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Apollo 1
- sudoscript 10y agoThis is what progress looks like. This is what it takes.
- labster 10y agoKilling our best and brightest after they express concerns about their safety? I hope that's not what it takes.
- rad_gruchalski 10y agoI guess what was meant was: "progress means sacrifices and sometimes people die". Nobody killed them on purpose...
- ISL 10y agoI disagree, but won't downvote. Failing fast is a virtue. Failing catastrophically is a disaster. We work fastest when we trust our tools. When our tools fail us, we're forced to revisit them entirely, which slows us down. Incorporating a margin for error and defending in depth are ways to move forward efficiently. Blue Origin's motto has the right tack. "Step by step, ferociously."
- ahh 10y agoBut in less than 30 months following the Apollo 1 accident, NASA flew five Apollo missions. During the final one of those five, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon. Much later, in the last decade of his life, Armstrong would reflect on what it took to reach the Moon. “The rate of progress is proportional to the risk encountered,” he said. “The public at large may well be more risk averse than the individuals in our business, but to limit the progress in the name of eliminating risk is no virtue.” Sadly, Armstrong and his ilk no longer makes the calls at NASA (and haven't for quite some time.) And so we see no progress.
- jdavis703 10y agoOr is the problem that each incoming administration wants to rejigger the programs? If each president (thinking about Bush and Obama) would just hand the scientists and engineers a few billion dollars and tell them "go do something that'll make America proud," we'd have something to be proud of by now.
- brianberns 10y agoWe'd still need someone to provide a singular vision and focus. Human nature says you can't just throw money at a group of people and expect that to happen on its own.
- endymi0n 10y ago100 times this. Providing "stupid money" but no vision and no accountability leads to the "but 4 billion of the budget needs to be spent in MY state - but then we'll have to transport the boosters by train - but then we'll have to cut them apart - but then we have to use complex o-ring seals instead of simply welding them together -> Challenger blows up" bikeshedding of the shuttle era.
- dnautics 10y agoActually it's scientifically been shown that you can just throw money at people. However, that study was not conducted on scientists, whom I am certain will squander it as they do now.
- justin66 10y agoI wonder if you think the vision needed to advance science is stronger among NASA scientists or US politicians.
- haikuginger 10y agoYeah, Bell Labs never did anything really important.
- akiselev 10y ago
- nradov 10y agoWatch the documentary "The Last Man on the Moon" about Gene Cernan. It spends some time on the human impact of the Apollo 1 disaster. Imagine having to tell your next door neighbor that her husband had just burned to death. http://thelastmanonthemoon.com/ http://thelastmanonthemoon.com/
- js2 10y agoFrank Borman, in his testimony before congress, referred to the accident being due to a failure of imagination. In searching for his full testimony, I found this: "Apollo 1-Challenger-Columbia Lessons Learned" - https://nsc.nasa.gov/sfcs/systemfailurecasestudyfile/download/397 https://nsc.nasa.gov/sfcs/systemfailurecasestudyfile/downloa... I also found transcripts of his testimony, but they aren't searchable - http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/inv.html http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/inv.html (I'll have to OCR the pdfs. I started to read the first one and it's fairly interesting.) There's two books I always recommend re: Apollo: 1) A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin. 2) Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond, by Gene Kranz.
- pjmorris 10y agoChaikin is terrific on the astronauts. Kranz is staring at me from my bookshelf, but I've not yet opted to read him. Let me add 'Apollo' by Murray and Cox to your list. It's focused on the Apollo engineers and managers, including great discussions of how they re-engineered things after Apollo 1, and of the behind-the-scenes work on Apollo 13, as well as many other elements.
- wazoox 10y agoThe Kranz book is really great. The LEM had its problems, too :)
- vermontdevil 10y agoEven though it had problems, the engine design was incorporated into Merlin engines under SpaceX later on. Apollo technology - the gift that keeps on giving.
- dr_zoidberg 10y agoThe testimony is "barely searchable", the text seems to have been already OCRed in someway, but it's disconnected at parts (so a full search may fail, whereas a partial might succeed). It'd then be a problem of parsing and joining the parts in a coherent way... which may not be an easier problem than just re-OCRing everything.
- pogba101 10y agoThe sheer bravery of the first men to sign up to go to the moon is outstanding. I remember listening to an interview where Buzz Aldrin said he estimated that there was a 60% chance of going to the moon and coming back home alive. He still decided to do it. They even wrote a speech for Nixon in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got stranded on the moon: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
- pjmlp 10y agoTrue, but not less brave than those that ventured into the endless oceans, when everything everyone knew was only Europe.
