War in Ukraine

#53,258
#53,258
VolStrom said:
Some people today think this is such a great thing to send and have a space capsule go to the moon and back when the WWII generation did it in the late 1960's.
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And they did it with less computer power on board than a first generation smart phone had.

Those astronauts had huge brass ones hanging.

Apollo Guidance Computer - Wikipedia
 
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#53,259
#53,259
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#53,263
#53,263
Pacer92 said:
Ahh…so we shouldn’t believe they lost the technology? Or anything they say?

What would be the purpose of lying about it?
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More likely we simply quit producing the big boosters to get big payloads up there - lack of hardware isn't the same as lack of technology but sometimes the words are used interchangeably.
 
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#53,264
#53,264
AM64 said:
More likely we simply quit producing the big boosters to get big payloads up there - lack of hardware isn't the same as lack of technology but sometimes the words are used interchangeably.
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I'd feel better about this entire program if they had just given 1/3rd of the money to SpaceX than they did to Boeing. SpaceX would already have a hotel and Internet capability on the moon.
 
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#53,265
#53,265
VolStrom said:
Most of their computing power was in their heads, they didn't need a computer to tell them how to make change at the drive thru.
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An interesting question to ponder. If an Apollo 13 catastrophe happened today on one of our missions, could NASA and the astronauts get back safely?
 
#53,267
#53,267
VolStrom said:
I'd feel better about this entire program if they had just given 1/3rd of the money to SpaceX than they did to Boeing. SpaceX would already have a hotel and Internet capability on the moon.
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SLS took Artemis 1 to lunar orbit but SpaceX’s Starship will be the vehicle that actually puts us back on the Moon.
 
#53,270
#53,270
VolStrom said:
I'd feel better about this entire program if they had just given 1/3rd of the money to SpaceX than they did to Boeing. SpaceX would already have a hotel and Internet capability on the moon.
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I'm not as sure about that. SpaceX has the benefit of all the earlier space research, and they aren't government ... which is what I think you are largely getting at. Did you know that back in the 60s a lot of Apollo and Saturn testing was done at Arnold AFB near Tullahoma and Manchester? There is a tremendous amount of testing still in the works there - some our military, some for other nations, and I believe some commercial testing, too.

I remember reading some time ago about a company (perhaps SpaceX) that was running much higher pressures in tanks than NASA would do and that allowed better performance but thinner safety margins. So far it seems to have worked (if it was SpaceX), but we have a lot more ability to build complex systems than in the 50s and 60s - and a lot of earlier space work to draw on.
 
#53,271
#53,271
hog88 said:
Yes, the astronauts today aren't dumb by any means.
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I never said they weren't. You asked if we could pull off another Apollo 13 today and I was unclear in my reply. NFW could these little delicate flowers that work today could rise up and do something like the NASA engineers did for Apollo 13.
 
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#53,272
#53,272
AM64 said:
I'm not as sure about that. SpaceX has the benefit of all the earlier space research, and they aren't government ... which is what I think you are largely getting at. Did you know that back in the 60s a lot of Apollo and Saturn testing was done at Arnold AFB near Tullahoma and Manchester? There is a tremendous amount of testing still in the works there - some our military, some for other nations, and I believe some commercial testing, too.

I remember reading some time ago about a company (perhaps SpaceX) that was running much higher pressures in tanks than NASA would do and that allowed better performance but thinner safety margins. So far it seems to have worked (if it was SpaceX), but we have a lot more ability to build complex systems than in the 50s and 60s - and a lot of earlier space work to draw on.
Click to expand...
Private industry is so much more efficient than the government. Private companies have a motive to make a profit, government has a motive to get a bigger budget of free money from the taxpayers. I don't care where the technology comes from, but SpaceX has made monumental strides in space flight by landing their first stage rockets and re-using them. Boeing will never do that ever, because they suck.
 
#53,274
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