If Apollo-Saturn was a beginning.

[Drunkrobot]

Elsewhere in the science labs you will find this thread:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/45565-What-if-the-Space-Shuttle-Program-had-done-its-job

It asks "what if the Space Shuttle was a complete success, what would it have led to?".

This thread goes a little further back in time, to the early 70s. Men were walking on the Moon, Kennedy's challenge to the American space industry was accomplished. And we did stuff.

You know those annoying "My other car is..." bumper stickers? I bet this guy has a pretty frickin' rad one.

But even as NASA was starting to get good at going to the Moon, new endurance records and ground-breaking discoveries being made on each new mission, it was called back, or rather, pulled back, to Washington DC. Voters were now getting bored of the Moon, and it's difficult to justify two men with living quarters on another world when there are millions without homes on Earth.

"The Earth is all we need!" Said nobody after looking at this picture.

5% of the annual budget is a lot less than what people today, and then, think is what NASA gets, but it is still a lot of money, and even the other, more Earthbound and "practical" science organisations get less than NASA. Space had to get cheap, and the new plans for a reusable "space truck" for LEO was the only new manned program that congress would accept, and pull through with.

The Space Shuttle: only 1.48% catastrophic failure!

Apollo-Saturn, the most fantastical transport system ever built in human history, was dead.

As it turns out, all that talk of the Apollo-Saturn duo being a waste of money meant the next generation of spaceship builders, the ones working right now, have had to re-invent the rocket. I'm sure you are aware of the SLS-Orion program in development right now.

Of, course it won't come apart like this in actual flight.

It is a wonderful design, and if allowed to flower, would open up a lot of options for NASA. But here's the thing-remember when those old spent F-1 engines were recovered from the sea bed?

<Hums the theme to Titanic.>

Those engines, along with museum pieces, are being studied by NASA to produce the high-power engines needed for SLS. Many people think aloud "How inept are the people of NASA that they need ancient relics to build their supposed "state of the art" rocket?".

It was invented ages ago, and is therefore primitive and useless!

What these idiots don't realise is that the F-1 was the best at what it does (producing an ungodly amount of thrust) for so long because what it does hasn't been needed for a long time. No rocket since had the payload capacity of Saturn V because not one needed the payload capacity. The F-1 is still state of the art. Unfortunately, there is few technical documents of the F-1 left, and the people at Rocketdyne who built it are either retired or dead. I'm sure the retired rocket scientists wish to help NASA build their new engines as much as possible, but it is difficult remembering every step to build a rocket engine you designed nearly 50 years ago. That means only the museum pieces and used wreckage from the sea-floor are left to base new engines on.

Let's use the Lunar Module as a better case.

You had trouble getting your car in that tiny parking space? That must have been an incredible accomplishment.

It was, and is, the only vehicle ever built that can take a human crew from Lunar orbit to the surface. The LEM had a brilliant service record, working every time it was needed to, even pushed beyond it's factory limits to become a lifeboat to the crew of Apollo 13. Not bad for small New York state-based aircraft company Grumman Corporation.

Here's to you, spaceship builders.

But then Project Apollo was cancelled, and demand for manned lunar landers dropped noticeably. The team that designed and built the LEM moved on to other projects and eventually retired, the remaining LEMs were sent to the museums, and the design sketches of components and how it all fits together, were thrown away. Why throw away this priceless data? Again, because it wasn't needed. These were the days when "data" was not stored as bits on a hard drive, but as actual pieces of paper, on a shelf. The designs for the LEM alone could fill a small room.

This. full of paper.

Grumman had no need for it, and drawings and paragraphs of technobabble don't make good museum pieces, so they were condemned. What does this mean? It means that when NASA starts thinking of building a new Lunar lander...

With blackjack, and hookers.

