Gene Cernan, last astronaut to walk on the moon.

[gsx600racer]

Seems we lost another NASA astronaut as well as John Glenn awhile back. 

As we are here tinkering with our toys to maybe gain a mph or two, these nation hero's put it all out on the line for all of mankind. 

Where we are trying to do 70 on 10" tires, these guy were strapping themselves into machines that did speeds which are unimaginable. When things broke, they didn't get out and pushed them home.

In an era that made all Americans and the people of the world proud is getting closer to the end. 

Rest in Peace.

[Deleted]

Jan 16, 2017 21:15:13 GMT -5 gsx600racer said:

Seems we lost another NASA astronaut as well as John Glenn awhile back. 

As we are here tinkering with our toys to maybe gain a mph or two, these nation hero's put it all out on the line for all of mankind. 

Where we are trying to do 70 on 10" tires, these guy were strapping themselves into machines that did speeds which are unimaginable. When things broke, they didn't get out and pushed them home.

In an era that made all Americans and the people of the world proud is getting closer to the end. 

Rest in Peace.

Very well said.  He always seemed like a great guy too.  Most folks probably think that NASA would not have let these guys fly if it was not safe...it was not safe.  It was more like..."Hey, we just launched three of these things and not one of them blew up so...it's ready for you."  Of course, 7 rockets of the same design prior to that all blew up.  All of those guys are/were much braver than I could ever be.  Take Jim Lovell on Apollo 13: "Ah Houston, we appear to be venting something out into space."  Now if that had been me, it would have been more like:  "Houston!!!  Holy Shit!!  There is a leak and I think it is the oxygen!  What the hell do we do?  Help! Help!"  "We are all gonna die!!!!!"

RIP Gene and all of the others that we have lost.

Bill

[humanshield]

Well said.

[Deleted]

I remember a story Gene told in an interview many, many years ago. He was just a kid (must have been fairly old) and he watched Alan Sheppard fly on the First manned Mercury flight and he said...that is what I want to do. Then, years later, he was walking on the moon. He obviously told the story better than I have here but, it was interesting that he made that kind of decision, and then made it happen.

Bill

[humanshield]

The 50's and 60's were glorious times for space vehicle development and there will never be anything like it again.

I think SpaceX or one of the others developing extraorbital vehicles is saying moon excursions for around $10,000 in the next 10 years.

We'll see. Would be cool though.

[bluegoatwoods]

Yes. RIP, Gene Cernan.

An accomplished astronaut, of course. He's one of three astronauts who rode a Saturn V twice. pretty cool thing to do. He's one of two astronauts who managed to get into lunar orbit twice. (Jim Lovell managed to get out to the neighborhood of the Moon twice. But the second time there was no actual orbiting involved. It was also a supremely dramatic adventure. But that's another story)

In one respect, he's a stand-alone. He managed to not just achieve lunar orbit twice, but to break lunar orbit and go on a lunar surface trajectory twice.

And that's a larger accomplishment than it might seem on the surface.

Consider; those Apollo spacecraft were out there far from any kind of help and they were performing at the very limits of their ability. The Apollo 17 spacecraft sustained those astronauts for something like 300 hours. And it could never possibly go a whole lot longer than that. Were one of those spacecraft in lunar orbit and the engine malfunctioned, then those guys would have been doomed. Even if a rescue mission might conceivably have been launched (I suppose it would require two rescue missions since both the rescuers and the rescued would need transportation) They could never have held out long enough. They'd have died somewhere in the neighborhood of the Moon while rescue was on the way. Even that's getting pretty speculative since no rescue attempt, realistically, would have been launched. This is no new, profound idea. I'm sure the astronauts, the NASA people, and regular citizens thought about this.

But consider the astronauts who left the command module and broke lunar orbit to descend toward the lunar surface. That adds an extra layer of complexity to the task of getting home safely. There's a whole 'nother spacecraft which must work properly plus the navigator must do his job well in order to get back to the mother craft safely.

