The next three weeks or so leading up to the anniversary are going to be full of pieces like this, from a British journalist who covered the event. It’s a good piece, and I don’t want to diss it–it’s obviously a key part of his own personal history and inspired him, but I disagree with this notion, which will also be a common one among the upcoming commemorations:
A new era was to begin: there would one day be huge satellite cities in space, colonies on the moon, an outpost on Mars, and all before 2001.
This is just not true, much as we’d like it to be. Apollo, for all of the wonder of the achievement, was in fact a detour from the road to those goals. I’ll be explaining that more in my essay a little later this summer in The New Atlantis. I would also note that Eagle didn’t separate from “Apollo.” It did so from the spacecraft Columbia. But that’s just a nit compared to the other point, and I encourage people to enjoy the piece anyway–it’s generally a good historical description of the event.
OK, but what about all that stuff I saw on Portree’s old site about von Braun proposing 100 Saturn V launches and NERVA powered triple hull Mars ships right to Nixon in the Oval Office?
This is the one I remember: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/imis1968.htm
One of the things that I have in my collection are some of the congressional testimonies of Von Braun and Web from 1963 through about 1966. Von Braun absolutely was going beyond flags and footprints with Apollo and it is clear that he probably had read Neil Ruzic’s book on lunar manufacturing.
With the increase in throw weight of the Saturn V from 48 to 98 tons with NERVA, Von Braun was planning for a massive buildup of capability on the Moon. Then there is Kraffte Ericke’s Selenopolis plan, which is very close to what Stuhlinger has told me that Von Braun wanted.
Von Braun absolutely was going beyond flags and footprints with Apollo
This just goes to show that von Braun might have been brilliant engineer and a lot of other things, but he would get a D- in Economics 101.
The problem was that Russia quit. If they had landed on the Moon and started even the smallest of bases we would have continued a bit beyond flags and footprints, at least putting some dirt moving equipment there to build a base. It still would have been abandoned but would have made the history a bit more interesting.
By 2001? People should check out the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” which came out at the end of 1967. Stanley Kubrick made the film, basing it loosely on a story by Arthur C. Clarke titled “The Sentinel.” Clarke later wrote a book version of the film.
Clarke, as some of you might know, was also a visionary engineer. He wrote the first proposal for communications satellites back in 1945.
The middle part of the film (between the apes at the beginning and the mysterious — some say influenced by LSD — trip at the end was supposed to be a realistic portrayal of what we would be doing in space by the late 1990s.
Yes, people got that part completely wrong. The author of that article, though, was, like most people, not really able to predict our future path in space. He was simply reporting what he had heard and believed.
For that matter, in 1969 physicist Gerard K. O’Neill proposed large space colonies. Remember the slogan “L5 in 95”? That was 1995, not 2495. That idea caught the attention of a group of people, some of whom should have known better. Yes, L5ers got a good bit wrong. Even intelligent, well educated people make horrible mistakes.
This just goes to show that von Braun might have been brilliant engineer and a lot of other things, but he would get a D- in Economics 101.
Didn’t von Braun come up with the “ball bearings made in microgravity” trope? I recall reading that NASA sent the idea to metallurgists at MIT to evaluate, and they concluded ball bearings made of steel solidified in microgravity would not be spherical, but instead would have “the morphology of a porcupine”.
The middle part of the film .. was supposed to be a realistic portrayal of what we would be doing in space by the late 1990s.
I need reiterate once again that the portrayal was quite realistic.
What most people miss in that part of 2001: Space Odyssey, are the logos on the space plane and Space Station V itself, where dr. Heywood flies to . They read “Pan American” and “Hilton Hotels” accordingly, NOT NASA, RSA or any other *SA.
Thats where we went wrong. I blame Kubrick for not painting the logos bigger.
and they concluded ball bearings made of steel solidified in microgravity would not be spherical, but instead would have “the morphology of a porcupine”.
Then I would score than one Von Braun 1, MIT zero because that is balderdash. Even back in the 80’s the shuttle program had a product called calibrated spheres who’s roundness exceeded that of what was made on the Earth. They figured out how to do them better here but to make some claim that they are not spherical is just wrong. Then there are the single crystal turbine blades, and there is a lot of very quiet and very good research in the biotech field that is going on even today at the station.
In our microgravity research efforts that I was involved in, it the cost was not the issue, it was reliability of access to space. It will be interesting to see what happens with several different vehicles going to the station, including Elon’s.
Again, looking at Ruzic’s book, he had private enterprise on the Moon doing vacuum manufacturing. He invented the Cryostat while writing the book, that is used today to dial in exact temperatures in vacuum processes.
One of the things that I have in my collection are some of the congressional testimonies of Von Braun and Web from 1963 through about 1966. Von Braun absolutely was going beyond flags and footprints with Apollo
Von Braun was lying to get money from Congress, Dennis. The same way he lied to Hitler.
With the increase in throw weight of the Saturn V from 48 to 98 tons with NERVA, Von Braun was planning for a massive buildup of capability on the Moon. Then there is Kraffte Ericke’s Selenopolis plan, which is very close to what Stuhlinger has told me that Von Braun wanted.
There’s an old saying, Dennis. “Not everyone who talks about heaven is going there.”
How much would it cost to send one astronaut to “Selenopolis” with Saturn V/NERVA? A billion dollars, maybe?
Building “Selenopolis” would have cost several times the US GDP.
If it doesn’t go without saying, that’s a bug, not a feature.
In our microgravity research efforts that I was involved in, it the cost was not the issue, it was reliability of access to space.
That’s an oxymoron, Dennis.
