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.
Stupid? Anything but.
I copy a reply I made elsewhere...
"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."
In article , Grimly Curmudgeon scribeth thus
Indeed they weren't any of them. But lets not forget the army of engineers and scientists who made the whole thing happen;!...
And for that matter the taxpayers of the USofA;!...
Indeed.
I know it costs but why are rooms not full of people wanting to meet these people?
But
And they answer the questions the kids ask.
Mars is a dead end IMO. Why go all that way to drop into another gravity well? The future lies in the asteroid belt.
Tim
Anyone else ever seen this?
+1 Those guys must have been very frightened.
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.
Well bugger me, I never knew such events occured. Well worth the trip.
[snip predicted long thread]
Stout fellow (well, not literally I expect). That's saved everyone else the trouble.
So book a ticket. You are only an hour or so away. Or make a day of it. There are plenty of things to see and do nearby.
Two words. "Ford Mondeo"
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.
That would be very tempting.
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.
cheers
Jules
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.
So will I when I when I go to the Isle of Man in two weeks.
Shepard's Freedom 7 flight is universally regarded as the first American space flight it reached 187km altitude and splashed down
486km downrange,Even Shepard himself must have conceded that Gagarin's flight was infinitely more spectacular.
I had dinner with President Bush (senior) just after he left office And I videoed his speech officially, for the charity that invited him.
Close, but no cigar.
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