The astronauts who broke lunar orbit and descended toward the lunar surface are surely the people who've been furthest away from home in terms of just how many steps needed plus properly working equipment in order to get home safely. And Gene Cernan is the only one who's done it twice.

A handful of years back I wrote him an e-mail mentioning this. I'd assumed that he was aware of this idea and I wanted to let him know that someone else was aware as well. He never wrote back. That was kinda disappointing.

It was Buzz Aldrin who got me thinking along these lines. That was many years ago. Someone who was interviewing him mentioned that he and Neil Armstrong, on the Moon, were further from home than any human had ever been. With the exception of Mike Collins when he was on the far side of the Moon in his orbit.

Aldrin's reply was, "No. We were on the surface of another planet. As far as getting home safely, we were much further than Mike."

I've alwasy sympthized with Buzz's feeling that he and Neil were the 'first men on the Moon' as opposed to Neil being the first man on the Moon.

As commander of the mission, Neil was the true pilot of that lunar module. But it was a two man job and Buzz helped. Getting safely to the surface (plus getting safely back to the mother ship) was the hard part.

Once the Eagle had landed, opening the hatch and stepping out was comparatively easy.

[Deleted]

Funny, I just watched a documentary on the first moon landing and...I saw something I had not seen in all of the others I had watched over the years, or read in any of my many books on this subject. The guys that designed the engine that would lift the astronauts off from the lunar surface were all at mission control when the big moment came. It had been tested, and tested...and tested but...get this...the fuel it used was so corrosive that only one firing was made and then the engine was scrap. So...all of these tests involved DIFFERENT engines...the same design of course but...each engine could only be fired once.

When it came time for Neil to hit the button to fire this engine...even the guys that designed it said there was a good chance it might not work. Can you imagine, just for a second, being there at that moment? What if Neil hit the "start" button and....silence? It did, of course, fire as it should as did all of the others but man...I had no idea that even the guys who designed and built that engine were worried about it...evidently very worried because, as I said, the engine Neil and Buzz used...was NEVER tested. I am thinking the engineers had to modify the Apollo spacecraft to accommodate the astronauts balls.

Bill

[bluegoatwoods]

Jan 16, 2017 22:21:38 GMT -5 PirateLabs said:

Funny, I just watched a documentary on the first moon landing and...I saw something I had not seen in all of the others I had watched over the years, or read in any of my many books on this subject. The guys that designed the engine that would lift the astronauts off from the lunar surface were all at mission control when the big moment came. It had been tested, and tested...and tested but...get this...the fuel it used was so corrosive that only one firing was made and then the engine was scrap. So...all of these tests involved DIFFERENT engines...the same design of course but...each engine could only be fired once.

When it came time for Neil to hit the button to fire this engine...even the guys that designed it said there was a good chance it might not work. Can you imagine, just for a second, being there at that moment? What if Neil hit the "start" button and....silence? It did, of course, fire as it should as did all of the others but man...I had no idea that even the guys who designed and built that engine were worried about it...evidently very worried because, as I said, the engine Neil and Buzz used...was NEVER tested. I am thinking the engineers had to modify the Apollo spacecraft to accommodate the astronauts balls.

Bill

Interesting...... I'm not a bit surprised either. 

Keeping three men alive for about a week on a trip to the Moon seems almost commonplace now that it's been done. Yet it was an astounding thing to do and it required reliance on a whole lot of technology and engineering that was unique to that particular task and, therefore, new and untried. I'm sure they were ultra-careful about it. Yet they were going out on one hell of a limb.

Apollo 13, of course, is a wonderful example of just one of the things that might have gone wrong out there.

In the case of the Apollo service module engine, my understanding is that the fuel involved literally needed no ignition source. Two different components were mixed and burnt spontaneously. I don't know if this is true of the lunar module descent and ascent engines. But I'm willing to believe it. And even that doesn't get away from the possibility of malfunction. Imagine a faulty fuel pump refusing to work. Still, no ignition system needed takes away one pretty major worry.