...the LEMs in air and space museums across the states will probably be taken apart, studied, tested (sometimes to destruction), and maybe put together again, like the F-1 is right now. The same is true of many other "relics" of project Apollo, like the spacesuits and the rovers. Beyond the obvious loss of an engineering masterpiece (Although I think it would be wrong to shun technological improvement to continue marvelling over machines of the past), this means a lot of money is being spent to do what has already been done.

NASA: Built a computer from scratch, then had that computer taken away from them, and forced to use an abacus for 40 years. Then the people who took away the computer makes them build another computer from scratch, better than the last one, with one-tenth the money.

Things weren't always like this. The people who built the machines of Apollo-Saturn were still building said machines, and some optimists among the designers were thinking on how the equipment could be made better. The production line would be increased, and the rockets would get both better and cheaper. Since all the hard work had already been accomplished (a 15-minute sub-orbital flight to an 8-day round trip to the Moon in 8 years is a steep learning curve.), it would've been relatively simple and cheap to scale everything up.

THIS IS WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN.

If the success of the Apollo missions had left the people of the world hungry for further exploration, what would the next big program have accomplished? There would've been space stations, of course, but humans would've also spent longer and longer periods on the Moon...

Never have I hated something so much for not existing.

...humans would be going to Mars by 1980...

STOP IT! YOUR BREAKING MY HEART!

...and the gas giants by the turn of the century.

One thing would make me happier than this happening in my lifetime. It is this happening before I ever existed.

Or at least, that's what I think would've happened. What would you think have come from the Apollo Program, with all the sharp minds, brilliant hardware, and money NASA had at it's disposal?

Edited August 13, 2013 by Drunkrobot
Removed grammatical errors, and added new snarky subtitle to Grumman photo.

[Kryten]

Why would any of this happen?

That's the main issue. You'd won your race to the moon, there's very little point going beyond.

[Drunkrobot]

Well first off, I'm British, my country was a spectator in the race to the Moon. And secondly, I was assuming we lived in a crazy parallel universe where the majority of people value scientific discovery and engineering achievements that don't have immediate practical value.

[Albert VDS]

Above anything else, I would wanted it to lead to a manned Mars landing.

By the way, nice post!

[Drunkrobot]

Thank you! When I do another of these really long posts, I'll be sure to bring comedy italic text with me!

Dude, don't respond to every comment. You do this all the time.

Hey, I'm responding to feedback. The dinosaurs died because they didn't respond to feedback.

That was a killer asteroid, this is an internet forum.

There are more similarities than you think.

[EvilotionCR2]

We flew to the Moon just because Americans wanted to "be" better than Russians. And also because John Kennedy wanted to be elected again. Or that's at least what I think. Our stupidity has made us more smart,

. Edited August 12, 2013 by EvilotionCR2

[Jimbobq11]

Stephen Baxter wrote a novel about a manned landing on mars in the 80s, Voyage. Back on topic: Crewed mars landings, crewed Venus flybys, and maybe, if the public approved, some sort of Earth-Moon System infrastructure. But that is a very optimistic assumption.

[Skyrunner27]

Well first off, I'm British, my country was a spectator in the race to the Moon. And secondly, I was assuming we lived in a crazy parallel universe where the majority of people value scientific discovery and engineering achievements that don't have immediate practical value.

That is pretty much America now. I actually have had to agree to disagree with almost everyone I met about going back to the moon.

We flew to the Moon just because Americans wanted to "be" better than Russians. And also because John Kennedy wanted to be elected again. Or that's at least what I think.

John Kennedy was dead

[Diche Bach]

A great post! Love the humor

I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Politics and fickle public opinion probably had more to do with the death of the Apollo-Saturn legacy more than anything NASA did itself. Still, I think the humorous tone you strike in suggesting that NASA is having to reinvent the wheel is perhaps a bit exaggerated relative to reality.

I had not even realized until getting into this game and having a couple weeks of free time to browse wiki that, there were a lot of important things happening in space travel during the post-Apollo era _besides_ the Shuttle. Many of these developments received little or no public attention; certainly nothing like the obsessive international attention paid to the Apollo program (or at least until the viewing public got bored of Apollo).

