For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[SunlitZelkova]

15 hours ago, DDE said:

Why did the bomber tail gun die?

To add on to everyone's answers, which are correct, BVRAAMs and SAMs just make it pointless when given the option of mounting more ECM equipment.

If I recall correctly though, the latest upgrade to the Tu-22M3 retains the tail gunner position, because the GSh-23 variant it has can launch flares instead.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

If Webb weighs less than the Lunar Lander... why are we not using Arianne for lunar missions?

[tater]

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/mld/for/d/potomac-worlds-rarest-artifact/7416366046.html
 

Want an x ray telescope?

[TheSaint]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

If Webb weighs less than the Lunar Lander... why are we not using Arianne for lunar missions?

Berry compliance?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

12 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

Berry compliance?

Man - I wrote that wrong.

Webb weights more - 6500kg vs 4300kg.

Again - if Webb outweighs Lunar Lander - can't we use ESA to throw rocks at the moon?

[tater]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Webb weights more - 6500kg vs 4300kg.

What lunar lander was 4300 kg?

The LEM was 15-16t, wet. Dry it would just make a crater. Also, it did not have to make the LOI burn, so sending a wet LEM at the moon results in... a crater (it could put itself in orbit, then eventually crash).

[DDE]

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

To add on to everyone's answers, which are correct, BVRAAMs and SAMs just make it pointless when given the option of mounting more ECM equipment.

If I recall correctly though, the latest upgrade to the Tu-22M3 retains the tail gunner position, because the GSh-23 variant it has can launch flares instead.

Gone on Tu-22M3M, but I've heard such a justification previously.

Spoiler

Tu-22M is an interesting story for this question precisely because Tupolev offered a turretless version with more ECM right away, and it was rejected.

[kerbiloid]

We should not forget Il-102 attacker as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-102

Spoiler

 

Was under construction in 1970s and tried to reborn in late 1980s.

But the sneaky 'Muricans dismissed all Sabres long ago, so it didn't succeed.

[K^2]

4 hours ago, tater said:

What lunar lander was 4300 kg?

The LEM was 15-16t, wet. Dry it would just make a crater. Also, it did not have to make the LOI burn, so sending a wet LEM at the moon results in... a crater (it could put itself in orbit, then eventually crash).

Yeah, the 4-5T was just the ascent stage, the part that took off from the Moon. And the CSM, which is what provided braking to park in Lunar orbit and acceleration to return the crew, not to mention the re-entry vehicle, was another 30T or so. The combined total payload to TLI of the Apollo missions was in the 45-50T range, which is way, way beyond capabilities of any rocket currently in operation.

If you wanted to launch Apollo-style mission with what we currently have, you might be able to put something together with a pair of Falcon Heavies, having the crew meet additional hardware on the way to the Moon. You would have to split the CSM into two stages to make it work - one stage to park crew and lander modules in Lunar orbit, and another for the return trip, and then shuffle all these parts between the two launches, but so long as you do a free-return mission, that should be fine. If you screw up the rendezvous and docking on the way to the Moon, you scrub, do a fly-by, and come back to Earth.

Of course, now the plan is to simply send a starship with a Super Heavy, rendering all of this kind of moot.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 hours ago, tater said:

What lunar lander was 4300 kg?

The LEM was 15-16t, wet. Dry it would just make a crater. Also, it did not have to make the LOI burn, so sending a wet LEM at the moon results in... a crater (it could put itself in orbit, then eventually crash).

I did a quick Wikipedia search to compare payload weights. 

(Looks like I'm exposing my institutional ignorance!) 

My curiosity is based on the SLS discussion and knowledge that we send Mars stuff out regularly... 

Never thought about look at dry mass vs wet. 

Thanks for pointing out what must seem obvious! 

 

 

 

<Resident Neanderthal stumbls back into the cave, muttering >

[tater]

Apollo TLI was ~45t. Interestingly SLS Block 2 can just about do that... the trouble is that Orion is far more massive, and has a weak SM.

[kerbiloid]

A minute of conspirology.

Usually the docs and samples of something workable get willingly destroyed when the owner is not going to use them in observable future, and doesn't want to let somebody copy and use them either for somebody's own construction or for somebody's knowledge about the owner's possibilities and technologies providing them.

The Apollo project was a simplified experimental replacement of Lunex when the latter appeared to be too hard for the date.
At least four more Apollos were built to fly to theMoon, but were moonly cancelled and used instead 1 for EPAS and 3 for Skylab.
(As we can see, Lunex was a sibling to the Horizon, a pure military lunar project.)

The lunar race was run for a strange purpose, to put a flag, and finished also in strange way.
The 4 last Apollo flights were cancelled because who needs that Moon anymore. Like if earlier they were expecting a diamond mine, so had paid for four ships more, but -  OMG, what a surprise! - the Moon appeared to be a rocky desert, so disappointed them all and was forgotten for decades.

Then the powerfullest engine in the world, F-1, was quickly forgotten how to make, the owerfullest launch vehicle quickly got out of need and forgotten how to build, the construction bureau (including Von Braun) was dismissed like they hadn't just several years before made them both, all manufacture documentation was lost, and a dark magic eliminated some sacral knowledge from the minds of the engineers, like if they never had seen something bigger than a petard.

And all of that had taken tens of gigabucks just for fun, and was never needed or planned to be used in future.

On the opposite side of the Pacific Gulf the things were looking also strange.
Four expensuve N1 exploded but didn't stop the attempts to get to the Moon even after the Americans.
Six Apollos have landed on the Moon, then made a sudden pause for three years. But the N1 was being developed and optimized, the finish if the Apollo flights didn't stop it, even when already six flags had been stuck into the Moon.

