Von Braun's Lost Ideas

At this time of a renewed Space Race with China, to get to the Moon's South Pole, we might want to look backward a bit. In the late 50s and early 60s, NASA's Wernher von Braun presented several ideas for long-term visits to the Moon. There's a good article that outlines the concepts from the US and USSR here. 

The German engineer's enormous lunar landers look dated, but far more stable and feasible than SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System. There were also plans for Project Horizon, with habitats buried under the lunar regolith. NASA moved away from these plans given the then-enormous expenses that lifting so much weight from Earth to orbit and beyond would incur.

Now launch costs are lower and we have several ideas for constructing building materials out of what we find on the Moon. I should be optimistic, Child of Apollo that I am. Yet I fear we are heading for disaster.

What von Braun proposed, but that got dropped then in order to beat the Russians and is not on the table now: build a reusable Moon or Mars exploration ship in orbit. The Russian space agency had such a plan, once, when their government was on friendly terms with the US. You can read about the Marsport plan here at Wikipedia. I've critiqued the idea of Starship and giantism before, but building a big ship that would go back and forth from Earth to the Moon or Mars makes great sense. The trick? Use small reusable rockets to build it from components in orbit, as we did with the ISS.

NASA currently plans a risky landing near the lunar South Pole, something Astronaut Victor Glover has critiqued, when he called instead for an equatorial landing where spots are safer and a quick return to Earth, in case of a medical emergency, more certain. The hastiness of the US/China race, as well as the political imperative to get American bootprints on the lunar before our current President leaves office, seems to be pushing the agenda. I'd have preferred an international mission led by the big space powers and a United Nations flag on the Moon this time.

Dr. von Braun's 1952 lander concept, and the real ones that followed two decades later, had broad legs for uncertain terrain. Allen B. Ury built a fabulous model of the idea.

I fear that the SpaceX's tall, narrow lander will simply topple over and kill its crew, ending the Artemis program and ceding space leadership to Beijing.

Images: Fantastic Plastic Models. They should build the real thing! 

 

Images 

Abandoned Tech: The Saturn Rockets

Location: Day-Dreaming about a 1985 Mars base

image source: Encyclopedia Astronautica's entry about the Saturn V rocket

What might have been, had Richard Nixon been a different man, possessing an optimistic vision that matched his calculated-but-brilliant realpolitik demonstrated by the opening to China and the bombing of Hanoi's government to the negotiating table.

I've been thinking of this occasional series since I began shaving with my grandfather's safety razor. It still works great and costs me very little, months into my experiment. Now I own two of these antique Gems (the trade name that fits well). They demonstrate that corporations seeking new markets often over-engineer products and make dubious claims about their improvement. I wish government could do better, but history shows otherwise when it comes to manned space travel.  Odd for me to propose such flights of fancy. I call myself a Neo-Luddite, though as one friend pointed out, I'm better described as a "Reform Luddite" more interested in appropriate technology than in getting rid of technology or curbing its use drastically.

I hope to explain why this Neo-Luddite thinks the US needs its manned program badly, and why it needs NASA for the sort of deep-space ventures that both Presidents Bush and Obama championed.  Both Presidents had NASA contractors scramble to re-invent something we gave up nearly 40 years ago: a heavy-lift rocket suitable for deep-space exploration.

When Nixon canceled the last three missions of the Apollo program, it put the world's most effective--then or now--space transportation system on its way to the scrap heap.  It's a myth that the Saturn V rocket's plans were scavenged from NASA dumpsters, though as Dwayne A. Day noted, records were lost or destroyed along the way. In any case, once the assembly lines for the Saturn IB and V shut, engineers moved on, and the tooling got dispersed or scrapped, there was no practical way to rebuild the mighty F-1 engine or other components without reverse-engineering from a museum piece at huge cost.  Rocketdyne did, as Day notes, save their records and record information from Engineers involved in the F-1 program. Much of the rest of the Saturn, however, would not meet modern standards for alloys and other technologies. A similar rocket today would weigh less and have the benefits of computer-assisted design. That's my hope for Dragon's proposed heavy-lift rocket.

But what if Saturn and its mighty engines had stayed in production, to be incrementally improved or parted out to new NASA and private vehicles?  Most of the pieces for a Mars mission were in place by 1970.

Boeing, in 1968, studied the technology needed to go to Mars by the mid-80s: a Nerva nuclear third stage lofted into orbit by a Saturn V, followed by assembling a Mars spacecraft there. Instead, we got Skylab, then an expensive and tragically flawed pickup truck to low orbit called the Space Shuttle.

Our nation badly needs unity now, and my optimistic side favors a multi-year mission scientific mission to Mars, using the International Space Station if possible to assemble our Mars ship, all this with the aim of resolving the questions about past or present life on the Red Planet. Such a program, paid for by deep cuts in defense spending and, yes, more debt, would have pay-offs in the hiring of technicians and engineers whose work would develop the sorts of spin-off technologies that came from Apollo, including the small computer on which I am writing this post.

We need deep space missions, not merely planting the flag but searching thoroughly and with tools greater than those carried by the Martian rovers. Finding out if we are alone or not in our solar system would, I'd hope, make the texting masses look above the horizon again. NASA's lead can help private industry follow, not to do science but to pioneer, as the pioneers came in the wake of Jefferson's expedition to the Pacific.

And if profit is to be had in space, profit that requires humans to live there, the masses will do more than look up.

They'll go there and we'll become an interplanetary species.

Technologies Overengineered, Ruined, or Abandoned: An Occasional Series

Location: Staring at the Shaving Mug

I'm getting ready to shave again. Some time ago, I switched from an expensive and over-engineered Sensor razor to my grandfather's 1920s Gem Micromatic razor.  I wrote about my reasons here and I still love it. With only one small nick in two months of fun, shaving has again become a manly and pleasant ritual, not a forgotten act as I prepare to do other things or--shudder--try the rapid task-shifting that some mislabel "multitasking."

Given the lack of news about virtual worlds, other than that reported well by other bloggers, and my lack of teaching there, I'm going to diversify the blog again.

I'm looking at an idea that James Howard Kunstler has popularized for a while, one that preceded my meeting Jim and getting caught up in his ideas. Jim is about to publish a new nonfiction book about the diminishing returns of technology. The idea of technologies done well and then forgotten has long captivated me, though I suspect that my Neo-Luddism has taken a different and more tech-friendly turn than Jim would make.  Both of us agree that "new" does not always mean "improved."

I plan to cover, in the next few weeks, several technologies that have been, in my opinion, perfected but then "improved" further or worse still, abandoned.  Here are some candidates:

• Apple's iMovie software
• The Saturn I and V rockets (you know I can't resist space stuff)
• Light local rail networks of the 20s-60s
• The fast-food restaurants of the 1950s and 60s
• The Leatherman^tm Pocket Tool
• The returnable-bottle soft drink
• DeWalt and Porter Cable power tools, after Black & Decker acquired them
• The Volkswagen Jetta TDI, Honda Civic, and Mazda 3 series.

I have personal experience with all but the Saturn rockets (pity!), Honda, and Mazda (near pity!).

My series will be opinionated (go figure) and open to critique and amendments. 

Got some other candidates for tech done well, then messed up or left to rust?