Author Topic: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith  (Read 48810 times)

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #150 on: April 05, 2019, 12:42:53 PM »
I agree with summation, and he wants attention to bolster his willfully ignorant knowledge and his ego.

Thence also, "Hey, I just want a friendly dialectic about my questions, and you guys are just a mean hornet's nest."  Translation:  Go easy on me so it doesn't break the illusion that I'm really smart.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline bknight

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #151 on: April 05, 2019, 12:50:16 PM »
I agree with summation, and he wants attention to bolster his willfully ignorant knowledge and his ego.

Thence also, "Hey, I just want a friendly dialectic about my questions, and you guys are just a mean hornet's nest."  Translation:  Go easy on me so it doesn't break the illusion that I'm really smart.

LOL  ;D
Truth needs no defense.  Nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the moon away from me.
Eugene Cernan

Offline jr Knowing

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #152 on: April 05, 2019, 01:01:48 PM »
Hi Gillianren,

I'll take that $50 bet. I said at "the time" ie the time the Psalms 19:1 quote was put on his gravestone Lutherans were using the King James version of the bible. That was 1977 and Von Braun had been in the U.S. for 32 years. I didn't say when he was growing up. He was in the U.S. for the last 32 years of his life. What? Did he have the Saturn manuals written in German? Lets be reasonable.

And if we really want to confuse things up. And which no has brought up, Von Braun became very religious near the end of his life and joined an Evangelical Episcopalian Anglican congregation.   

Offline mako88sb

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #153 on: April 05, 2019, 01:15:34 PM »
Hey,jr. mind explaining were you got that $50,000 per lb of weight eliminated figure from and also explain why it differs so much from Tom Kelly's "Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module" book that states the bonus was set at $10,000 per lb of weight reduction?

Offline jr Knowing

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #154 on: April 05, 2019, 01:22:03 PM »
Hi mako88sb,

I clearly misspoke if you are telling me you have documentation saying it was $10k not $50k per pound of weight reduction. I thought I read it was $50k. My mistake but it still illustrates NASA desire to reduce weight not increase it.

Offline Jason Thompson

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #155 on: April 05, 2019, 01:24:56 PM »
Hi Gillianren,

I'll take that $50 bet. I said at "the time" ie the time the Psalms 19:1 quote was put on his gravestone Lutherans were using the King James version of the bible. That was 1977 and Von Braun had been in the U.S. for 32 years. I didn't say when he was growing up. He was in the U.S. for the last 32 years of his life. What? Did he have the Saturn manuals written in German? Lets be reasonable.

And if we really want to confuse things up. And which no has brought up, Von Braun became very religious near the end of his life and joined an Evangelical Episcopalian Anglican congregation.

I see we can add taking bets to the list of things you don't get. Gillianren's bet ws that von Braun did not grow up reading the King James Bible. To take that bet you have to take the contrary position, that he did. You are correct that you never said he grew up with the KJV, but in that case you should have refused the bet on the grounds of irrelevance, not taken it, because if you took the bet you'd lose, regardless of your position in the discussion.
"There's this idea that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! Bloke who was a professor of dentistry for forty years does NOT have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!"  - Dara O'Briain

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #156 on: April 05, 2019, 01:27:30 PM »
Lets be reasonable.

Yes, let's.  Can we reasonably conclude that you have abandoned your discussion of the lunar regolith without addressing the open refutations?  Can we reasonably conclude that you know your argument on that point cannot prevail?  Can we reasonably conclude that your abandonment of it without resolution indicates an unwillingness to be honest in debate?

Quote
And if we really want to confuse things up. And which no has brought up, Von Braun became very religious near the end of his life and joined an Evangelical Episcopalian Anglican congregation.

Did they use the King James version?

You're still stuck with the problem that Ps 19:1 doesn't mean what you say it does, and never did at any time or in any language.  You pounded your fist on the table and insisted that von Braun's Lutheran (not Evangelical) background compelled him to read the scripture literally.  But the only reading of Ps 19:1 that gives your argument effect is the bastard paraphrase of it that you inflicted on us last night, which might as well have taken a machete to the original Hebrew.  You don't actually read Hebrew, do you?  You can't make your argument work without a comically inept paraphrasing of Ps. 19:1, and at this point I'm pretty sure you realize that.