For one thing, Space Lab, Mir and the ISS. By as early as 1975 the US and Russia were already working together (perhaps only to some symbolic extent) on a Shuttle Mir program. Mir was in the sky for a VERY long time and some incredible worlds records were set on that station. For example the longest single space flight and I would imagine the longest total amount of time I space for a human. I know the former was set by a cosmonaut in Mir (Polyakev I think was his name) and I suspect a substantial portion of the latter. While simply "leaving a guy up there for a long time" doesn't sound as dramatic or exciting as "one small step" it is in some respects equally or more important. Based on the sum total of all those human hours spent in microgravity above Earth, I think they now have a pretty good idea of what long space journeys (e.g., to Mars, or on a Lunar base) will really be like for the people that endure them. While I'm sure most of us KSP gamer geeks imagine that being an astronaut would be very, VERY cool (oh believe me, I dreamed of it myself!) the fact is: to spend many months in space is probably one of the most tedious, unpleasant and unhealthy things (not to mention dangerous) that anyone could ever do. Certainly not like time in prison, but not the bed of roses that it might superficially seem to be.

Insomnia, bone loss, muscle atrophy, loneliness, mood disturbances, distorted perceptions, and if memory serves weakened immune function and for some individuals, dysfunction of metabolic and cardiovascular functions. Probably the only reason the cosmonauts and astronauts who are now retirees are not known for dying early is because they were already chosen from a highly select group of near supermen/women to begin with, were intensively monitored and trained while in space, and to some extent since then too.

The simple fact is: long-term space habitation (or at least long-term micro-gravity habitation) may never actually be something that becomes commonplace, and I don't know why we would be surprised if the truth is anything different than that. The world highup from our own sea level is quite in hospitable, to say nothing of that beyond our atmosphere.

I think a number of things have happened here in the past 50 or 60 years that have left a bit of prevailing confusion in most of our minds.

First of all, the incredibly quick and relatively untroubled success of the Apollo program made it all seem so easy. But the fact is, the U.S. (and I suspect in large part the entire "Western world") were largely supportive of that program. I doubt that there was much quibbling about a few extra hundreds of millions for the Apollo program, given the important ideological meaning that it represented to people.

It is ironic that an ideological conflict could be the source of such a dramatic revolution in science and engineering, with such far reaching societal implications. But it was and we should be thankful for that. Instead of global thermonuclear war, we got Apollo, and Shuttle-Mir, and Soyuz, and ISS. Perhaps a little international competition between rival Superpowers wasn't such a bad thing after all . . .

In the absence of that sort of 'motivation' for a people to be solidary behind a cause, and thus for the administrators to be able to requisition the brainpower, the money and the other resources needed, something like Apollo is probably never gonna happen in a democracy, or for that matter in an autocracy either.

The Apollo program, in terms of the sheer magnitude of the accomplishment, and the incalculable impact it has had on life, is probably the single most important scientific movement in the history of humanity. Look around you right now, count up how many items in your immediate surroundings you are _SURE_ were not influenced (in their current form) by developments, inventions, prototypes, or accomplishments from the Apollo program or Space Race more broadly. I have read the experts lists of all the modern technologies that have become completely day-to-day commonplace and it is mind boggling how far reaching were the impacts of this program and the space race more generally.

The second way we are perhaps a bit misguided about what Apollo was and what 'should/could/would' have been is that, it is unlikely that a society can maintain that kind of "Golden Age" pace for very long at a stretch. Moreover, its not like there was a hard stop to space travel immediately following Apollo.