- Lio 10y agoOr the 8 men on the K-19 Widowmaker submarine who had to repair their reactor knowing it meant certain death. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3136111.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3136111.stm
- samkite 10y agoTotally agree. Many of the first Portuguese and Spanish explorers didn't even know if they would ever come back. They were leaving home to go to distant lands at a time where people still believed in monsters, witches and mermaids.
- earthboundkid 10y agoMan, the Hawaiians got that beat for courage. They had smaller boats, no magnetic compasses, and they still managed to find some tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific by ~900CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History_of_the_Polynesian_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History_of_the_Polyn...
- 19670127 10y agoOn the evening of that day in 1967 I was a nine year old space junkie watching Batman -- a phenomenally popular TV show in my demographic -- when ABC interrupted the show with a bulletin that "one astronaut had died on the pad" at Cape Kennedy. No other explanation was provided. I was mystified. I knew there was no launch that day. Our astronauts just didn't die on the pad, and why only one? Before I could figure it out ABC interrupted again and said three astronauts had died. It's flashbulb memory... I can remember where in the house I was sitting, I can remember the rabbit-ears black-and-white TV, and I can remember the black-circle dominated graphic that ABC put on the screen. And I remember the horrible picture of the burned spacecraft on the front page of the Washington Post two days later as my father held the paper up to read an inside page. Apparently ABC got a lot of angry calls for interrupting Batman. Weirdly, years later I was working at a very high profile Silicon Valley start-up, when our cock-sure management dramatically announced a huge new project that they had named "Apollo." I realized immediately that it was, to the day, the 30th anniversary of the fire. I confess that I am a small man, and did enjoy pointing out the anniversary to others. At least no one died when our Apollo failed. RIP Roger, Ed, and Gus.
- 19670127 10y agoHmm, Wikipedia says there was no Batman episode broadcast that night [0]. I don't believe it! [edit:] Well, maybe it was "Time Tunnel" -- my other favorite show of that era. It was on that night [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman_(TV_series)_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman_(TV_series)_epi... [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723777/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723777/
- gambiting 10y agoIt's fascinating that you can just look up what was on TV 50 years ago, without having to go into ancient archives of a TV station somewhere.
- kmm 10y agoIt's something I envy the US a lot for. I'm assuming it has to do with the population of the state I live in being only 6 million, but there is so comparatively little archived about things like TV shows, and other kinds of trivial (yet important in its own way) history. You can look up what was on TV 50 years ago, and I couldn't even figure out if "Hey Arnold!" was dubbed or subtitled.
- colinbartlett 10y ago> The risk, of course, is that pure oxygen under high pressure requires but a spark to ignite and rapidly burn. Frustrating to see even a technically-oriented publication report that oxygen burns.
- Ajedi32 10y agoI don't know, I think it kinda depends on how you look at it. Sure oxygen doesn't burn without a fuel source, but a fuel source won't burn without oxygen either; both are required in order to produce fire. Why do we then say the fuel is burning but not the oxygen? Just a thought...
- robryk 10y agoBecause oxygen is much more common than fuel on Earth's surface.
- gvb 10y agoGood information on the chain of decisions that set up Apollo 1 for the disaster: "Why Did NASA Still Use Pure Oxygen After the Apollo 1 Fire?" http://www.popsci.com/why-did-nasa-still-use-pure-oxygen-after-apollo-1-fire http://www.popsci.com/why-did-nasa-still-use-pure-oxygen-aft... (Warning: Horrible crap foisted on you via Javascript if you have that enabled.) tl;dr: 1. Designed Apollo to used a mixed gas (nitrogen/oxygen) atmosphere. 2. Needed weight savings. Mixed gas requires complicated, heavier, support. 3. NASA changed to pure oxygen over the objection of the North American Aviation engineers. Justification: a. Pure oxygen was used in the past with no disasters. b. The pressure in orbit was 5psi. At 5psi, fires are controllable. 4. Launch pad test with a closed hatch required atmospheric pressure + 5psi to get the differential pressure of space. 5. Spark + high pressure oxygen + fuel = disaster. Added: There were a lot more contributing factors such as the schedule pressure (wiring issues probably caused the spark) and the lack of explosive bolts on the hatch which prevented the astronauts from escaping quickly. Bonus tl;dr on the resolution: They pressurized the capsule with nitrogen/oxygen on the pad, so it was safe (other than being on top of a massive bomb). As the capsule ascended, they bled off the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere to maintain the 5psi differential pressure (the astronauts were breathing oxygen via their space suits so it did not matter to them). Once they were in space, the atmosphere was maintained with pure oxygen at +5psi.
- robryk 10y agoAlso, on the way down during landing, the capsule let in external air once external air pressure was larger than internal. This way they avoided having oxygen at atmospheric pressure inside at that time.