Author Topic: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties  (Read 100767 times)

Offline RAF

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #15 on: April 30, 2012, 11:29:56 AM »
...The Command Module being only 210 cubic feet would not fit (3) men all the food, water, air, spacesuits, boots, helmets, cameras film and equipment needed for up to 10-11 days in space.

Good thing that they had the service module...eh?


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The usual reply is that these items were in the Lem or the service module, but that would be very unsafe...

Why?...why would it be "unsafe"? What "skill sets" did you employ to determine it to be "unsafe"??


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...with an atmosphere that extends all the way to earth.

I simply do not understand what you are trhying to say....could you repeat, and clarify??


I'm going to skip #3 through #9 as I don't have the patience this morning to say wrong as many times as would be needed.


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There is no way the record of the Apollo missions is accurate.

Your opinion is irrelevant...please provide evidence for that claim, or retract your claim.


Offline RAF

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #16 on: April 30, 2012, 11:34:14 AM »
This is, by itself, a dead giveaway that you have been reading the typical and long ago discredited writings of hoax promoters.

Yep...the ONLY people that refer to the LM as the "LEM" are hoax believers.

A very "rookie" mistake on DAKDAK's part.

Offline Bob B.

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #17 on: April 30, 2012, 11:37:32 AM »
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5.  Several of the Apollo mission especially AP17 supposedly went to the moon when the moon was nearly full.

Why are you supposing anything when you can look it up? 

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9.  Any glass in the command module would melt upon reentry killing

Do you realize that the windows were on the trailing side of the CM as it reentered? 

Offline JayUtah

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #18 on: April 30, 2012, 12:36:54 PM »
I don't know if man went to the moon in the sixties or not, but the record of the Apollo missions seems to be completely false
As has been said, a few of us are engineers and this is our profession.

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1. The Command Module being only 210 cubic feet would not fit (3) men all the food, water, air, spacesuits, boots, helmets, cameras film and equipment needed for up to 10-11 days in space.
That's why most of that equipment was stored outside the habitable volume in modules specially designed for those tasks.

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The usual reply is that these items were in the Lem or the service module, but that would be very unsafe...
What's so unsafe about it?  The Russians have been using an identical design safely for decades.  We just imitated their design for Apollo.  And SpaceX is imitating the same design for the next generation.  We use it because it works very well and has proven to be enormously safe.  It was this design, for example, that allowed Apollo 13 to be a survivable event rather than an instantly-fatal event.

I can talk for hours on the subject of decoupling in design engineering.  Want me to?

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2. Back in the Apollo days we (the public) were told that the Moon was an Extremely Hot, Dry, and geologically dead place with no atmosphere. Now according to the NASA Lunar Science Institute the moon is an extremely Cold, Wet geologically active place with an atmosphere that extends all the way to earth. Just the opposite of what we were told.
No, this is a gross oversimplification of the available information, as well as a pretty silly argument in favor of a hoax.

First, NASA has never been the only source of information about the Moon.  In fact, as our nearest neighbor, it's the most accessible for private interests.  NASA, in existence only since the late 1950s, was at the time a relative newcomer to planetary study.  That's why Apollo had to bring in academics from outside institutions to train their Apollo people, who at the time were long on engineering expertise and short on astronomy and planetary science.

Second, why would NASA make up a whole different story that, to you, sounds suspicious if they were intent on faking Moon missions?  Wouldn't it make more sense to adopt a low profile and confirm what everyone else already knew?  That's like casing a bank for a robbery while wearing a clown suit; the aim of crime is to get away with it, not draw attention to yourself.

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3. The trajectory of the Apollo missions is nothing like spacecraft go to the moon today. Today spacecraft going to the moon make several increasingly large earth orbits not a crazy “8” trajectory.
There is more than one way to get to the Moon.  The low-energy orbits take weeks or months to get to the Moon.  This is obviously unacceptable in terms of crew expendables.  The lunar transfer orbits used by Apollo and all the other missions are widely published and well understood.  It's not as if the industry has suspicions about Apollo orbits.

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4. Regardless of popular belief computer and communication technology were not sufficient in the sixties (slide rules were  the norm in the sixties)
Nonsense, digital computers were well established in the 1960s.  The notion that technology of the 1960s was insufficient to implement Apollo is, on the contrary, the popular belief.  It is incorrect; the well-informed professional believe among aerospace engineers is that there is absolutely no reason Apollo could not have succeeded as described.  There is a wealth of design information available, and several people have succeeded in rebuilding the computers (or emulators for them) today.