Lastly, while I agree with you in grieving that the sorts of things in the moon base pics have yet to come to pass, I have to be honest that . . . well, maybe that sort of thing just isn't realistic . . . yet. As I said above, space is harsh, not a nice place for people to live and work. An amazing place with all sorts of promise, true. But also harsh, dangerous, inhospitable, unforgiving, and expensive. Even if somehow the 'momentum' of Apollo had not been 'lost' and the Saturn thing had not 'died' as you put it, we may nonetheless have been no closer to the science fiction imagery that we grew up on, i.e., living on moon bases, working in space stations, and putting on your space suit to go out for a days work fixing the antennaes and such.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Diche Bach

[karolus10]

Elsewhere in the science labs you will find this thread:

But even as NASA was starting to get good at going to the Moon, new endurance records and ground-breaking discoveries being made on each new mission, it was called back, or rather, pulled back, to Washington DC. Voters were now getting bored of the Moon, and it's difficult to justify two men with living quarters on another world when there are millions without homes on Earth.

This argument has no sense, because after 50 years from now there still will be issues (old or new), wars, hunger and poverty... this cannot be fixed entirely.

Space race was only an political card and it was cut down after it lost it's political importance, also development of rockets changed, military don't needed larger rockets and complex ICBMs using kerosene/lox, has been replaced with hyperbolic and SRB's due to costs and shorter deployment time.

Also US was dealing with Vietnam war at this time and building it's nuclear arsenal against Russians.

Military and (especially) armed conflicts are one of largest money drains for most of nations.

For example, recent Iraq war cost US ~ 760+ Billion dollars.

entire Apollo program cost around 135 billion dollars (25 billion in 70's dollars).

In 2011 world expenses on military was around 1.7 trillion US dollars.

Nasa has been crippled by fund cuts and space shuttle "lite" witch became purpose on it's own for decades to come.

Edited August 13, 2013 by karolus10

[apfelbeck]

Arstechnica has a really great pair of articles about NASA reviving the F1 engines in modern form.

[DerekL1963]

But even as NASA was starting to get good at going to the Moon, new endurance records and ground-breaking discoveries being made on each new mission, it was called back, or rather, pulled back, to Washington DC. Voters were now getting bored of the Moon, and it's difficult to justify two men with living quarters on another world when there are millions without homes on Earth.

Apollo was essentially cancelled when the budget was gutted and hardware production capped - in 1965/67. Few people realize that by 1969 Apollo was already running on fumes. (Fewer people realize the contracts for the final round of studies for the Shuttle, the ones that would solidify the configuration chosen in 1972, were signed while Apollo 11 was en-route to the Moon.)

And those who complain of politics and fickle public opinion destroyed Apollo should remember that politics and fickle public opinion created Apollo in the first place.

There's a school of thought among space historians that holds, not without some merit based on available documentation, that we really really owe the Apollo program we got not to Kennedy - but to Oswald. Kennedy was already thinking of ways to scale back the expensive beast and to move towards cooperation in space rather than competition - but those plans died with him in Dallas. Instead LBJ seized on the opportunity to push Apollo as Kennedy's monument.

[NeoMorph]

Stephen Baxter wrote a novel about a manned landing on mars in the 80s, Voyage. Back on topic: Crewed mars landings, crewed Venus flybys, and maybe, if the public approved, some sort of Earth-Moon System infrastructure. But that is a very optimistic assumption.

I remember reading this (still have it floating around somewhere... The thing that sticks in my head was the Apollo-N flight where the stack begins to pogo but they keep pushing forward and light the nuclear drive... and it explodes and lethally irradiates the crew. Was so damned emotive.

[Diche Bach]

Would like to read me one of them space history books Derek. What authors/books would you recommend as a good 'grand tour' introduction?

[Drunkrobot]

This argument has no sense, because after 50 years from now there still will be issues (old or new), wars, hunger and poverty... this cannot be fixed entirely.

I am aware of the fact that stopping the space program would have about zero impact on improving the human condition, in fact it would dramatically reduce it. Sparing a little thought for the future is just as important as thinking of the present.

