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Post by margamatix on Aug 9, 2005 15:22:21 GMT -4
I have been trying to get hold of a copy of the blueprints of the Apollo spacecraft, but I have been told that they have all been destroyed by the FBI.
Even for me, this seems a little far-fetched.
Is it true?
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 15:30:50 GMT -4
Do you even know what is meant by "the blueprints"?
This is not a rhetorical question.
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Post by margamatix on Aug 9, 2005 16:02:30 GMT -4
blue·print n. 1. A contact print of a drawing or other image rendered as white lines on a blue background, especially such a print of an architectural plan or technical drawing. Also called cyanotype.
2. A mechanical drawing produced by any of various similar photographic processes, such as one that creates blue or black lines on a white background.
3. A detailed plan of action.
4. A model or prototype.
Did you not understand the question?
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Post by sts60 on Aug 9, 2005 16:13:26 GMT -4
I'm pretty sure he understood the question. Here's a hint of where he's going:
Where are the blueprints for London?
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 16:18:36 GMT -4
Don't get snippy, Margamatix. I've lived most of my adult life around engineering documentation, and it is my observation that people who don't have firsthand experience with it -- especially in the aerospace industry -- and can only quote dictionary definitions have absolutely no clue how much of it and what kinds of it exist or should exist. Before I answer your question -- which I fully intend to do -- I need to get an idea if you have any inkling of exactly what you're asking for.
You might have this quaint notion of a few rolls of paper tucked under some guy's arm as he goes off to the factory floor to supervise the production of the Saturn V or the lunar module. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We're talking about literally millions of sheets of paper that never actually were all in the same place at the same time. Are you really sure you want it?
To answer your question briefly: yes, some of the Apollo spacecraft documentation has been destroyed. No, it was not destroyed by the FBI; it was destroyed by the contractors in the normal course of business. A great deal of the rest of it is spread out among private and public repositories, microfilmed, or otherwise rendered difficult to access.
I want to know if you understand the question.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 17:01:02 GMT -4
I promise you we're not trying to be obtuse or mean-spirited. But when I say we have heard all these arguments before, I really mean it.
The typical line of reasoning argues that since not every scrap of paper was retained from the design and construction of the Apollo equipment, there is something "suspicious" going on.
(Okay, the notion of the FBI having destroyed it is fairly uncommon. I'm glad you smelled that one for what it is.)
But that argument -- like all the others -- is a matter of comparing what actually happened to what was expected to happen. And as usual, we have to examine the expectations.
None of these authors has been within ten miles of an aerospace company. It is absolutely ludicrous to think they would know what the document controls in such an operate would be like. Most of them try to extrapolate from what it takes to build a lawn mower or a house or some other straightforward item, and they get it very wrong.
I could spend the rest of the afternoon describing the various aspects of engineering documentation that apply to your question. But I'll give a short example.
Suppose to want to design a coolant loop. It starts with a schematic. That doesn't try to represent the geometry of the final product, just the fluid and vapor cycles. Like an electrical schematic, it uses abstract symbols to represent pumps, pipes, components, valves, and subassemblies. The purpose of this document is to explore what kind of engineering will be required to solve that problem. There will be attendant review documents and commentary memos.
At some point you'll build a prototype. That will need a set of construction and assembly drawings. The prototype tells you about how something will work. You make changes to the prototype and scribble your revisions onto the drawings you've already made. You may go through several prototype cycles, each with its own construction drawings and evaluation documents. At the end of this process you produce a revised schematic, showing what the functional design really ended up as.
There are other documents and drawings such as thermodynamics graphs, flow graphs, and other material that is just as important to the design, but is not necessarily a drawing and will not necessarily end up as a blueprint.
Then you can do design drawings, which attempt to establish the geometry of the final system. You incorporate design information from purchased components (e.g., valves from vendors) and you make it fit the space provided. Usually more revisions are required in order to negotiate geometry with neighboring systems and with the assembly as a whole. Sometimes quirks in the geometry make you rethink parts of the functional design. For example, you find you need a pump where convection worked fine in the prototype. Or a certain segment pressure is higher or lower than expected.
When you have the geometry nailed down, then you have to produce the manufacturing and assembly drawings. Those are to be used by the machinists and line workers. These are often made into blueprints. (The blueprint process is not inevitable; it's just a way of making many copies of large-scale drawings cheaply for dissemination to many workers. So when you ask for "blueprints" are you asking for actual blueprints, or do you just mean "blueprint" as "drawing".
The construction drawings are typically very boring, many showing abstract shapes to be cut out of sheet metal and bent to the proper forms. These and the assembly drawings must sometimes be instantiated for each individual produced item, because there is frequently a requirement that drawings show the vehicle "as built", which (because of various tolerance issues) is not always "as designed". It is acceptable to allow what's called FOA, or "fit on assembly", meaning the precise location of features or cuts is determined by the workers on the line as something comes together. These must be documented after the fact, but aren't generally designed to that precision. You have to keep construction logs.
Then comes the whole raft of documents that pertain to the testing plan, evaluation, check-out, and approval for use. These are generally textual documents that are equally important to the design as the drawings. A cooling system will have to be tested as built, and that data is required to be on hand as long as the specific item is in operation. Aerospace manufacturers are required to keep very detailed pedigrees of every part and every process for every one of their items that is still flying, although a lot of that can be deferred to subcontractors.
Now that I've skimmed over some of the many documents required to design and build a cooling system, what do you think is appropriate out of all of that to retain, and why?
