Just when I thought he was starting to get it, off he goes on another ignorant piece about the “loss of expertise” at NASA, and the “inability” of the commercial crew providers to do it without them. He doesn’t seem to understand that companies and agencies don’t have expertise — people do. All of the people at NASA who know how to develop launch systems are dead or retired (because it’s been over three decades since NASA did one), and no one at NASA has ever known how to do one cost effectively. That experience resides at SpaceX, and other places. Clark Lindsey addresses the nonsense in comments over there.
15 thoughts on “Jay Barbree’s Latest Nonsense”
Comments are closed.
Yeah, but does SpaceX have buggywhips?
How much evidence do you need before concluding someone is a liar or a shill?
> How much evidence do you need before concluding someone is a liar or a shill?
Lots. It’s just so easy to be wrong yet completely and unteachably convinced you are right.
Yours,
Tom
From the article:
Over the past five decades, Americans have never been without their own crew spacecraft either flight-ready or just short of being ready to go.
I seem to remember a six-year period from 1975-1981 when no American flew in space. Back then, hitching rides with the Russians was not an option.
Uhoh, after STS-51L and STS-107 there certainly weren’t any crew spacecraft “ready to go”.
The last Mercury mission was on May 15, 1963.
The first manned Gemini mission was on March 23, 1965, some 22 months later.
The last Gemini mission ended on Nov 15, 1966.
The first manned Apollo mission launch on Oct 11, 1968, a gap of almost 23 months.
The last Apollo mission (Apollo-Soyuz) ended on July 21, 1975.
The first Shuttle mission was on April 12, 1981, a gap of almost 6 years.
The Challenger accident happened on Jan 28, 1986.
The next Shuttle flight launched on Sep 29, 1988, a gap of 2 years, 8 months.
The Columbia accident happened on Feb 1, 2003.
The next Shuttle mission launched on July 25, 2005, a gap of 2 years, 6 months.
So, in the 50 years of manned spaceflight, NASA has been without it’s own means of launching astronauts into space for a total of about 14 years, 9 months.
They could have kept on flying Mercury until Gemini was ready (indeed there were plans for one or two longer-duration flights), but NASA decided to terminate Mercury and concentrate on Gemini. The Russians had already proven that people could survive in space for a few days, so there really wasn’t much point to a three-day Mercury flight.
Apollo 1 was scheduled to fly in February 1967, so there would have been no gap at all if not for the fire.
Strictly speaking, the Shuttle could have kept on flying as if nothing happened after the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
It’s the six-year gap that interests me. Apollo had come to a dead stop with no more hardware left and the Shuttle was nowhere near ready. I was pretty young at the time, but I don’t remember people being terribly upset about it, unlike today with the “Oh noes! Obama has reduced us to buying rides from the Russians!” crowd.
There were plans to fly more Mercury missions but they were dropped. For one thing, when Gordon Cooper flew the last and longest mission, a lot of the vehicle systems failed. There didn’t seem much point to flying more missions.
While the first Apollo flight was scheduled for early 1967, they were having so many problems with the Block I capsule that it’s questionable whether they would’ve been able to go on schedule or that the flight would’ve been successful.
IIRC, the first Shuttle flight was supposed to happen in 1978 or 79. However, delays and overruns pushed the first flight to April 12, 1981.
Two of the issues that I recall dealt with the flight control system and the protective tiles. On the last Enterprise glide test, the pilots experienced PIO (pilot induced oscillations). They had to do some modifications to the flight control system to work out those bugs. When they flew the Columbia to the Cape on the back of the 747, a lot of the heat tiles fell off. They spent a lot of time fixing that issue. IIRC, early tests of the SSME sometimes exploded so that probably caused some more delays and overruns. No doubt there were other issues but those are the ones that come to mind.
As for the delays following the Shuttle accidents, it seems unlikely that anyone rational would’ve wanted to fly again before the problems were fixed. Perhaps they could’ve fixed the problems faster and were overly cautious. I honestly don’t know.
I remember reading that Shepard lobbied hard for MA-10, even after MA-9 had flown. I can’t blame him; it must have been frustrating to spend those years of training for a 15-minute flight.
I also remember reading somewhere that in early ’66, some thought that the first manned Apollo might fly before the end of the year. That optimism didn’t last long.
As for the delays following the Shuttle accidents, it seems unlikely that anyone rational would’ve wanted to fly again before the problems were fixed.
I didn’t say it was a good idea!
Gemini was just a gap program between Mercury and Apollo. Virtually none of the lessons learned in Gemini ever made it into any spacecraft.. with the possible exception of the escape seats for the first shuttle flights that were later removed. Hopefully, people will someday see Constellation (and son of Constellation, this SLS nonsense) as a gap program between Shuttle and commercial crew.
I disagree, Trent. Gemini was a vital steppingstone and is seriously underrated. Not in terms of spacecraft design, but in learning the skills necessary for living and working in space.
Long-duration flights, rendezvous and docking, and spacewalking were all pioneered and perfected with Gemini. If we had gone directly from Mercury to Apollo, there would have had to have been a series of Apollo earth orbital missions to develop those skills before they set out for the moon.
Assuming that NASA had skipped Gemini and concentrated on Apollo, it’s hard for me to see a manned Apollo flying before 1966. In 1965 they were still testing the Saturn I with boilerplate Apollos.
Everything Gemini did for Apollo was repeated in Apollo, and could have been done with Mercury. They didn’t need to build a new vehicle and then throw away all the lessons learned. It was just busywork between Mercury and Apollo to keep the workforce and the production lines going.
I’m with rickl on this one. It’s also worth noting that flying Gemini tested not only capabilities and systems but crewmen as well. In addition to all the intentional R&D and lessons learned provided by the Gemini flights, the program’s problems also faced some of the crews with opportunities to show their qualities when the chips were down. Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott saved Gemini 8 after a near-disastrous attitude control system failure and Buzz Aldrin pulled Gemini 12’s chestnuts out of the fire by demonstrating that the proposed solutions to previous Gemini EVA problems actually worked and also saved the Agena rendezvous part of the mission by improvising a radar-less approach when the tracking radar failed. Combine Armstrong’s Gemini 8 save with his hairsbreadth, but successful, punchout from the doomed “Flying Bedstead” and Aldrin’s McGyver-esque exercise in extemporaneous orbital mechanics and one appreciates that there was nothing whatever accidental or “luck of the draw” about both of them being on the Apollo 11 crew roster.
Great stories Dick, and I’d never heard them before.
Project Gemini was the first to include an on-board computer. It was the first to use fuel cells for electricity and drinking water. It was the first to have the ability to change orbits in space, not just attitude. It was the first to demonstrate EVAs and to not only learn how hard they were but how to resolve the problems. Gemini was the first to demonstrate orbital rendezvous and docking – something Apollo didn’t repeat until Apollo 9. Gemini demonstrated people could live in space for the time needed to complete a lunar mission (two weeks).