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5. Several of the Apollo mission especially AP17 supposedly went to the moon when the moon was nearly full. If the moon puts out enough light that I can easily see the settings on my telescope and camera in Florida, over 200 thousand miles away don't you think that the light would blind the astronauts if they were actually on the moon.
Subjective human-eye impressions are a poor measure of luminous intensity.  The Moon does not emit light; it reflects it just as does the Earth.  The solar influx is a well-known value.  The Moon's geometric albedo is measurable from Earth, as is the same value for various places on Earth.  The Moon's albedo varies from 4-12 percent on the maria to 20-25 percent in the highlands.  This is generally dimmer than Earth's albedo variance, so your argument holds to the effect that we should be more blinded on Earth that if we were on the Moon.

Yes, there are places on Earth such as in the Sahara desert (where I've been) and flying above the Earth's cloud cover (which accounts for the lion's share of Earth's albedo) where the reflected sunlight is uncomfortably bright.  In both those places I wear sunglasses, just as the astronauts did.  We have pictures of the Earth-Moon system taken from departing planetary spacecraft that show the Earth as the "bright blue marble" in space while the Moon (in this case taken with the same camera exposure setting) is a dull brown blob.  We see the Moon as "bright" only because it's in the context of the nighttime sky.  A candle in a dark room is pretty darn (subjectively) bright, but it's only "one" candela.

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6. Several people note that the lighting wasn't right in the lunar pictures and that they did not bring any lights with them...
Those people are right when they say no lights were taken.   Other than that, they don't know what they're talking about.  Regardless of their handwaving, they aren't "photographic analysts" or "investigative journalists."  Real photo experts have no problem with the Apollo photos.

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It would take at least 3 additional cameramen to take all the lunar footage not Ed Fendell from Houston with a remote control
You seem to have confused two different conspiracy-theory claims.  Ed Fendell operated the remote-control television camera from Mission Control, but on the J-missions only.  The "too many photographs" argument is aimed at the 70mm still photography, which was taken by the astronauts themselves.

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7. Since the spacesuits were supposedly cooled by water the astronaut's would have instantly frozen on Eva's and on the surface of the moon in the shade
I'm an engineer.  Show me the heat-transfer computations that prove this.

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8. The  Lem was made of Tin foil...
Nope.  The structural elements were made of aerospace-grade aluminum, just like the airliners we fly in every day.

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Mylar...
The outer covering was aluminized films, yes.  It's the stuff we still use for covering spacecraft for thermal protection.  It's wonderful material.  I also use it on the ground for thermal protection.

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...and tape
Show me a better technique for laying up polyamide blankets.  Seriously, I'm an engineer and this is what I do.  Show me a better way and prove to me that it's better.

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...the abort procedure was to bail out in space
Nonsense.  The LM abort procedure during landing and ascent was to ride the spacecraft to orbit and dock as usual, possibly with the CSM having to perform one of several contingency rendezvous maneuvers.  The contingency docking-failure procedure was to transfer in space in suits.  I'm not sure why this would be a problem in your book.

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9. Any glass in the command module would melt upon reentry killing anyone inside.
The glass was the same as used in Corning cookware, which is good to several hundred degrees.  The windows on the CM were on the lee side of the re-entry vectors, meaning they didn't get directly heated by the re-entry dynamics.  All subsequent spacecraft use these same techniques and manage to survive re-entry just fine.  Why is Apollo different?

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10. There is no way the record of the Apollo missions is accurate.
Tautology.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Echnaton

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #19 on: April 30, 2012, 12:55:11 PM »
DAKDAK
OK, so you think the moon missions were faked.  Tell us which crewed NASA space flights you accept as real?  Mercury, Gemini, the non-landing Apollo flights - 7,8 ,9 & 10, the ASTP, Skylab, the space shuttle are all candidates.
« Last Edit: April 30, 2012, 12:58:49 PM by Echnaton »
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Offline Abaddon

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #20 on: April 30, 2012, 01:08:35 PM »
<snip utter bovine fecal matter>
Yeah lots of folks got here before me.
Suffice it to say that if you are unable to provide any actual evidence, I and other experts here will bury you.
You have no idea how wrong you are.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #21 on: April 30, 2012, 01:09:55 PM »
I have researched the Command module in much greater detail than the Lem information on the Lem is very hard to find,since it  supposedly did not come back...

I've been able to find copious materials on the design and operation of the Apollo lunar module.  It takes up about three feet of shelf space in my office.  Most of the ones built for flight did not come back.  But that doesn't stop us from knowing about them.

