Quick_Nick
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Why on earth would a Mercury capsule have range safety charges? It's hardly bigger than a man. Even if the retro rockets stick with fuel, it would all likely tear to pieces.
What if the Apollo 13 explosion happened in lunar orbit?
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Urwumpe
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Because the same spacecraft was flying unmanned as well. The main Mercury Range safety system actually was just about pulling the capsule away from the rocket. The charge for destroying the capsule was only used for unmanned flights.
Urwumpe
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Wrong. this pain comes from the CO2 concentration in your blood triggering the breathing reflex and you resisting it. if you could keep on breathing, it would be more like CO poisoning - sleeping campers often die happily sleeping in a depression, because of CO2. (you can easily reach 3-5% CO2 in depressions at night and up to ten times higher than local average in "air-tight" tents. That is one reason why such depressions are a bad choice for your tent. The other is dihydrogenmonoxide.)
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1. NASA would never "order" them to their deaths... for Pete's sake, they didn't even force them to sleep, why would they order them to their death.
2. What would NASA have done.... they would have woke up every engineer in the program, have them come in, and EVERYONE would work 24/7 on ideas to fix problems as they arise, and do EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to attempt to do whatever was possible until the very last minute when they were all dead. How do I know this??? Because that's what they DID do. Half way to the Moon was a horrible place for it to happen. Sure, in orbit about the Moon with the Lunar Lander on the surface would have been even more dire because the LM "lifeboat" option was gone... but what did Sy Liebergot say when he realized ALL power generation was DONE on the CM. Did he say, well, that's it, we've lost the crew? NO. He said, "we have to shut down the CM because we're going to need the batteries for reentry". He didn't give up and say, we'll there's nothing we can do... he came up with a solution, and he passed it on to flight so they could make the decision.
I don't care if there's no obvious solution. There's NEVER a point where those guys would have given up. Regardless of whatever the apparent outcome would be, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. Until then, they'd deal with the most pressing problems on the table at the moment, and in the mean time, others would begin to think of a way to rescue some, if not all of the crew. Gene Krantz said it best..... "Failure Is Not An Option". It wasn't a cool catchy phrase... it was his mindset, as well as the mindset of the thousands of people who were dragged out of bed and worked for days to bring back the crew alive.
(P.S. "Failure Is Not An Option" is now a catchy phrase....
)
2. What would NASA have done.... they would have woke up every engineer in the program, have them come in, and EVERYONE would work 24/7 on ideas to fix problems as they arise, and do EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to attempt to do whatever was possible until the very last minute when they were all dead. How do I know this??? Because that's what they DID do. Half way to the Moon was a horrible place for it to happen. Sure, in orbit about the Moon with the Lunar Lander on the surface would have been even more dire because the LM "lifeboat" option was gone... but what did Sy Liebergot say when he realized ALL power generation was DONE on the CM. Did he say, well, that's it, we've lost the crew? NO. He said, "we have to shut down the CM because we're going to need the batteries for reentry". He didn't give up and say, we'll there's nothing we can do... he came up with a solution, and he passed it on to flight so they could make the decision.
I don't care if there's no obvious solution. There's NEVER a point where those guys would have given up. Regardless of whatever the apparent outcome would be, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. Until then, they'd deal with the most pressing problems on the table at the moment, and in the mean time, others would begin to think of a way to rescue some, if not all of the crew. Gene Krantz said it best..... "Failure Is Not An Option". It wasn't a cool catchy phrase... it was his mindset, as well as the mindset of the thousands of people who were dragged out of bed and worked for days to bring back the crew alive.
(P.S. "Failure Is Not An Option" is now a catchy phrase....
)
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TMac3000
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I find it far more personally rewarding to think what would have happened if the Apollo 13 explosion hadn't happened at all
Codz
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We may not have found the problem, and it may have instead happened on a later flight with worse consequences.
N_Molson
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Little off-topic :
Now I understand why after a night of (bad) sleep at camping, when I wake up, I immediately have a "get out of there ! get out of there !" feeling, that goes away only when I put my head outside. And I'm not claustrophobic at all. Just like I need to breathe. Those cheap plastic-like tents...
Its crazy what you can learn on OF.
Now I understand why after a night of (bad) sleep at camping, when I wake up, I immediately have a "get out of there ! get out of there !" feeling, that goes away only when I put my head outside. And I'm not claustrophobic at all. Just like I need to breathe. Those cheap plastic-like tents...
