I didn’t “forget” it. I am challenging your ridiculous and unsupportable assertion that the mishap had anything to do with “figur[ing] out how to do” rendezvous. The mishap could just as easily have happened during some other phase of on-orbit flight, and would have been just as dangerous (remember, the worst spin rates were after the Gemini had undocked from the Agena).

Space Ship 1 hasn’t been disruptive and I know disruptive.

I don’t think a moon program based on large rockets would be too expensive to sustain, just give me the money that is now going to the shuttle and the station and has been for decades and I will develop the Moon.

While large rockets are expensive and out of reach of private entities we need lots of equipment up there to make it possible to live and manufacture with lunar resources. Until we get over a certain concentration of utilities no one will make any money off the Moon.

As for Gemini 8 you are forgetting the part where they were spinning out of control about to pass out. If they hadn’t stopped to spinning before they passed out, they would have both been dead.

Ed,

The Apollo 1 astronauts were not killed by equipment failure; they were killed by the usual cause of all astronaut losses, NASA hubris. Ah we don’t need to test 17 psi of pure oxygen for flammability we got away with it earlier. Ah, we don’t need to test the O-rings bellow freezing they work fine above. Ah, we don’t need to worry about dropping foam, after all its just foam.

Ed there is a big difference between rendezvousing with something you brought with you and rendezvousing with something launched separately. Separate launches increase the complication greatly.

Now if there was sufficient redundancy in the system this might not be an issue but NASA is only proposing trips to the Moon Months apart which will not provide redundancy.

As for the cost of the Saturn 5 in routine production I don’t think there are any reports to NASA with that data. That would have been the bids on the second run, which never happen. I doubt any where there is a breakdown of the cost of the Saturn 5 in terms of development, assembly line set up, materials and labor. These might be derivable from internal company documents but I don’t think they were ever derived by anyone. At least not in terms of the entire rocket since there were 3 separate contractors.

Ed, significant numbers of people will never go to the Moon until we have a large base up there using large percent of lunar resources for base supply. I would say 80 or 90% percent of the mass required for base requirements.

It is damn expensive to get to the Moon because it requires a lot of energy and is very dangerous. While the price may drop significantly, getting to the Moon will never be cheap.

Gemini 8 experienced a thruster failure after docking. That had nothing to do with “figur[ing] out how to do” rendezvous. The rendezvous was already successfully complete by that point.

I had read it, I just dismissed it as a idea not worth pursuing like those in the 1960’s did.

Ah, the truth comes out… it’s a good thing Von Braun was more open-minded than you, since he admitted to John Houbolt after Apollo 11 that rendezvous was essential to going to the moon.

Now let us explore the relationship between what you said above and what you said below:

One thing you have to realize is we were in a race for global domination with the soviets and the Moon race was part of it. Sure landing a person on the Moon in a minimalist lander would satisfy the President’s order but would not have been suffient to declare our domination of space and our ability to do what ever we wanted on the Moon.

So, you are admitting here that the alternate approaches were not dismissed due to lack of merit, but due to the special circumstances of the space race in the 1960s? If so, good – because I agree. In particular, the “beat the Soviets” goal and the 1970 deadline pushed NASA into design choices for Apollo that they would not have made if the goal were, say, an economically sustainable settlement of the moon. That resulted in a program that was too expensive to sustain once the primary political goals were met.

Since the special circumstances of the 1960s no longer exist, I think it’s time to re-examine the design assumptions made under those circumstances.

Yes, they should have. Instead, they rushed Apollo into service before it was ready and killed three astronauts as a result.

It’s better to learn from the mistakes of the past than to repeat the mistakes of the past.

> The entire reason the Moon was chosen as the destination for the space race
> is going there and getting back would require an entirely new class,

No, it doesn’t. It was used to justify an entirely new class of rockets. That doesn’t mean it required them.

You can use trips to the grocery store to justify buying a new Cadillac. That doesn’t mean trips to the grocery store require a Cadillac.

> All the discussions I have read were considering even bigger
> rockets not smaller ones. No one was motivated by not spending enough.

Then you should expand your reading. Start with the Lunar Gemini articles on Astronautix.com. Then read up on Apollo Earth Orbit Rendezvous (von Braun’s preferred approach).

If you still want to say Earth Orbit Rendezvous is impossible, please provide technical arguments to prove it. Don’t just say Wernher von Braun was wrong because Karen Shea says so.

> All ways to get to the Moon and back with smaller rockets require
> multiple launches. In the beginning of the 1960’s they didn’t know
> how to rendezvous in space.

Pete Conrad disagreed with that statement. Mostly because he has done it.

Even if that were true, this is no longer the 1960’s. Rendezvous has been done many, many times since then. Every Apollo lunar landing required an orbital rendezvous.

> The reason multi-launch missions are more dangerous is because all
> rockets used long term have very similar failure rates regardless
> of size, less than 2% but greater than zero since any rocket will fail
> if it is flown enough. So multiple launch missions will nearly always
> have a larger failure rate than single launch missions.

The difference being, the loss of a single launch in a large program is nothing more than a nuisance. Whereas, a single loss of your Great Big Rocket would bring your program to a screeching halt, just as the loss of the Shuttle brought ISS to a halt.

That’s why Columbus took three ships instead of one on his first voyage (and on later voyages, when he could afford more ships, he took more). There were much larger ships available in Columbus’s day, but he didn’t want to put all his eggs in one basket.

> Plus the added factors of the multiple launch requirement, such timing
> and codependency? Then we add launch pressure with will make it more likely
> that warning signs will be dismissed because of pressure to launch caused
> by the rest of the mission already being up there.

