True - Armstrong left NASA and became a prof of engineering. What many forget is that generation of astronauts weren't just test pilots or fighter jocks, they were the first of the academically qualified ones too. Many/most of them had Masters or Honours in some Engineering or Aeronautical/Space discipline.
"Which is what we were absorbed with 40 years ago - after the Moon, what about Mars? With 70s technology, it would have been an utter, unparalled, unmitigated disaster in slowmotion. Right now, if it had gone ahead, we would have still been thinking of those poor dead Marsnauts lying frozen up there and likely any further Mars programmes would have been put on the back burner for decades or longer. As it stands, we have a good chance of getting there in a decade or two and have a decent chance of getting back intact - that's the tricky bit."
Ok, I'll substitute insane/crazy, intelligent idiots if you will (we all know a few of those). How else would you describe folk who are prepared to trust their lives to thousands of bits of kit designed and built by thousands of others, all needing to work. I absolutely applaud what they did but think they were a touch lucky.
I think it's a bit sad they have to, but I suppose an Air Force /NASA pension isn't all that. Neil Armstrong did all right for himself, but he had a magic kudos attached to his name.
No, never even thought of that. One or two are bound to visit Ireland - like Dublin or Armagh, so I'll keep an eye out.
Yeah I got to meet Gene Cernan briefly around 1996 when I did some consultancy work for NASA. One of the few (at that time) managerial types who understood and had an interest in my line of work and was able to discus it coherently.
Why? What's so different about it to landing on the moon, other than the distance involved? An understanding of Martian climate (or rather lack thereof) may have knocked it on the head, and also the additional cost of developing equipment to get there (and back), but I'm surprised that the technology itself was a limiting factor.
Call it an order of magnitude harder and more expensive. The Superpowers could just about afford the race to be first to the moon. To be the first to Mars would have bankrupted them.
The technology was a limiting factor, as are the laws of physics, and the biological aspects of the mission.
The journey to the moon took a few days. The quickest possible journey to Mars and back takes several months, so you need to carry about fifty times the amount of food and other consumables. You also need to find a crew who can get along with each other in total isolation for a couple of years without killing each other or themselves, rather than the week or two that they had to put up with each other for the moon missions.
The escape velocity from Mars is over double that of the moon, so the lander has to carry much more fuel to lift the same mass into orbit, which makes it bigger, so it has to carry even more fuel, and all that fuel has to be launched from Earth. As a rough guess, the Mars Excursion Module (including fuel) would be about ten times the mass of the Lunar Excursion Module.
We could do it now, but only by launching many rockets and assembling the Mars mission vehicles in Earth orbit. They couldn't have done that in the 1960s.
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