Posted on 08/14/2006 12:23:37 PM PDT by raygun
A visitor walks past the Apollo 16 lunar capsule on display at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006. NASA engineers designing the next U.S. moon rocket are getting ideas from old museum pieces including the hatch from the 34-year-old capsule. (AP Photo/Rob Carr)
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Jim Snoddy and other NASA engineers didn't just go to the drawing board or a warehouse when they needed ideas - and parts - for America's next lunar rocket. They went to space museums.
...tight deadlines and uncertain budgets...[forces]NASA [to] both cannibaliz[e] and analyz[e] pieces of its glory years, namely the Apollo program that first put humans on the lunar surface in 1969.
Snoddy, a manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has been removing valves and other parts from Apollo exhibits as he oversees construction of the upper-stage engine on the new moon rocket, dubbed Ares 1. Some of the pieces and accompanying documentation are not available anywhere but museums, he said.
[snip]
The same thing is going on at the Smithsonian Institution and Space Center Houston, where exhibits manager Paul Spana said he has had about a dozen visits this year from young NASA engineers and contractors trying to figure out how their predecessors sent people to the moon. They were particularly surprised to see the tight squeeze inside the lunar lander, he said.
[snip]
[retired] Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with...[some engineers] were not even born when the Saturn V was flying lunar missions.
[snip]
"The mechanics of [getting to & from the moon] to a large extent have been solved. That is the legacy that Apollo gave us,"
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
"what they hell are they doing up there on the space station?"
- Has anyone seen a press release or a news report that says, "hey gee - look at what NASA is doing on the Space Station" ????
All that money - and I cannot find a single person who can tell me what NASA is doing up there - OF VALUE thank you very much.
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Drinking Tang and making precision ball bearings.
Hey, he taught Rocky everything he knew...
Before his life was needlessly cut short in the senseless waste of life that was Rocky IV.
She demurely smiled, and quipped, "That, sonny, is what is known as arithmetic. They don't teach that no more."
I said, "Yeah, these days nobody could figure that out without a calculator. You probably had to learn your times tables to 12, eh? We only had to learn them up to 10." She looked at me with disdain, "12? 12? My dear boy, we learned our multiplication tables out to 19 by 6th grade. Prior to entering high school you were expected to have a great deal of the logarithmic tables memorized."
The cashier didn't have much to say as she bagged my stuff.
She then said, "Those calculators are evil you know."
"Oh?" says I. "Yes. My husband, bless his soul, worked for McDonald Aviation. He won competitions against people with calculators using only a slide-rule. They just don't teach the kids to think anymore."
Back when you used a slide rule, you had to know enough about the physical system you were working on to know where to place the decimal point. You were not considered competent unless you could give an answer to any problem that was in the right ball-park off the top of your head.
Nowadays a computer can spit an outright stupidity at one of these computer-jockey engineers, and he doesn't have the confidence to disagree with the machine. I review some work that is just idiotic, and whenever I redline something, the kid's only defense is that that was what the computer told him the answer was.
.. 
...my first computer
Here's a recent pic, wherein he assists in testing those ablative tiles on the Shuttle. Just wait'll the Chinese orbit another tin can. Zap!
Have you ever seen a Mercury capsule? OK, everyone, hop in!
Reporters see a rounded cone and think its the same. However, the shape is bout all there is in common between the two. :P
AP fails at rocket science.
That's a very respectable piece of hardware. It puts my Sterling to shame. My Dad gave me the one he'd used as a patternmaker in the Chevy model shop at the GM Tech Center when I took analytical geometry in high school. He said everybody was using calculators now. That was either my sophmore or junior year in high school (77-78).
Maintaining the basic systems. Wasting taxpayer $$$.
Half listening to the radio toady, I heard that some piece of the ISS may have been installed with the
wrong fasteners (bolts?), with the possibility that it may not hold.
The issue involves four bolts that hold the antenna support box to the forward right side of Atlantis' cargo bay. The KU-band antenna is used to relay voice, video and data between the shuttle and NASA's fleet of communications satellites.
Note the foam insulation that caused two catastrophic shuttle failures did not fail on earlier missions as it was made with CFC. After the foam was redesigned to use CO2 in a PC, ozone saving, environmental change did the breaking off problem emerge. Ditto with the rugged ablative heat shields of the Apollo missions were ditched for fragile silicon tiles ...a poor engineering choice when a reliable and rugged technology could have been retained.
But someone had to warn the fleet! Zac gave his life in a noble cause.
Over the past year, there was the dead roofer at KSC, shattered flood light while inside Atlantis (iirc),
and some other "mishap" that slips my mind.
Yeah. OTOH, the question of the bolt threads would probably not have come up if NASA weren't on their Shuttle Safety kick.
"...They just don't teach the kids to think anymore."
You are right about THAT. I force my boys to do it, though, and find any excuse to figure things in my head when they are around.
When they were younger, they used to ask on trips, "How much longer 'till we get there?" I answered, "We are 242 miles away, and doing 72 miles per hour - you tell me." And then, when they said "nevermind", I made them give me the answer without pencil and paper, or a calculator...
You mean the quest for drama, ratings and heaven forbid, syndication?
LOL! Yeah, all 26 episodes.
However, the new version on Sci-Fi is superb.
Very simple to ball park it, and then back the error out. As we say in the IT field: pice of caeke.
240 / 70 = 24 / 7 = 3 3/7 hours
3/7 hours = 60 / 7 = 8.6 minutes * 3 = 240 + 18 and move the decimal to the left, i.e., 25.8 minutes, or more precicely 3 hours 25.8 minutes.
That answer gets one into the infield to cover home plate.
After that its simply dialing the answer in by determining the ratio of 72 to 70, and dividing the original answer by that ratio.
72 / 70 = 7.2 / 7 which easily works out to 1.028. So the actual answer will be about 97% of what was initially computed. Simply compute 3% of the inital answer and discard it. 3% of 3 hours is .03 * 3 hours or .09 hours. 9% of an hour is nine 60/100's or nine 6/10's or nine .6's = 5.4 minutes.
3% of 25.8 minutes is .258 minutes * 3 minutes. clearly there are at least three 1/4 minutes so we have at least .75 minutes, and three .008 minutes. Easy enough to add .024 minutes to .75 minutes to get .774 minutes.
adding 5.4 minutes and .774 minutes gets us 6.374 minutes.
So the trip will take 3 hours, and 25.8 minutes minus the 3% (6.374 minutes). Now the only error exists in how long it'll take to cover the 2 unaccounted for miles at 72 MPH. That unfortunately can't be figured out w/out a calculator.
OR one can say, 60 MPH is 1 mile/minute. 72 MPH is 72 / 60 more than that. 72 / 60 = 7.2 / 6 = 1.2 Twenty percent of 60 = 60 / 5 = 12. So 72 MPH is 1 mile per 48 seconds. 48 seconds twice is = 100 seconds (2 * 50) - 4 seconds (2 * 2) = 96 seconds = 1 minute 36 seconds. So one subtracts 1.5 minutes from the 6.374 minutes and you end up with a net 3 hours 25.8 minutes minus 4.874 minutes. The trip will take at least 3 hours 20.9 minutes.
The correct answer is 3 hours 20.66 minutes. The difference being due to the rounding error in the 3% easy number used to calculate the error.
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