But, you have to remember what people were thinking back then. As children (the people who built the Shuttle, and the parents of those building the SLS-Orion) watched in wonder at the live TV from the Moon, the adults were complaining-"Why should my tax money go to a man practising golf on the Moon!" Looking back at the state of the world, they did have a point-Vietnam, campus unrest, the human race realising that it was destroying the environments-why should some Buck Rogers wannabes live in Tomorrowland at the expense of billions of dollars?

Pushing the boundaries of human science and engineering is exactly what should be done to help solve the problems we face, along with sparing money for those born in a less hospitable works than ours. But the majority of people couldn't see the significance Project Apollo had on improving the world we live in, and those of us who try to follow a scientific way of thinking can't blame them for not believing in something they had no, or little, knowledge about.

I think the space program is immensely important, just as important as welfare on Earth. But it doesn't matter what I think, it's what 51% of legal voters think.

[Drunkrobot]

To Diche Bach.

Thanks for putting your time towards giving such lengthy feedback. I had as much enjoyment reading it as I hope you had reading the OP.

First, exactly how much does NASA have to rediscover to build SLS. I know that as much equipment and experience that can be gathered from previous programs, like the Space Shuttle, and be practically used, is done so. This makes sense, using what you've got and building upon it is, in fact, the idea behind the thread. My point was that much of the hardware, especially later, more advanced blocks of SLS, need to take a page from Apollo-Saturn's book. If NASA wants to do more than simple fly-by missions with Orion, then more needs to be redone-a successor to the LEM, space suits that can deal with the dust etc. They won't be going back to 1972, the new equipment will be a vast improvement over Apollo-Saturn-it's just that, for a good deal of that equipment to be built, the space industry will need to learn things that it once had, but then lost.

And I agree with your second point, the space industry has hardly been stagnant for 40 years. Priceless information on how the body reacts to a microgravity environment has been gathered, and how that same microgravity environment could one day be of our benefit, large orbital factories producing things that could never be formed on the Earth. But I am of the opinion that the space industry shouldn't have been forced to chose between LEO and deep space. I'm sure you are too. Long-term life on space stations can be possible, a large spinning wheel can produce an effect of gravity. Closer to current abilities is putting two living quarters modules on two long arms connected to the central "stack" of a space craft or station, then spinning them. Spending sleeping, exercising, eating, washing and recreational hours in the living quarters would be an effective counter to microgravity.

And your last point, on how the science fiction sketches I used would probably have never became fact- I partly agree with you. I know that the future of space exploration is not exactly what Von Braun designed it to be, no more than what Da Vinci thought the first flying machines would look like. But the core idea of the sketches, of the human race inventing stuff to let them explore such places remains up to date. Take a man with no technology or knowledge of technology (i.e. science.), and put him in icy tundra or scorching hot desert. He would, very quickly, die. But give him clothes, a source of controlled heat, shelter, ways of harvesting food and water, ways to carry food and water, an effective mode of transport and the knowledge to use it all, and he would survive. Science and technology is how we conquered the world. Science and technology is how we will conquer space.

Edited August 13, 2013 by Drunkrobot

[DerekL1963]

Would like to read me one of them space history books Derek. What authors/books would you recommend as a good 'grand tour' introduction?

Frankly, I'm not aware of any. (Partly because I quit reading 'introductory' level material twenty plus years ago.)

[NeoMorph]

Derek, in your reading did you come across any build blueprints for the 8-Ball or Flight Data Attitude Indicator (Apollo Nav Ball). I have spent hours upon hours trawling the net to find information on this piece and have really enjoyed learning all I can about it but while I have finally figured out how the thing works I have never had anything but guesses to the size of the thing beyond the outside diameter of the case (7 inches high, 7 inches wide, 11 inches deep). I can guestimate most of it but it would be nice to find the exploded diagram of the parts. I'm going to be building multiple sized variants to try out the various sizes.

I have gotten a lot of Apollo manuals and some of them have had my jaw dropping off the ground when I realised what they had accomplished. A lot of what I already "knew" about Apollo have been nothing but urban myth.