Guys like Capt James Cook were certainly going out on a limb. Yet they weren't guaranteed death if anything went really wrong with their craft. The astronauts who went to the Moon were relying on hardware that was only barely, barely up to the task. Not that it wasn't well-designed and well-made. But their 'lifeline' was nearly unbelievably tenuous and delicate.

If guys like us tried to explore Antarctica on scooters we'd be taking far, far less risk.

[bluegoatwoods]

Jan 16, 2017 21:44:55 GMT -5 humanshield said:

The 50's and 60's were glorious times for space vehicle development and there will never be anything like it again.

I think SpaceX or one of the others developing extraorbital vehicles is saying moon excursions for around $10,000 in the next 10 years.

We'll see. Would be cool though.

There was a time when I wouldn't have believed it. Not all that long ago, either.

But Space Ex has been very, very impressive. They just might be the ones who get people to the Moon or, better yet, the asteroids at some practical cost. 

I'm just dying to see the Falcon Heavy rocket fly. I think it's scheduled maybe this year or maybe 2018. Not all that long from now.

[Senna1Rossi]

Jan 16, 2017 21:15:13 GMT -5 gsx600racer said:

In an era that made all Americans and the people of the world proud is getting closer to the end. 

This.

I really do hope that science, and the curiosity to further advance theoretical and practical science, doesn't diminish more like it has over the decades...

[bluegoatwoods]

By the way, we are soon to reach an important anniversary. January 27 of this year will be 50 years (hard to believe) since our three astronauts were killed in the fire aboard the first Apollo spacecraft. Virgil (Gus) Grissom being among them.

I haven't double-checked it, but I'm just certain that Gus was the first of the original seven to pass away. And now John Glenn has become the last. Very nearly fifty years later. I'm sorry to see these guys go.

I've long known that the Apollo 1 fire was the first historical event that I can remember. I have earlier personal memories, of course. But this my first memory of something that other people would remember as well.

I do have vague memories of earlier space flights. But I can't identify any particular mission. And I have vague memories of the fact that we were trying pretty frantically to keep up with the Soviets. I'm pretty sure that I didn't have much notion of just who the Soviets were. But I had picked up on the fact that their spacecraft, rockets in retrospect, were more advanced than ours and that we didn't like it.

I also remember the desolate feeling looking at the photos of the charred Apollo 1 capsule in the newspaper. Plus I was curious about something; I asked my Dad why that spacecraft looked different than the one I'd expected. That being the Gemini spacecraft. He told me that that was our newest spacecraft. He probably added, "That's the one that's going to get us to the Moon". But I suppose he might have been feeling dubious about that on that particular day.

And musing about this brings back one other memory. The Moon missions lasted about one week. I remember watching coverage of one of them and remarking to my sister, "Remember when these missions would launch in the morning and they'd be back in the afternoon?" And she said "Yes".

But the math doesn't add up. The last missions that were finished in such a short period of time would be when I was about three years old. I strongly doubt that I'd remember that. I think maybe the first Gemini mission was a short-term mission. But then they quickly got into multi-day missions. (Didn't Gus Grissom command that first Gemini mission? And I feel like I ought to be able to identify the pilot. But I'm drawing a blank.)

But there was one Gemini mission later on that was quite short. It could be that that one had impressed itself on my memory without my realizing that it wasn't meant to be as short as it was.

That would have been Gemini 8. And this mission was a real credit to Neil Armstrong, by the way. He was the commander. Which means that he was the real pilot. The 'pilot' being something more along the lines of an assitant. In this case the pilot was Dave Scott, I think.

To start with, they achieved the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit. It wasn't absolutely certain that it could be done at all. There was a good deal of fear of the unknown unknowns. And had it prove impossible, then project Apollo, not to mention the ISS, would never have gotten off the ground.