And suddenly after you've been dragged kicking and screaming to what the actual Lutheran exegesis is, and flagrantly avoiding where it directly contradicts what you say Lutherans claim about this verse, now the argument shifts.  "Oh, did I say Lutheran?  I really mean Evangelical."  Once again we find you frantically trying to cover up your errors instead of admitting them and incorporating the consequences into your line of reasoning.  How pathetically dishonest you are.  And no, von Braun did not join an "Evangelical Episcopalian Anglican" congregation, as if that word salad meant anything.  First of all, "Anglican" and "Episcopalian" are at once redundant and contradictory.  Episcopalians are the manifestation of the Anglican Communion in the U.S.  You don't say both "Episcopalian" and "Anglican."  If you say "Episcopalian" it implies membership in the Anglican communion.  If you say "Anglican" it generally doesn't single out Americans, and is generally only preferred outside the U.S.  Second, although nowadays (since the late 1990s) there is an evangelical faction of Episcopalians, there was no such thing prior to 1977.

No.  First von Braun joined an Evangelical church in Texas.  Texas-style Evangelicalism has about as much to do with Anglican worship as cow manure does with crème brûlée.  Later, he became an Episcopalian -- an ordinary Episcopalian.  Two separate churches.  Two radically different kinds of church.  I'm surprised I have to explain this to a self-proclaimed religious-studies student.  Finally, von Braun viewed his accomplishments in pushing mankind deeper into space as an affirmation of his faith.  Is someone who says that likely to be someone who adopts literally the arcane, centuries-old interpretation of the verse he puts on his tombstone, or rather the metaphorical poetic interpretation of it preferred by everyone who reads the Bible since the ancient Greeks?
« Last Edit: April 05, 2019, 01:31:25 PM by JayUtah »
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #157 on: April 05, 2019, 01:28:35 PM »
My mistake but it still illustrates NASA desire to reduce weight not increase it.

To reduce unneeded weight.  If new needs arise, you may have to add weight to meet those needs.  Where did you study aerospace engineering again?  I forgot...
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline mako88sb

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #158 on: April 05, 2019, 02:00:29 PM »
Hi mako88sb,

I clearly misspoke if you are telling me you have documentation saying it was $10k not $50k per pound of weight reduction. I thought I read it was $50k. My mistake but it still illustrates NASA desire to reduce weight not increase it.

Sure but as Jay mentioned it was weight that could be safely lost. Or to offset unexpected weight additions such as the decision to switch to battery power instead of fuel cell technology that ended up adding about 200 lbs of weight. Btw, the original LM proposed by Grumman was 22,000 lbs. Even before the contract was won by them, NASA's insistence about more redundancy requirements quickly increased the weight to almost 30,000 lbs. So right off the bat, weight increase was already happening until it got to the point that the weight reduction program was implemented. The thing here though, is that the weight at the programs implementation did drop from about 32,800 lbs to about 30,500 lbs. However, after that, it started to rise again, with the odd lower dip but by the time of Apollo 11, it was up to 33,500 lbs. No doubt without the weight reduction program, it would have ended up even higher than that but there simply were some things about the LM's design that ended up overall adding more weight. I already mentioned the decision about switching to batteries but another big increase in weight was due the decision to use 26 gauge wire and miniature connectors for certain applications that saved hundreds of lbs of weight. However they ended up with so many issues with recurring wire breakage problems that they switched to a heavier grade of wire from LM-4 till the completion of the program..

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #159 on: April 05, 2019, 02:19:48 PM »
Sure but as Jay mentioned it was weight that could be safely lost. Or to offset unexpected weight additions such as...

This should be in the lunar module thread, but I guess we've given upon on all semblance of thread coherence.  So be it.

If you create a special incentive to reduce mass, you change the way people think about that particular style of optimization.  Normally the reasonable-cost effort arrives at a design that's "good enough."  The Good-Enough concept is vital in engineering.  It's what separates actual engineering from mere tinkering.  When you drum that into engineers -- and we do -- then sometimes the best way to change the thinking is to change the reward structure.  You can get engineers to optimize expensively for this or that variable.  You just ask them to.  But if you really want a high degree of optimization, you dangle a special reward.

But the goal is not to minimize mass at all costs.   The goal is to create a mass margin by removing unneeded mass.  You reduce the mass without altering the functional performance.  The whole reason you want the mass budget to have a margin is so that when functional requirements change -- and they always do -- you have a margin to invade in order to satisfy it.  In the case of the plume deflectors, the concern was the duty cycle of the downward-firing RCS thrusters and the limiting factor being the thermal load on the descent stage.  A shorter duty cycle meant the LM was more difficult to fly, which in turn meant it was less safe to fly.  The most straightforward answer was to increase the duty cycle of the RCS.  And that meant solving the thermal-loading problem in some way other than limiting how long the thruster could fire.  That's when you're glad you got rid of all the unnecessary mass, because it means you can add structure to fix the thermal loading.  You trade a little bit of your mass margin for an expanded maneuverability margin.  Deciding that one is more important than the other is the art of engineering.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline bknight

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #160 on: April 05, 2019, 02:57:48 PM »
My mistake but it still illustrates NASA desire to reduce weight not increase it.

