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Post by AtomicDog on Nov 21, 2006 16:06:51 GMT -4
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Post by PhantomWolf on Nov 21, 2006 16:44:20 GMT -4
Even fighting for their lives, the astronauts still had the presence of mind to take photos and maybe wonder what might have been...
Well by the time they were going around the moon pretty much everything that could be done was done, so there wasn't a lot to do, why not salvage what you could?
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Post by spongebob on Nov 25, 2006 5:51:41 GMT -4
and maybe wonder what might have been... Why weren't the Apollo 13 crew given another chance to go to the moon on a later mission?
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Nov 25, 2006 8:19:08 GMT -4
Not enough funding: the missions after 17 were cancelled
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Post by spongebob on Nov 25, 2006 8:33:09 GMT -4
Surely it would require less funding to use astronauts who were already trained? Further, I have always been surprised that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins did not take part in further moon missions given that they had proved their skill and ability in piloting a craft to the moon and back.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Nov 25, 2006 8:52:49 GMT -4
Jim Lovell didn't want another flight, he wanted other astronauts to get a chance. He had already had two flights to the moon. Fred Haise was in line for another flight but it was canceled.
Even experienced crews would need to be trained for new missions.
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Post by AstroSmurf on Nov 25, 2006 11:12:34 GMT -4
Fred Haise got to fly the space shuttle, though. Granted, it's not the same thing...
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Post by Count Zero on Nov 25, 2006 11:45:10 GMT -4
Haise flew the Enterprise off the back of a 747 three times (including the first free flight) for Shuttle handling, approach and landing tests in 1977. Good, solid test-pilot work, but the Space Shuttle program suffered many setbacks and didn't fly into orbit until 1981. Haise retired from the Space Service in 1979 and went to work for Grumman.
Apollo 13 was his only space flight, but it did give this test pilot one record that's still on the books: He, Lovell and Swigert set the all-time altitude record of 401,056 km.
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Post by Kiwi on Nov 25, 2006 22:08:37 GMT -4
Surely it would require less funding to use astronauts who were already trained? I'm no expert on such things, but thoughts that occur to me are: Most of the Apollo astronauts were on the payroll throughout all the missions, therefore whether or not they were training for a specific mission would have little effect on that overall cost. Besides, they were all trained pretty much at the same time in batches and two crews trained for each mission, not one. The cost of training the crews for a mission was probably peanuts when compared to the cost of the Saturn 5 and the lunar module and getting them all off the ground.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Nov 26, 2006 16:21:29 GMT -4
I think the crews for 14, 15, 16, and 17 were likely already set by the time Apollo 13 happened, so it would have required bumping another crew.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Nov 26, 2006 16:41:20 GMT -4
That's very likely: the "back one, skip two, fly one" rotation would, at minimum, have all the places up to 16 set when 13 launched.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Nov 26, 2006 17:39:04 GMT -4
Okay checking it, only 14 and 15 had been selected as such. 16 and 17 were announced in 1971, but under the roster system the 13 crew would have flown on 19, which was cancelled.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Nov 26, 2006 17:48:53 GMT -4
By the roster, the 13 crew should have backed up 16, but only Haise did, the others were from 14. The 17 crew had all been trained, Cernan and Evans acting as backup for 14, Schmitt being back up for 15 (he was bumped forward to 17, replacing Joe Engle, because NASA wanted to send a geologist to the Moon and 18, his scheduled flight, was cancelled.)
So by the roster system, though 16 and 17 weren't official, the 16 and 17 guys had pretty much been picked by their backing up Apollo's 13, 14, and 15 (which all had been selected.)
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Post by Count Zero on Nov 26, 2006 20:07:21 GMT -4
One of the nifty "what-ifs" of history is what would have happened if the Apollo 17 prime crew were unable to fly: Their backups were John Young & Charlie Duke, who had just flown on '16. Tough on Jack & Gene-o, but John & Charlie would have gotten back-to-back moonwalks!
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Post by Kiwi on Nov 27, 2006 6:20:34 GMT -4
Tough on Jack & Gene-o... Even tougher on Gene-O when you hear what he says on the commentary track on the DVD of the movie, "For All Mankind": ########################### 0:54:25 Al Reinert: Yeah, I never realised that you could have been a lunar module pilot and you skipped it to gamble on being a commander. 0:54:32 0:54:32 Gene Cernan: I was a lunar module pilot, which meant I was a co-pilot, on Apollo 10, on the lunar module, and after Apollo 10 I had a chance to take a role as a backup lunar module pilot again, which would have led to me walking on the moon on Apollo 16. Walking on the moon, in other words, coming close on 10, but now I'm going to walk on the moon on Apollo 16, but I was going to do it from the right seat as a lunar module pilot. And to most people that probably wouldn't have made any difference. "So what! Here you're going to walk on the moon!" Yet there was more to it for me, and I'm not sure I can explain exactly why and I'm not sure people would really understand it, but I needed to be responsible for a crew, for a flight, for a group of people who are putting the program and a mission together that was going to take us to the moon. And, of course, I had no idea whether it would be the last flight to the moon or any flight to the moon, and I had no guarantees that it would be any flight to the moon. But it was just something special that I wanted and, of course, if I'd gotten the opportunity to command my own flight, that certainly would have meant I would have walked on the moon. But flights were being cut at that point in time, 20 and 19 were cut, 18 was shortly thereafter cut, 17 was in jeopardy. There may not have been any flights after 16 for me to get, but I was willing to take the risk by turning down an opportunity to walk on the moon as lunar module pilot of Apollo 16, to see maybe if there was a chance I could get a command of my own and maybe there would be a flight for me to fly to the moon in. You know, maybe I'd get it and maybe I'd walk on the moon. I have often referred to myself as the luckiest human being in the world. Yes, to have walked in space, to have gone to the moon a couple of times, to have walked on the moon, but that was perhaps one of the biggest gambles and biggest risks I ever took in my entire life, and fortunately I won. I won the lottery! Maybe, you know, some people would probably look at it and say I needed it to serve my ego. Maybe I did — I don't know. But I was willing to take the gamble, it was that important to me. 0:56:26 ########################### Thanks for that bit of info, Count Zero. We don't always connect the dots like that.
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