Its crazy what you can learn on OF.
Not really talking about AP13 specifically, but surely there were some "plans", if not actual procedures, for all Apollo missions just in case they'd never be able to get back. Thinking specifically about AP8....what if they trajectory was off? They miss the moon. Were they just expected to maintain radio contact until they ran out of air/power?
And someone mentioned a contingency for AP11, but didn't say what it was. Anyone know?
Weird subject, I know. But this thread got me thinking and now I'm curious. I can't imagine NASA (especially at that time) not having a plan for EVERYTHING.
And someone mentioned a contingency for AP11, but didn't say what it was. Anyone know?
Weird subject, I know. But this thread got me thinking and now I'm curious. I can't imagine NASA (especially at that time) not having a plan for EVERYTHING.
Well, since everything was filmed in Area 51 anyway, there were no plans required for something which wasn't in the scripts :lol:
Codz
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Well, since everything was filmed in Area 51 anyway, there were no plans required for something which wasn't in the scripts :lol:
No, no, no. It was a soundstage on Mars!:lol:
Urwumpe
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No contingencies, but anomalies. That is a difference. Contigencies apply when a normal proceeding of the mission is impossible and returning the crew safely becomes the priority.
Apollo 11 had two major anomalies:
- Buzz switching on rendezvous radar and landing radar at the same time for being prepared for a possible abort resulted in the computer displaying error codes. The cause was that the two active radars generated two much data to be processed in the time available during one cycle of the computer, so that less important functions had to be terminated to let the next cycle with critical functions at its beginning start on time.
- The landing site was full of unknown boulders, so Armstrong decided to switch to manual control and land further away at a less dangerous place.
Ghostrider
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asbjos
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I've never heard the last part, but the first part is here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Event_of_Moon_Disaster, and Michael Collins actually reads it in "In the Shadow of the Moon", too...
http://youtu.be/K9S4GjEl_oQ?t=2m10s
I doubt the world would be a better/different place. I even claim that Apollo did not change the world really. It basically changed the books and presents a few photos from the Moon. But it did not change politics, did not prevent wars and did not change societies. It just demonstrated our technological capabilities. But Teflon and ball pens are no Apollo spin-offs like many people believe.
What really changed the world was the ability to make fire I think, the invention of the wheel, the invention of glass and lenses, and the ability to create electricity. What changed and still changes the modern world was the invention and further development of computers, and the internet. Apollo was just a byproduct of our progress. The only amazing thing was to land on another heavenly body. But the technology wasn't something special. Not even back then. Only the economic and structural efforts, just to get three people to the Moon, was something special.
Wasn't the IC and/or transistor's development sped up as a result of the early manned space program? I'm sure those devices would have happened sooner or later, but their introduction came faster because of the space program, eh?
Artlav
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And yet, the whole world was watching.
Nothing else in history have quite the same effect.
Nothing else in history have quite the same effect.
Screamer7
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They all returned safely to the Earth.
We won't know what would happened in the event of a disaster.
BUT, as an religions person I feel that the Apollo program was blessed.
A lot of things could go wrong, and did.
But with a Higher Hand, it did not end in tragedy.
The only exception was Apollo 1 of course, but it happened on Earth.
We won't know what would happened in the event of a disaster.
BUT, as an religions person I feel that the Apollo program was blessed.
A lot of things could go wrong, and did.
But with a Higher Hand, it did not end in tragedy.
The only exception was Apollo 1 of course, but it happened on Earth.
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Hm, the tech was borderline back then, to the point that we oh-so-twitterly-advanced are having a hard time duplicating the effort. Rocket science is still rocket science, and still on the kaboomey side. The internet and computer tech today is mainly "same stuff as yesterday, only faster and flashier". There is no big paradigm shift in sight as it has been with the explosion of home computers in the late '70s-early '80s. Quite simply, we do with one small device what we used to do with many larger devices, but there's no "widening" as we experienced with the early days of the Web. If anything, we're now experiencing a low tide as walled gardens and secluded communities displace the Great Wide Open that used to be.
I personally think we're better off with the Moon landings than without. I like the fact that looking at the Moon I can say "Well, some guy has been there". It's inspirational, and reminds me that mankind could still learn that life is about more than GNP figures and 3-months ROI.
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