Break Points
Engineering Apollo
Jack Ganssle
9/2/2008 12:20 AM EDT
My dad was surprised to find that it was illegal to shovel sand from Jones Beach into the back of his station wagon. Was he going to jail?
It was 1958. Two successful and surprising Sputnik launches had energized the political class and spawned engineering efforts to match or beat the Soviet's success. All the U.S. had managed to loft was Explorer 1, which, at 31 pounds, was a mere 3% of the mass of Sputnik 2. But even in those very early days of spaceflight, when getting anything into even a near-Earth orbit seemed impossibly difficult, work was being done on a manned lunar landing. At Grumman on Long Island, my dad was doing pre-proposal landing studies. They thought sand could simulate the lunar surface. The cop somehow didn't believe his wild story about traveling to the moon, but simply issued a warning and moved on, no doubt shaking his head in disbelief.
The word "lunatic" comes to mind.
But just over a decade later, two astronauts managed to land and return safely. In another couple of years, the country was bored by the concept; I remember watching a later mission blasting off in a quarter of the TV screen while a football game filled the rest.
Neil and Buzz took their lunar waltz 39 years ago. Even after four decades, manned access to space is still fraught with danger and uncertainty. The costs are still astronomical. And America's only human-rated launch vehicle will go into mothballs in just two years.
It took just a decade to go from no space capability, through early manned launches, to a successful moon landing. Ironically if Orion meets all of its schedule goals, which seems unlikely given the routine overruns that plague big government contracts, it'll take 15 years of development and test to repeat Apollo 11's, by then, fifty-year-old accomplishment.
How did Kennedy's mandate succeed, especially given the primitive technology of the era? How did armies of mostly young engineers invent the spacecraft, the web of ground support infrastructure, and the designs of the missions themselves in such a short time?
The rich history of space exploration has been well told in many books. My favorites include Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys by Michael Collins, the lonely pilot who stayed in orbit during Apollo 11's descent.1 Of all of the astronaut autobiographies, this is the most literate and finely crafted.
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daleinaz
9/17/2008 8:22 PM EDT
I grew up during that time, and followed the missions closely. Looking back, I'm stunned at what was accomplished with such limited resources. Few people today (or then) appreciate the giant leaps that came from the space program, both in technology and in politics. Make no mistake, it was a RACE between the USA and the USSR, and the world-wide political consequences were significant.
Unfortunately, after we "won the race", we pretty much lost interest in further space exploration.
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john.conti
7/27/2009 10:14 AM EDT
Awesome review of these books. I knew someone who worked on guidance computers and, after talking with then, craved get more info.
It is interesting that the debate of human vs. machine control continues. In fly by wire and avionics this decision is crucial. Most don't realize how much tradition and emotion, instead of engineering design and data make a difference.
For example, in airline cockpits today, and "automation" based approach is used. The idea is that the computer can completely fly the aircraft, and using the nav computer, the pilots can tell it where to go. If the pilot flys, he is given a "flight director", a set of needles where the pilot is told by the computer which way to fly!
The problem is that this approach works as long as the automation works, when it fails the human is not enough in the loop to make a good call. In the space program where the trajectories cannot be guessed at this makes sense, but not in an airplane. I attribute the predominance of this idea to Apollo. The best example of a crash resulting is Flight 965, the Cali Columbia crash.
New system arriving today, use "synthetic vision". This is a fancy name for having a flight-simulator like view on the display of the aircraft. The autopilot can fly all it wants, and the human can watch out a virtual window as if it was a perfectly sunny day, even in the clouds at night. Given such a display no human pilot will ever fly into a mountain side or the dirt short of landing again.
I mention all this since I think the human/computer decsion is one all of us engineers make in designing our systems. So I think it is useful to study.
Thanks again for the great article.
Cheers,
John
http://the-cotton-gin.com
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