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Post by Ginnie on Sept 5, 2009 15:22:30 GMT -4
Just started reading this interesting book - anybody else read it?
Thought I'd post a few things from the book to help me remember it because I'm notoriously bad in recalling what I've read...
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 5, 2009 15:32:25 GMT -4
Tidbits...
"At the rockets tip sat Command and Sevice Module Columbia, and beneath it Lunar Module Eagle, each costing $100,000..."
This surely must be an error. Maybe $100 million instead?
"One of the two reasons that the American space program used ocean landings to bring its ships home, in fact, originated with a capsule designed to safely bail into the Atlantic in case of pad disaster - the truth was, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo craft could all equally touch down on land"
That's interesting, because I've heard it said before that the "The Russian capsules could land on land, but the Americans had to splashdown on water" as a reference that the Russians were more advanced than the Americans. It seems that the Americans were more concerned about safety once again, it wasn't a technological shortcoming.
The Gemini missions had ejection seats instead of a launch escape tower. If they were ejected while they were still on the pad they would be shot into the ground, so the dirt was plowed up fluffy like to lessen the impact. Spacecraft manager Ernie Reyes said "What else can you do? My God, what else can you do?
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Sept 5, 2009 16:53:19 GMT -4
That's interesting, because I've heard it said before that the "The Russian capsules could land on land, but the Americans had to splashdown on water" as a reference that the Russians were more advanced than the Americans. It seems that the Americans were more concerned about safety once again, it wasn't a technological shortcoming. Landing on land does not make one more advanced. The choice of water versus land was driven as much by geography as anything else. Launching from low latitude in Florida means that an American spacecraft passes over a very limited amount of US territory, making landings on land not very practical (unless they want to land in a foreign country). The decision to land on water opened up a wide range of potential landing sites and provided much greater flexibility. The Soviet decision to land on land restricted what they could do. Once their spacecraft traveled further than a single orbit, they had to wait 24 hours before a landing could be attempted because the landing sites inside the USSR had to rotate back into the plane of the spacecraft's orbit. Furthermore, American spacecraft had to be capable of water landings because ocean laid downrange of the launch site, meaning an aborted launch would bring the spacecraft down on water. On the other hand, Soviet spacecraft had to be capable of landing on land because an abort from their inland launch site would bring the spacecraft down over land. Each country made decisions regarding landings that made sense for them. It was not a matter of one being more advanced than the other. |
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 6, 2009 12:41:33 GMT -4
Yeah, landing on the ocean made sense. I guess if the earth was spinning in reverse, they'd launch from the west coast.  Its been mentioned that the astronauts were not very talkative about their experiences on the moon as if they had something to hide... Pete Conrad (Apollo 12) replied this way when asked what it was like travelling to the moon:
"Super! Really enjoyed it!"Mike Collins explains: "Being a military test pilot was the best background from a technical point of view, but was probably the worst background from a public relations or emotional point of view. We were trained to transmit vital pieces of information. If someone had said from the ground to me in space, 'Well, how do you feel about that', I would've said, 'What? Huh? I don't know how I feel about that, you want the temperature, you want the pressure, you want the velocity, ou want the altitude, what do you mean, how do I feel about that?' It was not within our ken to share emotions or to utter extraneous information." |
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 6, 2009 15:12:27 GMT -4
HB's often say that Apollo 11 couldn't have happened because it was too "perfect"...
"so many things in fact went wrong that Kennedy Space Center director Jay Honeycutt later admittted: "I'll tell you, it would have been damn easy to abort that mission. Damn easy."
The dangers - test pilot vs. astronaut
Marjorie Slayton said: " When Deke was a test pilot I was surrounded by widows."
One flier said "Being a test pilot is more dangerous than going up in the Mercury spacecraft or the Apollo spacecraft. They take infinite precautions with the spacecraft, not many with planes."
Neil Armstrong said: "I always felt that the risks that we had in the space side of the program were probably less than we had back in flying at Edwards Air Force Base or the general flight test community."
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 6, 2009 15:35:54 GMT -4
a good tidbit...
What most journalists at the time and, in turn, the general public also did not understand was that NASA did not just hire military pilots for its astronauts: they were military test pilots.
From Michael Collins: "Test pilots have to be older, smarter, steadier or they'll make the wrong judgement on an airplane and someone will kill himself later ... the test pilot has to be more of an engineer, studying charts and graphs for the airplane's limits."
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Post by stevehislop on Sept 7, 2009 5:39:00 GMT -4
Just started reading this interesting book - anybody else read it? i read it (as well as any other available biography of the apollo astronauts) and i loved it...pete conrad will allways be my number one moonwalker!  after i finished the book i tried even harder to stay "colourful" ;D |
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Post by Kiwi on Sept 7, 2009 7:45:28 GMT -4
Thought I'd post a few things from the book... Thanks for those Ginnie, I enjoy them. You might have noticed that I do the same, otherwise a good book can become an opportunity lost. I've typed up over nine pages of quotes from Mike Collins's "Carrying the Fire." Little bits like this from Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon" are so valuable: Page 440: Apollo 15's 10-foot-long deep core sample —
When the deep core was finally scrutinized in the Lunar Receiving Lab, it would teach what geologist Don Wilhelms would call "the lesson of the moon's antiquity and changelessness." Scientists would identify no less than forty-two separate layers of soil; the bottom layer had apparently remained undisturbed for half a billion years.Thinking of Dave Scott's bruised fingers and seeing the tremendous effort he and Jim Irwin took to get the sample out of the ground make it even better. Meanwhile, HB's whaffle on about how robots could, in their opinions, do the rock- and soil-collecting....  If I own a book I often underline bits that are important to me, then it's quick and easy to refresh my memory with all the important stuff in the entire book. |
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 7, 2009 15:49:28 GMT -4
Buzz was a bit of an engineer himself...
He attended MIT in 1959. He Sc.D. thesis was titled, "Line of Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous."
Ed Mitchell said this about Buzz, "You wouldn't want to sit near him at a party because he would start talking about rendezvous, and you would want to be talking about the good looking girl across the room."
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Post by laurel on Sept 7, 2009 16:48:01 GMT -4
I thought it was Alan Bean who said that. In In The Shadow Of The Moon.
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 7, 2009 17:42:45 GMT -4
I thought it was Alan Bean who said that. In In The Shadow Of The Moon. The book quotes Ed Mitchell as saying it...  |
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Post by laurel on Sept 7, 2009 18:09:44 GMT -4
Alan Bean said something similar in the documentary. Maybe they said the same thing at different times and we're both right.  |
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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 8, 2009 3:49:23 GMT -4
Having an engineering degree was a pre-requiste for being an Gemini Astronaut.
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Post by Ginnie on Sept 8, 2009 17:56:42 GMT -4
... unlike the "Top Guns" of the Mercury Missions.
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Post by laurel on Sept 8, 2009 18:19:13 GMT -4
Several of the Mercury astronauts did have engineering degrees though. Wally Schirra had a degree in aeronautical engineering from what is now the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Gordo Cooper had a degree in aerospace engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Gus Grissom had a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. Deke Slayton had a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
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after i finished the book i tried even harder to stay "colourful" ;D