Southwest faces the same problem — on a larger scale — every day. It’s hardly insoluble. In the event of a nuclear war, a US Navy SSBN has to launch dozens of missiles in a matter of minutes — under wartime conditions. You think it’s impossible to launch two or more rockets, hours apart, in peacetime?

Also, since you think so highly of the physicists who build atomic bombs, you might want to do some research on the “Great Expeditions” lunar and Mars program proposed by Lowell Wood and others at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Their approach relied on then-existing rockets (Delta, Atlas, Titan).

> While it may have been possible to build Space Ship 1 in the 1960’s why didn’t he?

Because he was too busy attending grade school?

Now you’re just getting silly.

> I really don’t care the answer because Space Ship One seems to be a
> technological dead end. Space ship one has only made a handful of
> flights and none since it won the x-Prize. If it is such a break through
> why isn’t it flying regularly?

For the same reason the Wright Flyer isn’t flying regularly.

> Sure it gets to space, technically but not far enough to be interesting.

Right, just as the Wright flyer did not go “far enough to be interesting” and microcomputers are not “powerful enough to be interesting.”

As Pat Bahn would say, you don’t understand disuptive technology.

> I am not counting on there being a gas station or a MacDonald’s on the Moon
> I am counting on a critical mass of people causing NASA to Mine , lunar
> resources, manufacture things with local materials and send up green
> houses so they can grow there own food. This would be a real step toward
> space development. We want space development not space camping.

Apollo “mined” a few hundred pounds of rocks. They could have taken a few plants and called it a greenhouse if they wanted to.

> I can’t say how much cheaper the second run of Saturn 5’s might have been
> because I have no access to the data;

Only because you haven’t bothered.

> at this point only Boeing does because it bought all the Saturn 5 contractors.

Nonsense. Do you think the contractors never sent reports to NASA?

> But it is basic economics that we a new technology product comes
> out the price is significantly higher than it will be latter since the
> first buyers pay for the development. After the company has earned back
> it’s sunk cost the price drops

Not enough that anyone but NASA will be able to afford them.

It’s sad that Moonies are only interested in transport systems that would make spaceflight rare and expensive and reject any approach that would allow significant numbers of people to go.

And, I wrote that I thought this was a very good idea. I have consistantly argued that for the VSE to succeed it must be executed with the lowest possible cost. Keeping crews on the moon for long periods of time, reducing transportation costs, especially if you can mine your oxygen, is an obvious way to do that.

Regarding Gemini versus Apollo, one of the interesting things in Asif A. Siddiqi “Challenge to Apollo” history of the Soviet effort is that the Soviets did not give up right after losing to Apollo. They kept trying for several more years (I forget off the top of my head, but it was well into the 1970s). It was only after the repeated failures of the N-1 that they finally gave up and pretended that they were not racing at all. Had the overly complex N-1 succeeded, or had the Soviets concentrated their resources on a single lunar project (they ran several in parallel, which was extremely wasteful of both talent and money), they may well have flown to the moon shortly after us. If so, history might have been very different and there might today be two lunar bases. Or, maybe not.

— Donald

I had read it, I just dismissed it as a idea not worth pursuing like those in the 1960’s did.

One thing you have to realize is we were in a race for global domination with the soviets and the Moon race was part of it. Sure landing a person on the Moon in a minimalist lander would satisfy the President’s order but would not have been suffient to declare our domination of space and our ability to do what ever we wanted on the Moon.

Broadcasting to the world the scenes of 2 American Astronauts Dune Buggying around on the Moon did that quite effectively.

Gemini to the Moon would not have declared our unbeatable technological and production superiority. Since the soviets probably could have done something to top it soon after.

Really? You never read about the EOR/LOR mode debate or about Lunar Gemini? And here I thought you were well-read on the subject…

All ways to get to the Moon and back with smaller rockets require multiple launches. In the beginning of the1960’s they didn’t know how to rendezvous in space.

And yet, the method ultimately chosen (LOR) not only relied on rendezvous, it relied on it in lunar orbit rather than Earth orbit.

I seem to remember one nearly fatal attempt to figure out how to do it.

Which flight was that?

I can’t say how much cheaper the second run of Saturn 5’s might have been because I have no access to the data; at this point only Boeing does because it bought all the Saturn 5 contractors.

I can assure you that no one currently at Boeing has the slightest clue how much a Saturn V cost. Boeing bought those contractors for their current programs, not their past ones. No doubt the data still exists somewhere, but it will be about as easy to find as the Ark of the Covenant.

I actually said it could begin by using NASA suggested vehicles. Just not there suggested stay and launch rate. I suggested earlier how if we increase the stay length to 2 years and the launch rate to 3 crew flights a year from 2 we could have 24 person base. 28 at crew change.

The next thing I would recommend is upping the crew capacity. With a crew of 4, half the people who go to the Moon need to be pilots. Since they need a pilot and a copilot for back up. This is not going to allow many specialists to get to the Moon. Whether they are mining engineers, scientists, doctors, hydroponics specialists, we will need specialist to develop the Moon not just people who will abandon there own work to train at NASA for years before they can fly.

I’m still interested in your analysis of why beginning a small base on Earth’s moon with Dr. Griffin’s suggested vehicles could not lead to your critical mass of people causing NASA to Mine, lunar resources, manufacture things with local materials and send up green houses so they can grow there own food, and sooner than developing new vehicles from scratch. Note, however, that I am not opposed to new vehicles; I just want to get started now rather than wait until they are developed.

— Donald