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Post by margamatix on Aug 9, 2005 17:08:28 GMT -4
None of these authors has been within ten miles of an aerospace company. It is absolutely ludicrous to think they would know what the document controls in such an operate would be like. Most of them try to extrapolate from what it takes to build a lawn mower or a house or some other straightforward item, and they get it very wrong. Thank you. I got the information - "Yes, it is bizarre that the FBI destroyed all the blueprints of the Saturn rockets and Apollo spacecraft. Yes, it is unbelievable that NASA ordered Ken Johnston to destroy all the duplicate sets of Apollo photography, essentially trying to confine the control of the visual record to one set of prints that NASA could manipulate. " - from this site.... www.lunaranomalies.com/fake-moon.htmwhose authors, Michael Bara and Steve Troy, claim that the Apollo landings DID happen. In light of what you say, I will dismiss them as idiots.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 17:15:17 GMT -4
Michael Bara and Steve Troy do indeed believe that the Apollo landings did happen, but they also believe some pretty weird and indefensible stuff too. Lunaranomalies.com is part of the Enterprise Mission. Bara and Troy work for Richard C. Hoagland, who believes instead that NASA is hiding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and stuff like that. Since they argue that the Apollo missions secretly uncovered evidence of space aliens, obviously they want to argue that the missions themselves were authentic. If you really want to get into it, we can talk about all the "bad blood" between Hoagland and NASA, but it's mostly a lot of mudslinging that's just distasteful.
I do not categorically dismiss the work of Troy and Bara, since they occasionally do defensible research. But I do not generally accept them as authorities on NASA's behavior.
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Post by sts60 on Aug 9, 2005 17:20:26 GMT -4
I just love the idea that perenially cash-strapped NASA would cover up the one thing absolutely guaranteed to generate massive and enduring public and political support for a vastly expanded space program.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 17:30:46 GMT -4
If you're interested, I recommend the Sullivan books, Virtual Apollo and Virtual LM. Scott Sullivan is just a regular private sector engineer. In conjunction with PTC, a manufacturer of high-end engineering software tools, Scott used their product Pro/ENGINEER to create highly detailed CAD models of the CSM, LM, and LRV. Not just "look good" models, but models that attempted to reproduce every strut, screw, plastic film, and essentially all that would be required to design the spacecraft all over again.
I spoke to Scott during this project, and he was happy to tell me that part of the reason he did it was to demonstrate -- contrary to hoax claims -- that detailed information on the design and construction of this equipment was in fact available to normal people.
But we do have to talk about the Saturn V.
The CSM, lunar module, and other aspects simply went fallow. The contractors destroyed some of the documents according to their individual retention policies. (You don't keep millions of pages around, or microfilm them, unless there's a reason.) The Saturn V was explicitly put out of production; the design documents were microfilmed and the originals destroyed. The tooling was broken up. The support facilities were dismantled. This was a political move to send a clear signal to the space shuttle bidders that the shuttle -- considered a risky business proposition -- would not have to compete against the wildly successful Saturn V for business or federal dollars.
People do stupid stuff, just not always for the reasons we suspect.
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Post by Sticks on Aug 9, 2005 18:29:14 GMT -4
From my experience with the areospace industry (From the MOD end), the paperwork for a new aircraft designed for active duty, can sometimes weigh more than the aircraft itself (Or is this another urban legend I swallowed from a factory poster?) A close relative of mine was in contractor surveilance for the MOD, and aircraft was his speciality from when he joined the Air Ministry (Pre MOD days) But moving on to today Now that the Shuttle is all but finished, I did wonder if NASA could return to Apollo technology to get the job done. With the loss of documentation for the Saturn V, I take it that one is a non starter and my suspicion that I aired on BABB, that this is the end of peopled spaceflight in the US?
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 9, 2005 18:53:45 GMT -4
The Saturn V documentation is not lost; it's microfilmed in the National Archives -- the mother of all basements. Seriously, I believe it's in the College Park facility, but it is currently uncatalogued and thus it would take an act of Congress to get to browse it. The goal was to prevent the production of the Saturn V, not to lose the design knowledge it represented. Unfortunately we really don't want to build the Saturn V from the original drawings. For all its glory and elegance, it's a 40-year-old design.
It is no joke that an aerospace product is sometimes outweighed by its documentation. Each lunar module was shipped to Florida with a boxcar full of necessary supporting documents. That was just the documents that the customer (NASA) required; it was not the full set of documents that applied to the design and manufacture of it.
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Post by Kiwi on Aug 10, 2005 2:30:13 GMT -4
It doesn't really sound like "I have been trying to get hold of a copy of the blueprints of the Apollo spacecraft" was a truthful statement.
I hesitate to call it an outright lie, but perhaps Margamatix could allay our suspicions by telling us the exact steps he undertook.
Or was it all just typical HB hyperbole?
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Post by Sticks on Aug 10, 2005 6:28:47 GMT -4
Unfortunately we really don't want to build the Saturn V from the original drawings. For all its glory and elegance, it's a 40-year-old design. So it is an old design, so what It worked It did the job
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Post by sts60 on Aug 10, 2005 10:00:12 GMT -4
Yes, indeed. But as much as I would like to see Saturn Vs flying today, it makes no sense to try to recreate the original. It would be a helluva lot of work to try to reproduce the original parts, which would all have to be certified again anyway. Moreover, a lot of technology has changed since it was developed - that is, a lot has been learned since then. It makes much more sense to build a new booster, such as the Shuttle-derived heavy lifter, than to try to make "aftermarket" Saturns.
Consider the B-52 bomber, another and even older design that proved its durability and effectiveness. Try to imagine how hard it would be to build new ones, then multiply that by a hundred or so. (Of course, B-52s are still flying, piloted by the sons and daughters - maybe the grandsons and granddaughters - of their first pilots!)
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