A better version of N1, the N1F was ready to be tested in several months (still to become the second on the Moon), but it suddenly it happened that other four lunar Apollo flights were cancelled.
And immediately the N1 program was cancelled, too. Even without a test of the better version which had already costed additional money.
I.e. it was cancelled not after the first Apollos reached the Moon, but after the second Apollos were stopped from ever flying.

The N1 project was cancelled, all docs and samples were destroyed. This can be understood as "we don't know if we can, but now we don't have need, and let's nobody knows what we can and what we don't".

But immediately an epidemy of destructive madness possessed the American minds, making to completely destroy the successful rocket, ship, engine, documentation, dismiss construction bureau, and clean the memory of the project engineers making them to start singing the delusional nonsense like
"We have forgotten how to make the things we were making for decades and see in the dreams!
We have lost the technologies of 1960s and in 1980s we can't reproduce them again because we forgot how to read the docs and calculate the numbers!
Poor, poor things we are, we forgot everything we could, and even didn't signed numberless copies of those docs in hundreds of offices before making them in metal, so we have no backup copy to reproduce our own work, believe us!"
(This btw feeds the lunar conspiracy, as how could it be. Success, success, success, BANG!  - a control headshot.)

It could be understandable if US had in 1990s same problems like SU had, the economical collapse, the industry degradation, the brain leakage, and so on.
But they didn't.

Obviously, this looks like Saturn, Apollo, F-1, their docs and technologies were not just "lost" or "forgotten" but destroyed to prevent their usage by anybody else, in the situation  when the US got ensured that even the Apollo flights were too hard, let alone a (military) lunar base building, so in several decades the lunar rocket wouldn't be needed by the US, while decades later there will be another rocket based on future technologies.
(If they knew about SLS saga, they would bury backup copies of Saturn/Apollo/F-1 docs on the tropic islands and tattoo the map on everyones head under hair.)

This looks more possible than the epidemy of silliness making to get everything just lost.

And this additionally proves that the lunar race was not for the childish flag planting order, but to get first before the opponent had built his military base and monopolized the Moon.

(If someone wants it as a movie plot, feel free to use, MIT license.)

[SunlitZelkova]

This is going to be fun (I really mean that)!

19 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The Apollo project was a simplified experimental replacement of Lunex when the latter appeared to be too hard for the date.

Apollo was not a replacement for Lunex. Apollo was originally an advanced (in comparison to Mercury) LEO spacecraft that was intended to eventually evolve into a space station program, *kind of* like 7K-OK and 7K-OKS/DOS.

Once Kennedy, without full approval from NASA, decided to land a man on the Moon before 1970, it got converted into a lunar landing program. It should be noted however that it was purely expeditionary, never intended to build a lunar base as Lunex did. Funding was only provided for one G-class mission, four H-class missions, and five J-class missions. The original and actually funded plan never called for a lunar base.

As the first few years of the program past, NASA centers got ambitious and came up with studies and proposals for a lunar base, but these remained as, for all intents and purposes, glorified napkin drawings, with no actual development taking place, and funding never being allocated. They tried to get funding in 1967, but the US government really didn't care about the Apollo program beyond Kennedy's goal and beating the Soviets, so that mindset, in combination with a desire to punish NASA for not being honest to Congress with North American Aviation's behavior that contributed to the Apollo 1 fire, led to little funding being assigned for the Apollo Applications Program- only enough for the Orbital Workshop (OWS) which became Skylab. The lunar base dreams got abandoned because it didn't appear they were going to have more Saturn Vs to launch the base and crews anyways.

Lunex likely got cancelled because of the following reasons-

1. It was too ambitious for its time (spaceplane)

2. There was little to no military value when compared with the need for funding for fighting in Vietnam

3. The Air Force, amidst the squeeze on funding that the Vietnam War caused, saw crewed military spaceflight as one of the easiest things to get rid of. Dynasoar and MOL lived on because their AOR (LEO) had potential value, but even they saw little development work beyond mockups and calculations, and got cancelled eventually too.

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The lunar race was run for a strange purpose, to put a flag, and finished also in strange way.

The Moon Race was not run for a "strange purpose"- just exploration of the Moon. In 1962 when Apollo began, uncrewed probes were constantly failing and the data they could return was extremely limited. Humans were deemed necessary for scientific exploration. Despite the E-8-5 program getting started not that long after, in the psychotic hysteria brought about by Gagarin's flight and the Red Scare in general, it made perfect sense.

It did not finish in a strange way, as we will see below.

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The 4 last Apollo flights were cancelled because who needs that Moon anymore. Like if earlier they were expecting a diamond mine, so had paid for four ships more, but -  OMG, what a surprise! - the Moon appeared to be a rocky desert, so disappointed them all and was forgotten for decades.

On the opposite side of the Pacific Gulf the things were looking also strange.
Four expensuve N1 exploded but didn't stop the attempts to get to the Moon even after the Americans.
Six Apollos have landed on the Moon, then made a sudden pause for three years. But the N1 was being developed and optimized, the finish if the Apollo flights didn't stop it, even when already six flags had been stuck into the Moon.

A better version of N1, the N1F was ready to be tested in several months (still to become the second on the Moon), but it suddenly it happened that other four lunar Apollo flights were cancelled.
And immediately the N1 program was cancelled, too. Even without a test of the better version which had already costed additional money.
I.e. it was cancelled not after the first Apollos reached the Moon, but after the second Apollos were stopped from ever flying.

There was nothing sudden about the cancellation of the latter Apollo flights.