I'm not talking "The moon landings were a hoax perpetrated by the US government in their way to fool their own citizens"... I'm talking about things like "On Apollo 11 the LEM was going to crash so Neil Armstrong took over manual control and flew it to a safe landing spot." (which was only partly true - He flew under computer assisted flight rather than manual. Think MechJeb Translatron - Keep Vertical mode).

I'm talking things like "Gimbal Lock" like I explained in another thread of mine. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/40866-When-Gimbal-Lock-Is-A-Bad-Thing?highlight=gimbal+lock

I'm talking about how Buzz Aldrin saw a UFO (that turned out to be one of the shrouds that covered the LEM when it was in the stack).

I'm talking about how Apollo 11 almost never left the moon due to a broken contact breaker switch... the switch that armed the ascent engine that would take Neil and Buzz back up to the Command and Service Module in orbit around the Moon and home... broken off when the two astronauts were putting on their space suits for the moonwalks. Buzz found the switch on floor of the LEM and he actually fixed it with a felt pen.I wonder where Buzz keeps that pen that saved a pair of astronaut's lives. http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=4&doc_id=1283891

There are sooooo many little stories like that which really make you realise that space exploration is so damned dangerous. You break something then you had better have a backup and it had better work because there is no way of popping out to the local electronics store to buy a new switch or circuit breaker. Had that felt tip pen not worked do you think they would have had further landings? What if 13 hadn't have succeeded in bringing the crew back alive?

I think this is one of the reasons why Mars is such a big step when compared to the moon. You really need to launch multiple ships in formation so that if something goes wrong with one ship that you have the option of sending the team on the faulty ship over to the others as backup. We need a faster flight method as well before we even think about a manned mission to Mars. We need to have ships that can do Earth to the Moon in a couple of hours at most.

Anyway... waffling aside, the things that the Apollo astronauts did is beyond amazing. But the real awards should have gone to the scientists that made it happen because without them, Neil Armstrong wouldn't have said his famous "That's one small step for a man... One giant leap for mankind!". One misplaced decimal point and POOF.... they would be spam-in-a-can.

[Moon Goddess]

But, you have to remember what people were thinking back then. As children (the people who built the Shuttle, and the parents of those building the SLS-Orion) watched in wonder at the live TV from the Moon, the adults were complaining-"Why should my tax money go to a man practising golf on the Moon!" Looking back at the state of the world, they did have a point-Vietnam, campus unrest, the human race realising that it was destroying the environments-why should some Buck Rogers wannabes live in Tomorrowland at the expense of billions of dollars?

I really have to wonder though, did the people who were worried about they're tax dollars want to spend them on making peace with the soviets? racism? environmentalism?

Really I can't think of any time any good has ever come from the phrase, "Why should my tax money go..." No they complain that because they want their tax money to not be tax money at all, they want to keep it. That phrase is incredibly destructive to the entire civilization we live in. We live together, we have to work together the way we do that is pay taxes.

[Kerbal01]

I remember reading this (still have it floating around somewhere... The thing that sticks in my head was the Apollo-N flight where the stack begins to pogo but they keep pushing forward and light the nuclear drive... and it explodes and lethally irradiates the crew. Was so damned emotive.

Loved that series of books.

[jwenting]

Why would any of this happen?

That's the main issue. You'd won your race to the moon, there's very little point going beyond.

and that, the defeatism, the utter lack of imagination and explorative urge, is the reason our society and likely our species has doomed itself to extermination.

[rdfox]

For the record, the claim that any of the technical documentation for the Apollo program has been lost forever is just an urban legend. While the contractors likely disposed of their copies of it in the mid-70s, when it became clear that they weren't going to need them again, NASA retained its copies (because NASA retains *everything*... for example, the various ground checklist/manual props seen in Mission Control in Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon? Those were the REAL ones--not just new copies of them, but the actual ones used in MOCR during the actual missions, pulled out of NASA storage facilities and loaned to the productions for use in those scenes.), both on paper and on microfilm; the problem is that the ones that WERE digitized early on to save on storage space are stored in formats that are so obsolete that it would be very difficult to recover them today. However, it *can* be done if NASA wanted to.