Low reliability and high cost go hand in hand. Failures cost money. It’s impossible to reduce cost without increasing reliability, and vice versa.
Again, looking at Ruzic’s book, he had private enterprise on the Moon doing vacuum manufacturing.
Yes, and he also stated that any such enterprise required significant reductions in transportation costs. Which he supported.
Ruzic did not subscribe to the absurd belief that any attempt to reduce launch costs had to wait until after the building of “Selenopolis.” If you showed up at a Moonie church today, you would probably burn him at the stake. 🙂
Even Von Braun himself finally began to question his approach.
According to Michael Neufeld’s biography of Von Braun, “As reported by friends Ernst Stuhlinger and Fred Ordway, he asked several times whether he had chosen the right path in leading the United States to spend so much money on space. They of course reassured him that he had.”
Dennis,
I think the metallurgists were right.
Those calibrated spheres were not metal, they were some kind of rubbery polymer. As I recall, the fabrication process involved them forming by uniform accretion of long-chain molecules of some kind around seed nuclei in a liquid suspension. Microgravity allowed superior roundness to be achieved because there was no gravity-driven stratification of the polymer molecules in the suspension. In a significant gravity gradient, these heavy molecules slowly sink to the bottom of the reaction vessel leaving fewer per increment of volume the higher up the vessel you go. This asymmetry of distribution increases over time and produces corresponding slight asymmetries in the rate of accretion at points on the growing micro-spheres. Agitating the suspension just introduces even larger, random asymmetries in local distribution of polymer molecules in the suspension. Absense of gravity eliminates this problem. The large molecules have no tendency to stratify and accrete at a nearly uniform rate at all points on a developing micro-sphere making the finished reference spheres both precisely round and precisely equal in size.
For melted metal to become solid ball bearings, the material has to change phase. This can occur either a little at a time, starting from one or more surface points, or all at once, starting from a single point. The latter requires one to be able to supercool the liquid metal spheres while maintaining their liquid condition until the solidification process is initiated in each would-be sphere. This would be difficult – perhaps even impossible. Even if possible, however, when liquid metal solidifies, the shape it assumes is not necessarily the shape it had as a liquid. Solidified metals are crystalline and crystals have preferred geometries that are based on polyhedrons, not spheres. I don’t think the surface tension of the still-liquid portion would be able to overrule the “polyhedral tendency” of solidifying metal enough to yield high-precision spheres that required no finishing even if the most rapid possible solidification (of a supercooled spherical liquid metal mass) from a single initiation point could be reliably achieved. I’m not sure the end result would look like a porcupine, but I’m certain it wouldn’t look like a finished ball bearing either.
An interesting question about Von Braun: Did he ever have any personal interest in spaceflight?
In the aircraft industry, most engineers want to fly on the aircraft they are building. Even those who are working military fighters, etc. will try to snag a ride any chance they get.
As far as I can tell, Von Braun never had any such desire and only wanted to sit in the block house, push the button, and watch the rocket fly.
Obviously, NASA’s astronaut selection rules would not have allowed him to fly, but Von Braun could have used his influence to try to change the rules. He probably would not have been successful, but I’m not aware that he even tried, as Burt Rutan or D.D. Harriman would have.
Even before his NASA days, when he was writing about spaceflight for Colliers, consulting for Disney, etc., I’m not aware that he ever said anything about wanting to fly in space himself.
Does anyone have any information to the contrary?
Regarding microgravity ball bearings
“Didn’t von Braun come up with the “ball bearings made in microgravity” trope? I recall reading that NASA sent the idea to metallurgists at MIT to evaluate, and they concluded ball bearings made of steel solidified in microgravity would not be spherical, but instead would have “the morphology of a porcupine”.”
Ah, but we have a real-life and quite old micro-gravity technology used to manufacture the lead shot loaded into shotgun shells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_tower
Perhaps steel (for a ball bearing) would behave differently than lead, but the idea that all molten metal would form into a porcupine shape in microgravity is empirical nonsense.
That’s curious. I tried to post a comment and it didn’t go through. Perhaps it was stopped by a spam filter because of a link to wikipedia? Hmm…
Well, if that’s the case just look up “shot tower” in wikipedia.
Shot towers are a very old micro-gravity technology used to manufacture the lead round bird shot used for shotgun ammunition. So clearly molten metal, lead at the least, will form spheres in microgravity. Perhaps steel needed for ball bearings would act differently than lead, though a “porcupine morphology” seems bizarrely counter empirical.
The spam filter stops any comment with a link. I have to approve it.
Perhaps steel (for a ball bearing) would behave differently than lead, but the idea that all molten metal would form into a porcupine shape in microgravity is empirical nonsense.
“The wide range of materials which were successfully formed into spheres indicates that the formation of unduloids and the resultant spheres is related to the process of power input and not the materials.”
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19740002179_1974002179.pdf
One experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions.
What I find bizarre and disturbing about this spherical vs porcupine debate is that it is happening at all so many decades and $billions after first suggestion. The discussion here should have ended with a reference to solid research results five or maybe thirty five years back.
Dennis is on to something here. Rand is wrong in suggesting that Apollo was a “detour.” The true detour happened when we abandoned Apollo and tried to build a government space line, i.e. the shuttle.
>..Apollo, for all of the wonder of the achievement, was
> in fact a detour from the road to those goals…
Agreed, even for Von Bran it was a big step back from his Colliers article concepts.
Sadly Griffen, and now NASA I guess, see the detour as the true path for NASA. I.E. NEVER opening up space, but keeping space rare, flags and Foot prints, specticals.
The 2001 vision looks a lot farther away now then when I started in the shuttle program in ’81.