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but my sources on the command module is the Smithsonian where some of the command modules are currently kept.

LM-2 is also kept in the Smithsonian.  And you can't actually get inside any of the CMs in the Smithsonian.  I've been inside one Apollo CM post-flight, and several Apollo CM boilerplates.  I don't really find them as cramped as they're made out to be by conspiracy theorists.  I'd gladly agree to spend 10 days in one in return for the chance to fly in space and explore another world.

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210 cubic feet is extremely small

Compared to what?  In logical terms what you're doing is called "begging the question."  You're giving your opinion and simply asking people to agree with it.  You need to tell us why this is necessarily too small a space.

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my source on the lunar atmosphere is                                                                                http://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/download-view.cfm?Doc_ID=483

I see; I may have misunderstood what you were trying to claim earlier.  You're saying that if NASA had really been to the Moon, we should have seen these results earlier.

You need to do some more research.  The Preliminary Science Report and other official scientific findings from NASA indeed describe the thermal environment of the lunar surface.  We've always known it to be hot when the sunlight strikes and cold otherwise.  I'm not sure where you understood otherwise.  We've always known the Moon had an almost-negligible atmosphere, but Apollo had the ability to study it only as it was constituted at the lunar surface.  For most other purposes, the Moon's atmosphere is non-existent.  It certainly has no fluid-dynamics properties at any place.

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my source on the light coming off the moon is my own eyes

How accurate is the human eye at measuring luminous intensity?  Again, this is begging the question.  Without even discussing Apollo-specific materials, we can prove your belief wrong.  All we need is properties of the Earth, Moon, and Sun that have been observed and measured for more than 100 years by almost every relevant scientist.  That's how we know an astronaut wouldn't be instantly blinded on the Moon, but he will want to take sunglasses because it will be uncomfortably (but not injuriously) bright.

If you're a Mythbusters fan, you know that they consult with many outside experts to get their demonstrations as physically and scientifically accurate as their format allows.  Guess which expert they consulted to get the brightness of the lunar surface right for their lighting tests?

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and the fact that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and glass melts around 700 degrees Fahrenheit is common knowledge...

Does water always freeze at 32 F?  Or does that temperature actually vary according to other properties?  How does vacuum or being kept under pressure in a tank affect that phenomenon?  What if water is allowed to seep very slowly through a porous plate in a vacuum, in the shade.  How will that affect the problem.

The human body produces between 85-120 watts of metabolic heat.  How is that heat rejected on Earth?  How would it be rejected in space?  What if that body were encased in a very good insulator; what would happen to that heat?

Here's another clue:  the last time I was at the Air & Space Museum, the guide demonstrating space suits had a hard time answering that question.  With his permission, I answered the question satisfactorily for the tour group, using modern ILC space suit materials as an illustration.

So if you trust the Smithsonian to get the right information, and they trust me to give them the right information, whom should you be listening to?

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my source on the trajectories is from current moon missions...

Without knowing what specific missions you mean, I can still probably stipulate that it's good information and probably reasonably accurate information.  But you have to understand it in the context of orbital dynamics, which is a big whole science of its own.  Every trajectory between Earth and Moon is some kind of orbit, which is to say it will obey the mathematics of orbital mechanics.  But not every trajectory shares the same properties in terms of geometry or the fuel it takes to achieve.  They're all valid, but not every orbit is suitable for every mission.  Mission design isn't just a matter of pointing the rocket at the Moon and lighting the fuse.

I can send an automobile-sized spacecraft to the Moon from Earth orbit using only about 30 gallons of fuel.  But it will take 18 months to get there.  If my mission doesn't allow for that kind of patience, I'll have to spring for a higher-energy orbit.  But that means more fuel, since the initial impulse will have to be greater.  And that means either less mission payload, or a more expensive launch vehicle.

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my source on computer and communication technology is not backed up by anything except for my own memory

Did you work as an engineer in the 1960s?
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline sts60

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #22 on: April 30, 2012, 03:45:51 PM »
Hi, DAKDAK.  Welcome to the board.
I don't know if man went to the moon in the sixties or not, but the record of the Apollo missions seems to be completely false
Sounds like you've made up your mind already. 

By the way, men went to the Moon in the '60s and '70s.  Apollo 8 orbited the Moon.  Apollo 10 orbited the Moon and performed a descent and ascent in the LM (not "LEM", which was an earlier designation).  Apollo 11 actually landed on the Moon, and was basically the final test flight.  Apollo 13 went around the Moon in a gravitational assist abort.  Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 landed on  the Moon and peformed increasingly sophisticated scientific missions.