Congress did not give funding for further Saturn IB and Saturn V construction in 1968, so not only were there no further batches, but even some vehicles that had been ordered were then cancelled. Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970 in order to use the Saturn V to launch the aforementioned Orbital Workshop (which would be named Skylab the following month). Apollo 15 and Apollo 19 were cancelled in September 1970 as a result of budget cuts, with the numbering scheme of course being altered so that the first J-class mission (originally Apollo 16) would become Apollo 15, and so on.

The L3 program wasn't cancelled after Apollo 11 because of the following reasons-

1. They had funding and a schedule. You don't just stop development after spending so much time.

2. The Soviets still nonetheless could have attempted to reach the Moon, in the same manner that the US didn't just cancel Mercury and jump to Apollo because Vostok beat Mercury-Redstone.

As stated above, the Apollo missions were cancelled long before N1 and L3 development got cancelled. Thus the N1 was not cancelled because of Apollo. More likely, once Glushko replaced the problematic Mishin as head of TsKBEM, he decided to cancel it on his own initiative, for the following reasons-

1. He disliked it due to its design and supposedly to a lesser extent, because of the falling out with Korolev

2. He understood that the Moon Race was over and would not receive further support from the Communist Party, government, and military. The military (at least Grechko) in particular hated the whole thing and felt it was a distraction from achieving deep nuclear parity with NATO

3. The focus was on space stations, and would soon turn to countering the Space Shuttle threat as well

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Then the powerfullest engine in the world, F-1, was quickly forgotten how to make, the owerfullest launch vehicle quickly got out of need and forgotten how to build, the construction bureau (including Von Braun) was dismissed like they hadn't just several years before made them both, all manufacture documentation was lost, and a dark magic eliminated some sacral knowledge from the minds of the engineers, like if they never had seen something bigger than a petard.

And all of that had taken tens of gigabucks just for fun, and was never needed or planned to be used in future.

But immediately an epidemy of destructive madness possessed the American minds, making to completely destroy the successful rocket, ship, engine, documentation, dismiss construction bureau, and clean the memory of the project engineers making them to start singing the delusional nonsense like
"We have forgotten how to make the things we were making for decades and see in the dreams!
We have lost the technologies of 1960s and in 1980s we can't reproduce them again because we forgot how to read the docs and calculate the numbers!
Poor, poor things we are, we forgot everything we could, and even didn't signed numberless copies of those docs in hundreds of offices before making them in metal, so we have no backup copy to reproduce our own work, believe us!"
(This btw feeds the lunar conspiracy, as how could it be. Success, success, success, BANG!  - a control headshot.)

This is not true. Documentation did survive, but as it was the contractors responsible for doing everything else, including manufacturing equipment and so on, it just didn't get saved. This happens everywhere. No one remembers how to mass produce P-51s or steam locomotives. Trying to restart production of those would be an equal challenge to restarting Saturn V production.

As documentation did survive, a Saturn V derivative with an improved F-1 engine called the Comet HLV was proposed as part of the First Lunar Outpost study of the post-SEI 1990s. It didn't get approved (the International Space Station got chosen instead), but it could have been done. After all, use of J-2 derivatives has been continuously proposed for different rockets since the 1990s.

It doesn't really make sense now though that Starship is being developed.

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Obviously, this looks like Saturn, Apollo, F-1, their docs and technologies were not just "lost" or "forgotten" but destroyed to prevent their usage by anybody else, in the situation  when the US got ensured that even the Apollo flights were too hard, let alone a (military) lunar base building, so in several decades the lunar rocket wouldn't be needed by the US, while decades later there will be another rocket based on future technologies.
(If they knew about SLS saga, they would bury backup copies of Saturn/Apollo/F-1 docs on the tropic islands and tattoo the map on everyones head under hair.)

This looks more possible than the epidemy of silliness making to get everything just lost.

And this additionally proves that the lunar race was not for the childish flag planting order, but to get first before the opponent had built his military base and monopolized the Moon.

There is no evidence of this. To do this, thousands of contractors would have to be told to keep on the hush, which would be impossible.

What happened was completely normal and natural, with no nefarious motive behind it, as evidenced by the above.

------

That's not to say there wasn't some military aspect to the lunar programs of the two countries, but the evidence provided above does not point to such a conclusion.

[Jacke]

29 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

This is going to be fun (I really mean that)!

What @SunlitZelkova says about the US and USSR space exploration actions in the 1960's and 1970's jives with my knowledge of the period.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Apollo was not a replacement for Lunex.

It was not a practical replacement, but it was started because the Lunex appeared to be hardly implementable to the date, so they needed an experimental ship to work out the lunar flights at all.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Apollo was originally an advanced (in comparison to Mercury) LEO spacecraft that was intended to eventually evolve into a space station program,

Advanced - compared to the Mercury. Very simplified - compared to the original lunar plans of late 1950s.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

*kind of* like 7K-OK and 7K-OKS/DOS.

7K appeared much later, after Voskhods, as a usage of the cancelled orbital base (Soyuz or Zvezda) supply ship Sever.

DOS was a pure improvisation based on expropriated Almaz instances, after the original DOS versions failed before being engineered.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Once Kennedy, without full approval from NASA, decided to land a man on the Moon before 1970, it got converted into a lunar landing program.

The Apollo program was signed by Eisenhower, before Kennedy became the president. As well, the F-1 engine was based on the earlier E-1 one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

Kennedy just gave the green light to the existing projects because they were already existing.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The original and actually funded plan never called for a lunar base.

The Apollo program wasn't. The project from which the Apollo studies had started, was.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

As the first few years of the program past, NASA centers got ambitious and came up with studies and proposals for a lunar base

These proposals were officially in development since 1958 (Horizon Project), and unlikely NASA officers would ever suggest something before getting sure that the idea is already accepted or even running.
Because the officials are people without fantasy but always strongly armored with paperwork plates, otherwise nobody would assign them to manage billions of governmental USD.