To reduce unneeded weight.  If new needs arise, you may have to add weight to meet those needs.  Where did you study aerospace engineering again?  I forgot...

One of his "teachers" must have been hunchbacked  ::)
Truth needs no defense.  Nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the moon away from me.
Eugene Cernan

Offline Jason Thompson

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #161 on: April 05, 2019, 03:48:55 PM »
My mistake but it still illustrates NASA desire to reduce weight not increase it.

When designing a payload for space flight you always want to reduce weight where possible. Not at the cost of practicality, however. So yes, Grumman did get a financial incentive to reduce weight, but weight that they could safely reduce. That's why they went for four legs instead of the original five, that's why they used mylar foil for heat shielding, that's why they eliminated the seats and reduced the size of the windows, that's why they eliminated the second docking hatch.

None of that means that if they find it necessary to add additional things as the development program progresses, such as plume deflectors, provided they don't make the thing too heavy to fly at all, they can't do it.
"There's this idea that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! Bloke who was a professor of dentistry for forty years does NOT have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!"  - Dara O'Briain

Offline bknight

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #162 on: April 05, 2019, 04:05:49 PM »
My mistake but it still illustrates NASA desire to reduce weight not increase it.

When designing a payload for space flight you always want to reduce weight where possible. Not at the cost of practicality, however. So yes, Grumman did get a financial incentive to reduce weight, but weight that they could safely reduce. That's why they went for four legs instead of the original five, that's why they used mylar foil for heat shielding, that's why they eliminated the seats and reduced the size of the windows, that's why they eliminated the second docking hatch.

None of that means that if they find it necessary to add additional things as the development program progresses, such as plume deflectors, provided they don't make the thing too heavy to fly at all, they can't do it.
I remember a NOVA program discussing the LM development.  All those features were mentioned along with the decision not to go with 3 legs due to possible instability on landing on a rock or a crater and the vehicle tipping over.  Those guys were really clever in the reduce the weights safely.
Truth needs no defense.  Nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the moon away from me.
Eugene Cernan

Offline twik

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #163 on: April 05, 2019, 04:25:17 PM »
Hi Jay,

I read your link to the commentary of the Lutheran professor's thoughts on Psalms 19:1. Which part of his comments conflict with what I am saying? He uses the firmament interpretation and says it is like "plexi-glass dome" covering earth.  And to many, if not most, Lutherans, live their lives on a doctrine of Justification in which the literal words of the Bible are the sole basis of truth. (I minored in Religious studies as an undergrad) 

Oh and there is that word again, truth. God, Bible, truths, all one in the same. (at least to many) It makes you wonder what Armstrong was trying to say. He says that if we can remove "ONE of truth's protective layers... there are places we can go beyond belief".  Huh? What are truth's protective layers and what specific one is he talking about? To me, he is either talking about the firmament or he is suggesting a certain truth is being withheld from the public and that truth needs to be made known in order for us as a civilization can progress "to places beyond belief". Of course this is just conjecture on my part. What is certain Armstrong felt he had to make his point cryptically for whatever reason.

Dear Jr.

I go to a Lutheran church (actually a combo Lutheran/Anglican - "Lutherican"), and I will bet you my next paycheque not a single one of my fellow parishioners thinks the Earth is surrounded by a plexiglass-like dome.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Moon Rocks and the Absence of Regolith
« Reply #164 on: April 05, 2019, 05:06:05 PM »
I go to a Lutheran church (actually a combo Lutheran/Anglican - "Lutherican"), and I will bet you my next paycheque not a single one of my fellow parishioners thinks the Earth is surrounded by a plexiglass-like dome.

Jr Knowing's argument is predicated on the notion that von Braun's religion compelled him to read the Bible literally.  If he adopted a metaphorical or figurative interpretation, then "firmament" is not in any way restricted to mean a dome -- Plexiglas or otherwise.  If von Braun lived out the end of his life as an Episcopalian, then it's a sure bet.  Episcopalians are the last people on Earth to read the Bible literally.  Or, in my experience, at all.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams