Von Braun's Moon Mission

[Northstar1989]

I thought this seemed very Kerbal, and hope you guys enjoy watching it:

Regards,

Northstar

 

[ChrisSpace]

It sounds a lot more interesting than what really ended up happening.

[RCgothic]

How do they get a crew of four aboard if the space suit hogs the airlock?

Other than that, the casualness of the whole thing is what struck me. The degree of autonomy of the ship, how easily things are constructed on orbit (and then we install the nuclear reactor!), the aggressive manoeuvres close to other vessels/structures, and the way a repair was made by just piloting a space suit into a jet of venting nitric acid at however many atmospheres and casually plug that right up. And our mars mission is under constriction even as we flyby the moon for the first time. No incorporating lessons learned for us!

Oh, and the space station was at an altitude of 1000 miles, nicely within the inner Van Allen belt and squandering the oberth effect for moon missions.

Edited March 8, 2017 by RCgothic

[benzman]

Steampunk!  1950s style! Brilliant!

 

[DerekL1963]

7 hours ago, RCgothic said:

Oh, and the space station was at an altitude of 1000 miles, nicely within the inner Van Allen belt and squandering the oberth effect for moon missions.

They didn't know the Van Allen belt existed in 1955...  Or how hard working in zero-G would be.  Or that thin wings like those were a non-starter on a vehicle intended to re-enter.  Or...   There's a lot of good engineering in that series, some informed guesswork, a great deal of SWAG, but there was also tons of stuff they didn't know they didn't know.  (Unknown unknowns in current parlance.)

[Nikolai]

17 hours ago, benzman said:

Steampunk!  1950s style! Brilliant!

 

I've actually heard the term "rocketpunk" used to describe this sort of thing.

[Bill Phil]

On ‎3‎/‎8‎/‎2017 at 5:46 AM, RCgothic said:

Oh, and the space station was at an altitude of 1000 miles, nicely within the inner Van Allen belt and squandering the oberth effect for moon missions.

Starting from orbit, the Oberth effect would be almost negligible. It's very useful if you're going to the Moon in a single launch, but not quite as useful if you're starting from orbit (in fact, the relative energies of the orbits would be slightly less, so *shrug*).

They weren't aware of the van Allen belt, which also extends down into the ISS's orbit. It's called the South Atlantic Anomaly.

[RCgothic]

I estimate ~300m/s  extra required to get to 1000km and then to a lunar intercept vs starting from 100km and going straight to TMI.

Perhaps it's not much. For the moon. It is an extra ~500m/s required for every craft trying to get to the space station from earth though, particularly over the multiple supply runs required.

[Aser]

Thanks for posting that OP.

No wonder people of the time were so excited about space.

[Guest]

One thing: the spacesuits!

I never seen that movie before, but...

I was thinking, how I'd design a spacesuit and spacesuits in this 50s animation are almost the same!

With 2 small differences:

1) They planned to use limited RCS, and I was thinking about a small robot hand at the bottom that can semi-automatically recognize and grab railings, use rollers to rotate the spacesuit along all axes and same rollers to drive along the railings.

2) They planned 6-8 similar human controlled hands around the suit, and I was thinking that it needs 4 computer-assisted hands: 2 with high strength and 2 for precise operations. They need to be controlled by repeater controllers like those in high-radiation labs, but with computer assists, like : "hold steady from here"

It have advantage of having much simpler pressure vessel and also no rigidity problems, so it can have 1 ATM pressure at all times.

But ... what stops us from moving astronaut form suit to station and converting suit into remote controlled robot? It will be even simpler without life support ...