The problem, however, is that NONE of this information is directly applicable to building a new spacecraft *today*. Technologically, every item used in the Apollo program is a dinosaur today. While the F-1 engine remains the best there is at what it does, nobody but NOBODY would build an exact duplicate of it today--it's too labor-intensive, too complex, too expensive, and relies FAR too much on a Rube Goldberg machine of mechanical parts to get the microsecond-precise timing required to run it successfully. On top of that, the relatively small production run and limited technology of the time means that every single item used in the program was hand-built and custom-fitted to the specific mission it was on (a situation similar to when the US military licensed the 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun during World War Two and were horrified to see how many parts on it were specified as being made to a certain specification "and then file to fit"); no two were precisely alike and each had to be massaged into working as designed, and the details of THAT process were never recorded in technical documentation, as it was never the same for any two units.

The expectation is not that the crew at Marshall will reverse-engineer the F-1 to start a second production run of identical engines when we have no technical documentation remaining--it's that they'll reverse-engineer the F-1 to see what individual modifications were made to the units that they retain as samples to get them to work, compared to the documentation, and then figure out all the ways they could change the design to retain the same (or better) performance with a simpler, less expensive design that has its timing done by microprocessor software instead of loops in fuel lines and tiny delay valves and flow restrictors and such.

It's the same with all Apollo hardware--we could do much better with an all-new design based on the Lessons Learned rather than trying to replicate it today, simply because the technology has matured so much that many of the expedients and work-arounds involved in making it possible for us to land on the Moon with, as Spock once put it, "stone knives and bearskins" are no longer necessary. On top of that, it's not the "how" that NASA needs to relearn--we have all the documentation that explains exactly how everything worked. It's the "WHY" that NASA needs to relearn, and that they're interrogating old engineers and reverse-engineering hardware for--we know HOW the F-1 engine worked, but we need to know WHY they chose that particular plumbing design. We know HOW the LM guidance computer worked, but we need to know WHY the MIT engineers decided on that particular architecture. By learning *why* the engineers did what they did back then, we can thus avoid a lot of the trial-and-error phase of R&D, because we know what most of the problems we'll have to solve are, and can thus start work directly on tackling those problems with the best technology has to offer today, rather than wasting effort with designs that run headlong into those same problems and having to discard the design and start anew.

(For the record, attempting to return the original Apollo-Saturn hardware to production today would be essentially impossible, given that many of the technological solutions present in them are no longer available because they're so very obsolete--for example, surface-mount miniature vacuum tubes are GONE now, completely replaced by solid-state electronics that would require all the computers to be completely re-engineered.)

[Drunkrobot]

In reply to rdfox.

I said earlier, in the thread that building SLS is NOT a return to Apollo-Saturn, it is simply looking back at the people who built it, how and why they did what they did, and how the technology of today can simplify, and improve the work done in the 60s.

OK, I didn't put it that clearly, but I was trying to stop the posts from being too long. Thank you for your reply!

[King Arthur]

and that, the defeatism, the utter lack of imagination and explorative urge, is the reason our society and likely our species has doomed itself to extermination.

Three words: Lack. Of. Practicality.

We can dream all we want, but if something isn't worth the money (and manned spaceflight has steadily proven itself through the years that it isn't, unfortunately) then it simply isn't happening.

[OtherDalfite]

and that, the defeatism, the utter lack of imagination and explorative urge, is the reason our society and likely our species has doomed itself to extermination.

Alright, so what is there for man to accomplish on missions? Plant a flag? Take some samples a robot could take at a fraction of the cost? Just lack of "imagination" isn't a good reason why Kryten was wrong.