The NASA proposals were just a pale shadow of what was officially expected originally.
The Horizon base was officially requiring hundrdeds of Saturn family launches, years before NASA suggested anything.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Lunex likely got cancelled because of the following reasons-

1. It was too ambitious for its time

Exactly for this reason they first tried something smaller, Apollo.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

2. There was little to no military value when compared with the need for funding for fighting in Vietnam

1. US entered the Vietnam war in 1963, while Mercury was launched two years earlier, and the lunar program has started in 1958.

2. During the Vietnam war US have replaced Atlas with Titan I, then Titan I with Titan II and Minuteman. And several generations of Nike.
So, if/as the lunar race purpose was to prevent the Russians from building their lunar fortress first, the Vietnam war would play no role at all, because the military value is the ability of a sudden or revenge rocket strike from the Moon back, compared to which the Indochina politics was meaning nothing.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Dynasoar and MOL lived on because their AOR (LEO) had potential value

Dynasoar was a USAF pet project, and it was another purpose: a suborbital bomber + orbital recon for that bomber.

MOL was an attempt to save the Gemini project by joining at least anything running, and to save money required for the KH-10 "Dorian" 2-m spy telescope with lifespan of 2 months and (as usually) 90% of films full of shots of clouds.
So, MOL was an attempt to 
1. Make the KH-10 clever and shoot only clear land and exact targets.
2. Have a USAF duty recon to be launched at any time in any direction and stay in LEO while the hot phase of the nuclear war is running.
3. Make somebody adopt poor Gemini.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The Moon Race was not run for a "strange purpose"- just exploration of the Moon. In 1962 when Apollo began, uncrewed probes were constantly failing and the data they could return was extremely limited.

Nobody but scientists needed the lunar stones for that price.  And nobody cares what they need for that price. Definitely not 25 G of old bucks and definitely not (quoting you) during the Vietnam War, lol.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Humans were deemed necessary for scientific exploration.

Humans with money not so much. This exploration couldn't bring any profit.

All slogans about the new materials and so on get broken by one simple question: was it needed to fly to the Moon to develop these materials and technologies and start selling them?

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Despite the E-8-5 program getting started not that long after, in the psychotic hysteria brought about by Gagarin's flight and the Red Scare in general, it made perfect sense.

E-8 was a continuation of the previous E-#, and started in 1960, before the humans started flying, and it was a part of the Red Scare which forced to start running the US lunar program, as it looks like.
Because what if the Russians have built a fortress first.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Congress did not give funding for further Saturn IB and Saturn V construction in 1968

Congress alrerady had given funding for the four Apollos later utilized in LEO. It was not give the further funding.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970 in order to use the Saturn V to launch the aforementioned Orbital Workshop (which would be named Skylab the following month). Apollo 15 and Apollo 19 were cancelled in September 1970 as a result of budget cuts

They were cancelled as lunar flights. But the hardware was used in LEO flights, with smaller Saturns.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

1. They had funding and a schedule. You don't just stop development after spending so much time.

Easily. A lot of projects stop being funded. 

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

2. The Soviets still nonetheless could have attempted to reach the Moon, in the same manner that the US didn't just cancel Mercury and jump to Apollo because Vostok beat Mercury-Redstone.

The Soviets didn't declare their efforts to reach the Moon, and kept them in secret till late 1980s, so nobody in the world just would know if they stop trying.
IRL they just declared that the probes have brought the ground, and the money are better used for the orbital station, so the Americans were looking winners in a noone's else race.

Mercury and Vostok are not connected. The former is a rocket head with a man inside, the latter is a standard high-altitude balloon cabin adapted to space flight.

They didn't jump to Apollo, they needed a smaller test ship before building Apollo,
Later it evolved into Mercury II aka Gemini for more complex tests.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

More likely, once Glushko replaced the problematic Mishin as head of TsKBEM, he decided to cancel it on his own initiative, for the following reasons-

1. He disliked it due to its design and supposedly to a lesser extent, because of the falling out with Korolev

Glushko preferences played no role here.
He was assigned by government, and followed the plans of the government. The government decided to cancel N-1 right before the test of its improved version.
If he was ordered to continue N-1, he would continue N-1.
But he wasn't, so with pleasure cancelled it and destroyed all ttraces. But his pleasure doesn't play a role.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

He understood that the Moon Race was over

He immediately started his own lunar project, LEK, much greater than the Korolev's one.
Energy is a simplified rocket from his lunar project after instead of the Moon he was ordered to build a shuttle.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The focus was on space stations,

The space stations were based on the Chelomei's lunar project, UR-500 as Proton and LK-1 as a fly-by ship (which in turn was derived from the earlier orbital recon/inspector/interceptor family of projects).

The station hull is made of the ICBM (including Proton)  fuel tanks, and it was a plan of a lunar Almaz with return ship in the nose.

And they have focused on the orbital stations after the Apollo reborn was cancelled by Congress, three years since the last Apollo return from the Moon.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Documentation did survive, but as it was the contractors responsible for doing everything else, including manufacturing equipment and so on, it just didn't get saved.

Then what's the problem to reproduce Saturn-V / F-1, forget the Apollo.
It's tested and anyway not worse than SLS.

Who cares if the tech is old, if the new tech is not better and still can't fly?
Battleships are built in 1940s, and who cares? 

The common use documentation survived, we can download it from internet, but what about the manufacturing documentation?
That one which you give to the workers with exact list of details and their blueprints, with technological notices?
What are the mystic technologies of 1960s which can't be reproduced in 2000s?

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

This happens everywhere.

Any other known government-funded  25 bln USD megarockets whose docs were not saved by the manufacturers?
Especially in the Country of Lawyers where they refer to the Queen Victoria times precedents?

(Energy is not an example, there were no known social events in USA).

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

No one remembers how to mass produce P-51s or steam locomotives.
Trying to restart production of those would be an equal challenge to restarting Saturn V production.

Nobody will ever need P-51, as it was just one of tens of other such planes. Just build another piston plane.
The steam locomotives are rather simple and rather alive. If it's required, the locomotives can be manufactured very quickly and easily. (Let alone the countless stored ones).

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

It doesn't really make sense now though that Starship is being developed.

I would remind that SLS is being developed either, and the government has already paid for Saturn. And Saturn had better energetic characteristics.

The Starship (more accurate - SuperHeavy) is currently the same as N-1. Once it flies as planned, it won't be.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

There is no evidence of this. To do this, thousands of contractors would have to be told to keep on the hush, which would be impossible.

1. All these contractors are paid by government for that, The budget funding is what can take your soul out, sell it for nothing, and still let you stay happy that you didn't get into problems about a (let it be dollar) not proven with a signed papersheet.
Of course, any budget contractor would try to keep the docs in the dry and safe place of the archive in case if twenty years later the audition wants to check it because ten years later it had appeared that something went wrong in your product.

2. They sign all their docs and give their copies to the opposite contract side, i.e. to the government official (who in turn wants a paper that he hasn't signed something wrong).
So, backup copies of any significant part of the project would stay in different places.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

There is no evidence of this.

That's why I say "it looks like" everywhere.

(In addition to the obvious fact that I have no care at all about the American taxes distribution, lol.)

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

What happened was completely normal and natural

For Redstone or Jupiter, but not for Saturn V and Apollo.

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

That's not to say there wasn't some military aspect to the lunar programs of the two countries, but the evidence provided above does not point to such a conclusion.

I see this explanation as the only counter-hypothesis to the lunar conspiracy which tells that US never flied to the Moon, so the scrapped the mockups.

Also if you read the Project Horizon docs (still available somewhere in internet, but removed about two years ago from the wiki links with the whole site), they are anything but Zubrin-like fantasy.

Edited December 30, 2021 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Kennedy just gave the green light to the existing projects because they were already existing

You would have to understand American politics to know how remarkable that is (was).  His 'enthusiastic support' speech assured its survival and success (from a financial /politics standpoint - enabling the technical). 

Funny thing is that Democrats forget that Kennedy was even more of a Cold Warrior than Reagan. 

... 

I think you are missing something simpler - remember, "When you hear hooves, think 'horses' not 'zebras'! " 

You should remember that the 70s was a relatively stagnant economic time.  Major transitions afoot.  Democrats shifted to the naval-gazing strategy of domestic policy and the Republicans followed suit later with the 'me, me, ME! Look at how RICH I am!' stuff of the 80s and the Evangelical religious culture war with the rest of America ramping up.  Reagan/Bush did not start a revolution - they were the culmination of the old way. 

Some legacy policies did get finished - but by the mid 90s America was almost exclusively naval-gazing.  Anything that did not advance one sides' domestic agenda or the other was a side show or prestige piece. 

Even 9-11 could not shift that. 

Edited December 30, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[SOXBLOX]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_in_spaceflight#By_country

Interesting spaceflight statistics from Wikipedia. This year, China flew a few rockets more than the US. The most-launched series of vehicle was the Long March, but the most-launched individual type of rocket was the Falcon 9. Most reliable launcher in current service also goes to the Falcon 9, with the Block 5 having a 100% success rate (78/78).

[kerbiloid]

13 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You would have to understand American politics to know how remarkable that is (was).  His 'enthusiastic support' speech assured its survival and success (from a financial /politics standpoint - enabling the technical).

I don't doubt that Kennedy gave it a launch kick, but the technical part of plan was officially put on the table by Eisenhower, thus Kennedy just had to choose if start it.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

I don't doubt that Kennedy gave it a launch kick, but the technical part of plan was officially put on the table by Eisenhower, thus Kennedy just had to choose if start it.

Kinda my point. 

Notice who gets the street cred, tho.  Pretty easy decision. 

 

[kerbiloid]

51 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

You should remember that the 70s was a relatively stagnant economic time.  Major transitions afoot.  Democrats shifted to the naval-gazing strategy of domestic policy and the Republicans followed suit later with the 'me, me, ME! Look at how RICH I am!' stuff of the 80s and the Evangelical religious culture war with the rest of America ramping up.  Reagan/Bush did not start a revolution - they were the culmination of the old way. 

This didn't affect the military stuff (Peacekeepers and Midgetmans, Tridents I and II, Pershing 2, ground-based BGM-109 are from the 70s). 
The lunar flights just for flag planting wasn't essential in 1960s, too. And the v8 cars and oceanic ships were not less actual.

In late 1960s-early 1970s (exactly the financial worldwide crysis preceding the 1973 world energetical crysis) they cancelled a bunch of space projects: Dynasoar, MOL, Orion, and Saturn/Apollo look not outstanding here.
Orion was cancelled due to the nuke prohibition (at least, officially).
MOL was cancelled because better electronics allowed to exchange with ground with images in real time, so the crew got useless like the films and film capsules, and they replaced the whole KH-10, including MOL, with better and crewless KH-11.
Military's Dynasoar was cancelled for financial (probably cause by its niobium shield cost, lol) reasons but immediately before starting another spaceplane, under the common NASA and military control.
These two also took the USAF Titan rockets from the crewed flights, so maybe that was some military's competitors' win.
(As both the KH-11 compatible Shuttle and KH-11 were first of all recons, probably of those who do the reconning, like now the ULA is competed by somebody unknown and definitely not friendly to the ICBM solid booster brothership, but requiring a lot of launches in peace time and preferrably a network of sats around the Earth.)

And this anyway unlikely affected the secrecy and archives, so the ability to just build Saturn V after blowing dust from the papers.

I would expect that once the focus shifted from the space, and the tech got unneeded in the foreseeable then-future, all this would be archived and stored.
But what looks more critical for that time, nobody probably thought that in 2000s they will have no rocket comparable to Saturn-V, so it was more important to prevent anyone's else abilities to reproduce it).

Edited December 30, 2021 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

17 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

important to prevent anyone's else abilities to reproduce

Too much credit given for both paranoia and forward thinking. 

America is a place of cluttered basements. 

 

This is more likely:

 

 

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

This didn't affect the military stuff (Peacekeepers and Midgetmans, Tridents I and II, Pershing 2, ground-based BGM-109 are from the 70s). 
The lunar flights just for flag planting wasn't essential in 1960s, too. And the v8 cars and oceanic ships were not less actual.

In late 1960s-early 1970s (exactly the financial worldwide crysis preceding the 1973 world energetical crysis) they cancelled a bunch of space projects: Dynasoar, MOL, Orion, and Saturn/Apollo look not outstanding here.
Orion was cancelled due to the nuke prohibition (at least, officially).
MOL was cancelled because better electronics allowed to exchange with ground with images in real time, so the crew got useless like the films and film capsules, and they replaced the whole KH-10, including MOL, with better and crewless KH-11.
Military's Dynasoar was cancelled for financial (probably cause by its niobium shield cost, lol) reasons but immediately before starting another spaceplane, under the common NASA and military control.
These two also took the USAF Titan rockets from the crewed flights, so maybe that was some military's competitors' win.
(As both the KH-11 compatible Shuttle and KH-11 were first of all recons, probably of those who do the reconning, like now the ULA is competed by somebody unknown and definitely not friendly to the ICBM solid booster brothership, but requiring a lot of launches in peace time and preferrably a network of sats around the Earth.)

And this anyway unlikely affected the secrecy and archives, so the ability to just build Saturn V after blowing dust from the papers.

I would expect that once the focus shifted from the space, and the tech got unneeded in the foreseeable then-future, all this would be archived and stored.
But what looks more critical for that time, nobody probably thought that in 2000s they will have no rocket comparable to Saturn-V, so it was more important to prevent anyone's else abilities to reproduce it).

Lots of 50-60 programs became an wast of money as technology advanced. Also the 70's regression killed lots of prestige mega projects like the Saturn 5. 
We have pretty good blueprints of the Saturn 5, likely some subcontractors simply archived their designs deep then the program got canceled simply so the government could not grab them. The real problem building an Saturn 5 today is that so many of the sub components are no longer made. 
And while modern machine shops with CAM has worked very well creating limiting run of vintage engine parts rockets are much more complex than vintage cars. 

Its an reason the US keep the M1 production line up even if they have enough tanks, closing it and restarting it in 10 years will be much more expensive.
Gun and armor is nice, engine is decent but could be improved. You want more active defenses and probably using an unmanned turret and much more sensors.

 

[kerbiloid]

34 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

We have pretty good blueprints of the Saturn 5

The manufacturing doesn't need just the blueprint. It needs exact specifications, drawings, various low-level stuff for the workers.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

The manufacturing doesn't need just the blueprint. It needs exact specifications, drawings, various low-level stuff for the workers.

And tooling.

[SunlitZelkova]

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It was not a practical replacement, but it was started because the Lunex appeared to be hardly implementable to the date, so they needed an experimental ship to work out the lunar flights at all.

Apollo had no relation to Lunex or a lunar base. It's pure intention was to land men on the Moon before 1970- and then that was it. It was not a developmental program to work towards a lunar base.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The Apollo program was signed by Eisenhower, before Kennedy became the president. As well, the F-1 engine was based on the earlier E-1 one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

Kennedy just gave the green light to the existing projects because they were already existing.

Kennedy did not greenlight an existing project. He altered the nature of Apollo.

As I mentioned earlier Apollo, as conceived during the Eisenhower administration, was an Earth orbital spacecraft that was intended to evolve into a space station.

Kennedy did not receive approval from NASA prior to announcing his goal of landing a man on the Moon prior to 1970. Apollo as we know it (a lunar landing program) did not come to fruition until after his 1961 address to Congress.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The project from which the Apollo studies had started, was.

But those projects that included a lunar base were never approved. And therefore Apollo could not have been military related as you claim, because there is no connection between Apollo and Lunex/Horizon.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

These proposals were officially in development since 1958 (Horizon Project), and unlikely NASA officers would ever suggest something before getting sure that the idea is already accepted or even running.
Because the officials are people without fantasy but always strongly armored with paperwork plates, otherwise nobody would assign them to manage billions of governmental USD.

The NASA proposals were just a pale shadow of what was officially expected originally.
The Horizon base was officially requiring hundrdeds of Saturn family launches, years before NASA suggested anything.

Project Horizon was a US Army project created by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA). It got rejected by Washington D.C. as Eisenhower despised the concept of military control over space exploration. It has no connection to NASA, apart from the fact that the people who created it ended up becoming part of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

NASA has and continues to create proposals that are pure fantasy. Just read the Integrated Program Plan, proposed in 1969-

http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/01/thinking-big-traffic-model-for-nasa.html

This was NASA's "serious" post-Apollo proposal, and it was a total joke. It called for two lunar landings in 1974 and one in 1975- despite Apollo 20 already having been cancelled and Saturn V production basically having halted.

Project Horizon was never "expected officially". It was a poor attempt by the Army to wrestle control of crewed spaceflight from NASA, ARPA, and the rest of the military.