Here are some of the reasons I believe this

Others have already picked over this, so I'll only add a couple of comments.


3.   The trajectory of the Apollo missions is nothing like spacecraft go to the moon today. Today spacecraft going to the moon make several increasingly large earth orbits not a crazy “8” trajectory.

Clementine did, for various reasons, but Lunar Prospector did not, so your claim is incorrect.  But aside from that, why exactly is the trajectory "crazy"?  It was designed to offer maximum protection from Van Allen Belt radiation and flexibility for translunar abort - which came in handy on Apollo 13.  Why would you expect a manned Apollo trajectory to look like that for an unmanned probe?

4.   Regardless of popular belief computer and communication technology were not sufficient in the sixties (slide rules were  the norm in the sixties)

Slide rules were used in the '60s.  So were general-purpose digital computers, like those in the MCC, and those aboard Apollo.  (In fact, a modified Apollo Guidance Computer was used to control the first fly-by-wire aircraft, an F-8 Crusader which had no other means of control.)

I would like you to explain exactly why computer technology was insufficient for the task.  Please bear in mind that I have coded for and operated spacecraft computers.

8.   The  Lem was made of Tin foil, Mylar and tape

Over an aluminum skin, over aluminum structural members.

the abort procedure was to bail out in space

No, it wasn't.

9.   Any glass in the command module would melt upon reentry killing anyone inside

What kind of "glass" do you think was used in the CM?  And please explain exactly how you decided the temperature, and more generally the thermal loading, on the trailing surface exceeded the design rating of said windows?  Please bear in mind that I used to work for the guys who designed the CM, so I will pay close attention to your answer.

10.   There is no way the record of the Apollo missions is accurate.

This is a statement of opinion.  Would you care to cite your credentials that lend weight to your opinion?

Also, regarding your opinion, in your next post you said

information on the Lem is very hard to find

Really?  Typing "Apollo Lunar Module" into the NASA Technical Reports Server returned hundreds of reports and analyses, along with many more images and follow-on studies.  Even typing the same into Google will place you two clicks away from thousands of pages of design information, development histories, and so on.

Look, collectively this group here has a lot of knowledge related to Apollo.  You have two choices as to how to proceed:
1. Dig in stubbornly and defend your misconceptions
2. Learn about Apollo, and spaceflight in general, and possibly reexamine your initial premise. 

Offline Bob B.

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #23 on: April 30, 2012, 04:32:48 PM »
DAKDAK,

Many people have already corrected you on the LEM versus LM thing, so I’d just like to elaborate a bit.  Early in its development the module that was to land on the moon was called the Lunar Excursion Module, abbreviated LEM.  However, during the LEM’s development NASA decided it wanted to procure separate funding to develop a means of motorized mobility for the astronauts while on the surface of the moon.  NASA was afraid that having the word “excursion” in the name of the LEM may imply to some that it already had mobile capability, which it did not.  To avoid a misunderstanding that could possibly jeopardize approval for a motorized surface vehicle (if the LEM already had excursion capability, then a separate vehicle would be redundant), NASA dropped the word “excursion” and changed it simply to Lunar Module, abbreviated LM.  However, by the time this change came about, everyone had already gotten use to pronouncing the name “lem,” so the pronunciation stuck even though the official designation, and the one we should strive to use, is LM.  Lunar surface mobility was eventually realized with the development of the Lunar Roving Vehicle, or LRV (often simply called Rover).

edit spelling
« Last Edit: April 30, 2012, 08:31:47 PM by Bob B. »

Offline Halcyon Dayz, FCD

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #24 on: April 30, 2012, 06:49:10 PM »
Learnt something new today.

I always thought the Excursion was dropped because some PR type felt it sounded to frivolous.
Excursions is something you have with your school class.
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Offline twik

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #25 on: April 30, 2012, 07:29:45 PM »
I'm nowhere near an expert, but the figure-8 trajectory never struck me as "crazy," but a very elegant solution to going from one gravitational pull to another. Perhaps DAKDAK will explain what exactly was crazy about it, and why going in an ever-increasing spiral is preferable?

Offline gillianren

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #26 on: April 30, 2012, 08:07:32 PM »
Look, collectively this group here has a lot of knowledge related to Apollo.  You have two choices as to how to proceed:
1. Dig in stubbornly and defend your misconceptions
2. Learn about Apollo, and spaceflight in general, and possibly reexamine your initial premise. 

