Richard Jernigan -> RE: "Moon Hoax" Conspiracy Theorists Rev up for 50th Anniversary (Jul. 18 2019 23:57:15)
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I stayed up late last night and watched a Public TV documentary on the NASA manned spaceflight programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. I was aware of it at the time, but the documentary reminded me vividly that the human flight programs were inherently a part of the Cold War. The Soviet Union gained great prestige from Sputnik, the first man made earth satellite. They followed up with the orbital flights of Gagarin and Titov, which gained even greater prestige. Gagarin was sent on a world tour of national capitals. There was footage of Gagarin parading through the streets of London in a cavalcade of Rolls Royces while crowds cheered. Meanwhile the U.S. efforts were a series of spectacularly disastrous failures of un-manned rockets. With Alan Shepard's successful suborbital flight the USA began to gain a foothold, but the Soviets had a sizable and clearly perceived lead. One of my friends tracked Shepard's flight with a telescope on a gun mount, from a U.S. base in Antigua. Shows how old I am. John Glenn's orbital flight gained the U.S. a little more ground, but the U.S. was still clearly behind the Soviet Union in space technology. Glenn was hailed as a hero, and given a ticker tape parade in New York City. Judging from the rest of his life, he deserved to be famous. But Gagarin and Titov outshone him in the space race. In the documentary NASA's official historian points out that people weren't interested in satellites, or even so much in ICBMs. What interested people was manned space flight. Kennedy decided to set the goal of a human moon landing before 1970 in order to gain prestige for the USA, and to galvanize the U.S. space technology community. In 1963, worried about the escalating cost of manned spaceflight, Kennedy proposed a shared moon landing effort to Khruschev. After consideration, Khruschev declared himself open to the proposal. Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, Khruschev was deposed in 1964. The USA and the Soviet Union continued to compete. The Soviets, like the USA had imported German rocket experts, but decided to make their space race a purely Soviet effort. They repatriated the Germans. We kept our Nazis, and they got us to the moon before the Soviets. I say our Nazis did it because to me, with years of space related experience, the most impressive part of the U.S. moon program was the development of the Saturn V rocket. At Huntsville, Alabama, where the rocket was developed, there is a museum dedicated to the project. There is a Saturn V separated into stages, suspended on its side above the heads of the spectators. It is gigantic. People stop in their tracks and stare when they enter the building. The Apollo 12 Airstream trailer is there, with a photo of my brother in it with the astronauts. The most impressive thing for me is the display of the project plan and schedule. It is blindingly fast, immensely risky, and it went off without a flaw. It was one of the most impressive technological feats of the 20th century. Another significant role: von Braun is widely believed to be the one who finally convinced Kennedy that a moon landing before 1970 was possible. People these days may be impressed by SpaceX. I feel privileged to have cooperated with them on their initial flight tests. But with all their brilliance and elan they have suffered more failures, mistakes and schedule setbacks than von Braun and the Saturn V did. Their first three flight attempts were failures. The first two ended in fiery and spectacular explosions. The third was hilarious. They fueled up the rocket to launch, but scrubbed. While "de-tanking" liquid oxygen from the second stage, a vent check valve stuck closed. Under atmospheric pressure the empty LOX tank slowly shriveled up the second stage like a crushed beer can--on live TV. Most of the 3,000 people on Kwajalein Atoll saw it. Many of them were highly educated and successful engineers. People made fun of SpaceX. I said the rocket business was a sporty game. Every project had its failures. Rocket failures are public and spectacular. But SpaceX has always figured out what went wrong, and they have never made the same mistake twice. That's what makes them so good. Saturn V never had a major failure. After the Apollo 11 landing and return, public interest in manned spaceflight decreased significantly in the USA. NASA's budget was cut 20% the next year. After the last Apollo flight my brother left NASA. Years later he was the head of the Galveston County Public Health Service. My wife, children and I went to his younger daughter's wedding there. There was a good sized crowd at the reception at the former Bishop's mansion. After a while I looked around to find my brother. He was standing tall, smiling, the father of the bride. With him at the moment were a half dozen men who didn't look nearly as upbeat: slumped shoulders, tending to look down, maybe not the spiffiest suits. I wandered over and was introduced. The men around him were old friends who had stayed on at the Manned Spaceflight Center. It's true that "purely scientific" research can be carried out more efficiently by unmanned means. The unmanned missions to Mars, Venus and the outer planets have been technological tours de force. The driving objectives of manned flight have not been scientific research. The Space Shuttle program deployed some research satellites that didn't attract much public attention. Perhaps most famously the Shuttle enabled the repair of the Hubble Telescope. But this wasn't a big scientific advance. It was a lucky recovery from a major f...up. The Shuttle project killed 14 people. I knew well the aerodynamicists and aerothermodynamicists who did the analyses and predictions for the Shuttle reentry. I consulted with their small company in Mountain View, California on a military project. The shuttle was ten times bigger than anything that had reentered the atmosphere before. They nailed it, including the precise altitude regime where the effect of the control surfaces would reverse, then recover. To me it was an impressive piece of work, but it was only needed because the Shuttle was manned, and had to be brought back home. The Apollo program was part of the Cold War. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos intend to colonize Mars. Will they make it? Maybe, maybe not. Just before Kennedy's speech, a poll showed that 61% of Americans thought it unwise to try for the moon. After Kennedy's speech 65% agreed that we ought to go for it: an example of political leadership with no visible counterpart in the present day. RNJ
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