Meanwhile, NASA proposals from the 60s were just the fantasies of engineers and scientists of the time. The US government had no interest in crewed spaceflight outside of fulfilling the late President Kennedy's goal he set for the nation.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

1. US entered the Vietnam war in 1963, while Mercury was launched two years earlier, and the lunar program has started in 1958.

2. During the Vietnam war US have replaced Atlas with Titan I, then Titan I with Titan II and Minuteman. And several generations of Nike.
So, if/as the lunar race purpose was to prevent the Russians from building their lunar fortress first, the Vietnam war would play no role at all, because the military value is the ability of a sudden or revenge rocket strike from the Moon back, compared to which the Indochina politics was meaning nothing.

The US had advisors in Vietnam since the 1950s, and the US military was itching to get involved further throughout the entire period prior to the actual start of the war.

Why would they start a billion dollar program with dubious return when they were far more eager to deploy American combat troops to Vietnam as quickly as possible.

ICBMs are very different from a worthless military lunar outpost. The military lunar outpost in the 1960s was questionable, ICBMs were a key portion of the bedrock of security at the time.

There is no evidence either side considered the possibility of Moon based missile strike to be real. Vietnam was considered vital to the US strategic position in the Cold War, for propaganda reasons and as a base to contain communist influence in Asia.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And nobody cares what they need for that price. Definitely not 25 G of old bucks and definitely not (quoting you) during the Vietnam War, lol.

Humans with money not so much. This exploration couldn't bring any profit.

People, even the US government, did, for the following reasons-

1. The feeling the US was behind the Soviet Union in science and technology and, most importantly, making the right investments in science and the nation's future. Hence Kennedy's emphasis on "America's choice" to go to the Moon.

2. Kennedy made the proposal and was assassinated. It would be dishonorable to abandon the goal he set for the nation, just as many felt it would be dishonorable to abandon his commitment to civil rights.

That was worth anything to the people who controlled the purse.

People did speak out against it as the Vietnam War intensified and "social consciousness" became a thing. This is why the latter portion of the program got cancelled.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

All slogans about the new materials and so on get broken by one simple question: was it needed to fly to the Moon to develop these materials and technologies and start selling them?

I never mentioned "spinoffs" as a reason for support of the lunar program.

Therefore this is invalid as evidence towards some nefarious ulterior motive for Apollo.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

E-8 was a continuation of the previous E-#, and started in 1960, before the humans started flying, and it was a part of the Red Scare which forced to start running the US lunar program, as it looks like.
Because what if the Russians have built a fortress first.

The lunar sample return project itself did not start until much later.

Just because you say "Apollo was related to military matters" does not mean that is true, unless you provide evidence.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The Soviets didn't declare their efforts to reach the Moon, and kept them in secret till late 1980s, so nobody in the world just would know if they stop trying.
IRL they just declared that the probes have brought the ground, and the money are better used for the orbital station, so the Americans were looking winners in a noone's else race.

Mercury and Vostok are not connected. The former is a rocket head with a man inside, the latter is a standard high-altitude balloon cabin adapted to space flight.

They didn't jump to Apollo, they needed a smaller test ship before building Apollo,
Later it evolved into Mercury II aka Gemini for more complex tests.

No one outside of the Soviet and Chinese blocs believed there wasn't a "Moon Race" going on. Regardless of what actual intelligence the public had access to, people believed it to be a thing.

The matter of prestige was still under consideration by the Soviet government. Landing a woman on the Moon was considered to be an option to give the seemingly inferior L3 complex some propaganda value over Apollo, among other things, and while these were mere passing suggestions, it does nonetheless provide evidence of a propaganda motive for the Soviet crewed lunar program, even past 1969.

In any case, the final Apollo missions were cancelled in 1970, thus the argument that the cancellation of the N1 and L3 in 1974 is related to Apollo and thus that provides evidence of some military competition is unfounded.

From the NASA-US point of view, Mercury and Vostok were in competition with each other to put the first man in space. This was the next major goal following Sputnik, with further robotic exploration (Moon, Mars, Venus) being its own little side show. Even after Vostok "stole" this achievement from the Americans, they didn't just close down Mercury and start right away for the Moon with Apollo, they continued with it.

"Jump to Apollo" was in reference to the goal, and thus the projects under development to achieve the goal, changing. Mercury flights continued despite Apollo having been announced shortly after Alan Shepard's flight.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Glushko preferences played no role here.
He was assigned by government, and followed the plans of the government. The government decided to cancel N-1 right before the test of its improved version.
If he was ordered to continue N-1, he would continue N-1.
But he wasn't, so with pleasure cancelled it and destroyed all ttraces. But his pleasure doesn't play a role.

Glushko signed the order. This is the point in my statement.

As I mentioned, outside reasons forced its cancellation. But he could have argued for its continuation, but did not.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

He immediately started his own lunar project, LEK, much greater than the Korolev's one.

LEK and Vulkan were basically just scribbles in comparison with the N1 and L3. N1 had flight test articles, L3 had flight test articles, and studies were conducted on the ergonomics and design of a lunar base. As far as I am aware, this level of investment did not occur with Vulkan and LEK.

He tried to get it approved as a pure scientific project, with no relation to what the Americans were doing. But Keldysh, the military, and the government felt a Space Shuttle counter was the main priority and a lunar base should wait until after 2000, so it did not get approved.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The space stations were based on the Chelomei's lunar project

Yes, but there is no evidence LK-1/the flyby projects in general had any relation to military missions to the Moon.

UR-500 was an ICBM deliberately designed to work as a launch vehicle as well, but that doesn't indicate there was an intention to build a military base on the Moon. The Ministry of Medium Machine-Building and the RVSN had deep ties to the space program so using one rocket was a matter of convenience.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Then what's the problem to reproduce Saturn-V / F-1, forget the Apollo.
It's tested and anyway not worse than SLS.