It would make all of us very happy if you would do the latter.  I think most of us would rather educate than argue with the intractable.
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Offline ka9q

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #27 on: May 01, 2012, 02:01:59 AM »
Simply rubbish. The LM was made of aluminium, with an outer layer of mylar and tape for thermal control purposes.
The external thermal blankets on the LM descent stage were all Kapton, not Mylar. Kapton has a characteristic orangish color. It was fabricated as sheets of various thicknesses with a very thin layer of metallic aluminum on the rear surface; these different thicknesses account for the different shades of red, yellow and gold one sees on the LM.

I believe Mylar may have been used in some of the internal thermal blankets on the ascent stage. They were all hidden behind thin sheets of metal that acted as part of a Whipple-type micrometeoroid shield as well as controlling the thermal properties.
 

Offline ka9q

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #28 on: May 01, 2012, 02:47:41 AM »
Slide rules can be used to do all the mathematics needed for a flight to the Moon.
That's actually not true. Lunar flight requires a lot of calculations that can't be done on a slide rule.

Differential equations are central to orbital mechanics and space flight. While the "2-body problem" (one heavy planet and a spacecraft) has an "analytical" solution, meaning that there are formulas into which you can plug your parameters and quickly get your answers, there is no analytic solution for the general case of 3 or more bodies. Earth-moon travel is the classic example of a 3-body problem (earth, moon and spacecraft).

Numerical integration is the only alternative; it's an almost "brute force" way to solve an arbitrary set of differential equations that involves repeated computation, the output from each step serving as the input to the next. This can't be practically done on a slide rule when the operations are repeated thousands or millions of times.

Some integrations can also be done on analog computers (indeed that was their primary function) but analog computers have some very definite limitations. They've been obsolete for decades, replaced with digital computing. Apollo began this transition with a vengeance.

So computers were critical to Apollo. The development of special purpose onboard computers and their software was a major part of the program, and they proved up to the job. They also represented a significant contribution to the state of the art; the onboard Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was the first computer made entirely of integrated circuits.

The AGC performed quite a bit of numerical integration as it updated state vectors and executed digital autopilot algorithms. These were relatively simple operations that could be done easily even by those relatively limited computers.

Apollo's real number crunching was done on the ground by a room of IBM mainframe computers in Houston called the Real Time Computing Complex (RTCC). This primarily consisted of maneuver planning, which also involves numerical integration. What makes maneuver planning more computationally intensive than updating a state vector is that it's an iterative process that must run much faster than real time; you make a little change to the burn, propagate it out to see where that takes you after several days or whatever, and then go back and change the burn some more until it takes you where you want to go.

The results of these runs were read up to the crews vocally, who wrote them down for later use. Some of the maneuvers were for planned procedures such as lunar orbit insertion or trans-earth injection, but most were abort contingencies, ways for the crew to get home on their own at any point in the mission in the event of a communications loss.

The Saturn V Instrument Unit (IU) contained its own digital guidance computer, an IBM design very different from the AGC called, naturally enough, the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC).

So while Apollo needed computers, and the computers of the 1960s were very limited compared to today, they were definitely up to the job.

« Last Edit: May 01, 2012, 02:51:48 AM by ka9q »

Offline ka9q

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Re: I don’t know if man went to the moon in the sixties
« Reply #29 on: May 01, 2012, 03:01:02 AM »
I'm nowhere near an expert, but the figure-8 trajectory never struck me as "crazy," but a very elegant solution to going from one gravitational pull to another. Perhaps DAKDAK will explain what exactly was crazy about it, and why going in an ever-increasing spiral is preferable?
Indeed it was very elegant. The "free return trajectory" that relied on that figure-8 was probably the single most elegant orbital mechanics concept in the entire Apollo program. If the Service Propulsion System engine on the CSM failed after translunar injection onto a free return trajectory, the crew would not be lost in space; they would return home automatically.

There are spacecraft that use ever-increasing spirals to go to the moon or even to high earth orbit. Those would be the ones using ion engines. Ion engines have the singular advantage of extremely high specific impulses, which means they can achieve the same impulse (thrust force times time) with a much lower mass of propellant than conventional chemical rockets.

Unfortunately, ion engines also have the singular disadvantage of very low thrust, which means it takes a long time to get to where you're going -- far too long for a human mission that must carry consumables like food, oxygen and water to keep the crew alive in the meantime. So they're used only on robotic spacecraft where it's acceptable to take months instead of just 3 days to go to the moon.