Falling space junk (Hold the anchovies)

[hirez]

The realisation that I am/was a complete spaceflight junkie was kicked into me by the series of comments on miss_soap's journal. Of course, it's obvious now that I think about it. As a (pre) teen I grooved (for it was the seventies) on the Apollo coverage, Reg Turnbull, James Burke, Gerry Anderson's diesel-powered heavy plant, the Apollo-Soyuz mission, Skylab, Mir, Buran, pre-86 Shuttle, Tomorrow's World and even Maria von Schell in an ugly beige jumpsuit.

Mind, this is the same Tomorrow's World that published a book in which they went on at great length about mining for manganese modules on the seabed, as evidenced by the Hughes Corporation's Glomar Explorer. The fact that this was a cover story invented by the CIA to divert attention from the real project - raising a sunken Russian K-boat - is... Unfortunate, given the circumstances of this post.

Which is that it's beyond me why anyone would give credence to the Apollo hoax rumours. I've spent the last couple of days wandering through NASA, Encyclopaedia Astronautica and Wikipaedia and my impression remains that anyone who voluntarily straps themselves onto the point end of a huge firework built by gummint contract is significantly braver than I am. Fancy spending a week in a small cone with two other blokes and no bog (See, if it had all been done by Hollywood, the bizarre American prudery when it comes to bodily functions would have ensured that all space vehicles came with an upstairs closet, rather than adult Pampers. Seriously. Read the story of the Apollo 8 mission) then descending to another planet in a device about the size of an Austin Mini, with a flight computer about as powerful as a mid-80s HP programmamble that crashed repeatedly during that descent? Not my idea of a good time.

It became depressingly clear during the Challenger investigation that is was a miracle any of it worked at all.

This explains why we're earthbound. (found via reddragdiva and sclerotic_rings)

Comments

[razornet.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. but as pointed out by baxter and a fair number of NASA's own R&D people if they ditched the overblown safety testing and allowed people to make heros of themselves we would be on Mars right now. There are plenty of people exist who would happily attempt the moon strapped to an ICBM with nothing more than a vacuum suit. Myself included.

The reason we're planet bound is that it's no-long politically convenient to throw money at a space program, it's going to be the chinese or private enterprise who take us to the stars if we ever go at all.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Um. NASA's entirely broken 'safety' is another reason they're in their current mess. They may (or may not) test a lot, but they seem to entirely fail to act on it, other than to fudge the results for Management.

See final link for why the private sector isn't going into space. They can't even make the trains run on time.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

X-Prize?

Give the private sector the confidence we could keep the He₃ we shake'n'bake on the moon, we'll be there tomorrow nigga, yo. The Sovs already built all the tech we need, and at a price that's right.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I point again at the last document linked.

I'm fairly keen to be able to steam off up to the moon as a paying punter, but all I can see from the X-Prize is:

a) Wobbly sub-orbital hop with single driver
b) Some businessy things
c) Lunar profit!

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

At least there is a step b in this plan :-)

There is no commercial interest in the moon because a) no-one has a working fusion reactor yet and b) the moon is wrapped up in stupid UN treaties that effectively preclude commercial resource extraction. He₃ is set to be the most precious commodity ever once a couple of pre-requisites are met... and it's there for the taking on the moon's surface.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

if they ditched the overblown safety testing and allowed people to make heros of themselves

Or alternately, we'd have a bunch of heroic dead astronauts and still not have placed a working Saturn into orbit.

I'm reading "Stages to Saturn" at the moment, a hardcore engineering history of the Saturn launcher. Damn good stuff, particularly on engineering QA. They built all those Saturns and every one worked right first time (except the one left over). Now show me modern software anything like that reliable?

NASA didn't break (and it surely is now) until after Apollo.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Actually I think it's the sheer ridiculous unfeasibility of launching someone into quite so much unknown which makes the allegations of faking so appealing to some.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm. Hoofing a series of Septics up to the moon == more likely than some comic-fondling oik has the soul of a dragon.

[reddragdiva]

"Which is that it's beyond me why anyone would give credence to the Apollo hoax rumours."

I suspect it's a lack of control in their lives and hence asserting the only power they have, the power to disbelieve, whether it's stupid or not.