Because restarting the production lines would take more money and effort than using existing Shuttle development and contractors.

Apollo was not an ideal system cost wise. LOR is an expensive mission profile for anything more than a few expeditions (and all NASA plans since Apollo have included a lunar base in the proposal). If it would cost enormous amounts of money to restart Saturn V production for a vehicle with similar performance and cost anyways, it makes more sense to build using Shuttle components.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Who cares if the tech is old, if the new tech is not better and still can't fly?
Battleships are built in 1940s, and who cares?

Because it costs more to restart dead production lines.

Battleships are a poor comparison because the US Navy actually kept maintenance equipment and new parts production lines intact.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The common use documentation survived, we can download it from internet, but what about the manufacturing documentation?
That one which you give to the workers with exact list of details and their blueprints, with technological notices?
What are the mystic technologies of 1960s which can't be reproduced in 2000s?

They could be, but it costs enormous amounts of money in comparison with utilizing existing Shuttle suppliers.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Any other known government-funded  25 bln USD megarockets whose docs were not saved by the manufacturers?
Especially in the Country of Lawyers where they refer to the Queen Victoria times precedents?

(Energy is not an example, there were no known social events in USA).

Manufacturers are private entities. They don't utilize space for something they don't need. Ask Boeing to "just build" a DC-3 again, and you will find that they will have a hard time getting it together.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Nobody will ever need P-51, as it was just one of tens of other such planes. Just build another piston plane.
The steam locomotives are rather simple and rather alive. If it's required, the locomotives can be manufactured very quickly and easily. (Let alone the countless stored ones).

Nobody needed a Saturn V. It wasn't just Boeing building the S-IC stage, there were hundreds of other contractors involved. Many companies likely don't exist anymore. There is no need to keep machines, tooling, etc. for something no one is going to build in the future.

Likely, in the early 70s as the production lines closed for good, many thought "if they are going to return to the Moon, just build another rocket". Apollo was done, and there was no reason in keeping Apollo production lines intact when nobody was going to be buying Apollos.

I am talking about actually existing designs, not just old technology. Trying to manufacture a steam locomotive from 1938 would be an expensive task, just as trying to restart production of any old piece of equipment would be.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I would remind that SLS is being developed either, and the government has already paid for Saturn. And Saturn had better energetic characteristics.

The Saturn V is basically extinct outside of museums. Restarting production would cost more than just using existing Shuttle suppliers.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

1. All these contractors are paid by government for that, The budget funding is what can take your soul out, sell it for nothing, and still let you stay happy that you didn't get into problems about a (let it be dollar) not proven with a signed papersheet.
Of course, any budget contractor would try to keep the docs in the dry and safe place of the archive in case if twenty years later the audition wants to check it because ten years later it had appeared that something went wrong in your product.

This is simply absurd. People have talked about graver things for nothing, we would certainly know if there was some master plan to wipe the production related documents of the Saturn V off the face of the Earth.

The Saturn V did not utilize budget contractors. They would have no reason to keep documentation and manufacturing equipment stored because it was clear no one would utilize it any time soon. This happens with everything.

Many of the contractors likely just don't exist anymore, because they lost their business when the very exclusive Shuttle took over.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

2. They sign all their docs and give their copies to the opposite contract side, i.e. to the government official (who in turn wants a paper that he hasn't signed something wrong).
So, backup copies of any significant part of the project would stay in different places.

The government doesn't get copies of documents dealing with how to manufacture X component, utilize X machine involved in manufacturing the component, etc. They get what deals with the component itself, and that is it. They don't deal with the minute details of the manufacturing process.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

That's why I say "it looks like" everywhere.

"It looks like" is not suffice to make statements regarding actual facts and history.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I see this explanation as the only counter-hypothesis to the lunar conspiracy which tells that US never flied to the Moon, so the scrapped the mockups.

There is no need for a "counter hypothesis". There is simply no evidence of "fake lunar landing" claims, and such claims can be debunked by the actually existing facts, not some other theory.

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Also if you read the Project Horizon docs (still available somewhere in internet, but removed about two years ago from the wiki links with the whole site), they are anything but Zubrin-like fantasy.

Men on the Moon in April 1965 (with a 1959 start date) was just as silly as SpaceX's "humans on Mars in 2024 with Starship".

21 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I don't doubt that Kennedy gave it a launch kick, but the technical part of plan was officially put on the table by Eisenhower, thus Kennedy just had to choose if start it.

21 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Notice who gets the street cred, tho.  Pretty easy decision.

Apollo under Eisenhower was an orbital spaceflight program intended to evolve into a space station. Up until Kennedy's address to Congress, a crewed lunar orbital mission or flyby was considered by NASA as something for the 1970s, with a lunar landing in the 1980s. During Eisenhower's tenure, military crewed lunar proposals were nothing more than vain attempts to get control of crewed spaceflight from NASA and ARPA.

The Apollo program as we know it (crewed lunar landings) was very much Kennedy's baby, with no relation to Eisenhower.

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

This didn't affect the military stuff (Peacekeepers and Midgetmans, Tridents I and II, Pershing 2, ground-based BGM-109 are from the 70s). 
The lunar flights just for flag planting wasn't essential in 1960s, too.

Except it was essential. It was a challenge given to the nation by Kennedy. Normally nobody would care what a politician told everybody to do a few years ago, but Kennedy was assassinated. It was felt that completing some of his popular goals was a way of honoring him. The goals of his that the government of the time chose to complete were civil rights and the lunar landing.

Edited December 31, 2021 by SunlitZelkova
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