and not allowed to fail in test in order to find those points.

One day in 1989 or 1990 I found an old Mercury capsule escape motor in one of the storage bunkers.

Very interesting vid on Apollo IV

Apollo IV pt.1
Apollo IV pt.2