But they managed it with no apparent trouble. The craft that they docked with was an unmanned spacecraft that was designed and built for the express purpose of being a target for the Gemini spacecraft. It was launched into orbit on it's own rocket a few hours before the Gemini was launched into orbit. These unmanned craft had the name of "Agena" and they were really not much more than a decent sized rocket engine, a decent fuel supply and some electronics that the Gemini crew could use for various purposes while docked. One of the later Gemini missions used this Agena to boost themselves into an orbit with an apogee of something like six hundred miles. Not bad at all.

But anyway, this particular docking went smoothly. But almost right away they started having trouble keeping the Gemini-Agena craft stable. It was yawing, pitching and/or rolling when it wasn't being asked to by the crew. And apparently it got worse pretty quickly. This also happened at a time when the spacecraft was out of communication with mission control in Houston. Meaning that the astronauts were not able to confer with Houston over the matter.

Armstrong decided that he had to do something and he'd have to do it on his own. Calculating that the trouble was more likely in the Agena than in the Gemini, he undocked. This was a pretty bold move, doing it without Houston's blessing. Had he chosen wrong I don't suppose he'd have faced court-martial or other legal trouble. But his career with NASA surely would have been ruined. And he did choose rightly in the ways that counted.

But he was wrong on one matter. The trouble was not in the Agena target vehicle, it was in the Gemini spacecraft.

Mounted all around the rear and the nose of these crafts are small rocket-type engines. For small-scale maneuvering. They're not powerful. But they don't need to be. They're not meant to blast the craft to the Moon. They're only meant to turn the nose so-many degrees port. Or rotate the craft. Things like that. I'm not even certain that the propellant actually burns. But I imagine it does. Compressed air, for instance, would do the trick. But you get more bang for your buck with gunpowder. But I'm rambling.

One of the thrusters on the Gemini craft had failed to shut down when it was told to do so by the crew. It just kept on burning. And this is what was making the Gemini-Agena unstable.

Undocking from the Agena actually made the situation worse. Because now the craft, was smaller and less massive. This gave the malfunctioning thruster the ability to spin this now lighter craft even faster. If memory serves, their rate of rotation reached the neighborhood of 60 rpm. And I guess they were tumbling end over end.

Imagine yourself in a vehicle that's not much different in size than a mid-60's Olds 98 and it's tumbling once per second. You must get that tumble under control if you're to save yourself. But at such a speed of tumble, merely getting your bearings is going to be quite a struggle. And I understand that Armstrong and Scott were in danger of black-out. And that surely would have been the end of them.

And Neil had another problem. He could, and did, counter-act the spin given him by the malfunctioning thruster by using the remaining thrusters which were working properly. That was his only hope, in fact. But he didn't have an unlimited fuel supply. Every 'bad' thrust he gave it would subtract from what he had left.

I don't suppose he could possibly have done anything visually. The Earth would have been little more than a blue smear in his tiny little window. Over and over again. And that's if his window happened to be facing the Earth. The Moon and the stars, no doubt, would have been even more useless. I guess he must have done it using those instruments on his dash. But I can't imagine what sort of instrumentation that would be. If Dave Scott was also looking out and telling him whether the Earth was moving more slowly or more rapidly, then that might have been useful. I'll guess that the combination of instrument reading plus Scott's visual help was probably how he did it. It's a good thing that neither of them got sick or passed out.

I suppose Neil's advantage was having 8,10,12 (?) good thrusters to counter-act that one bad one. But his disadvantage was in spinning so fast that it getting his bearings and cancelling such a spin seems like it must be something of a miracle.

Anyway, he got it under control and saved his own life plus that of his pilot. They re-entered safely and splashed down about eleven hours after launch.

That was kinda the point of this long detour. Maybe that mission was the one that impressed itself on my memory for being so short. I was merely too young to absorb the fact that it was short because of an emergency.

Plus the fact that Neil earned our praise and attention on this mission. Another definite astronaut hero.

[Deleted]

Yes, the stuck thruster issue was very serious. The rotation was up to 1 rev./sec. and much more and they would have blacked out. Just another day at the office for Neil. Speaking of that...I will try to post the vid here of Neil training in the flying bedstead for the lunar landing when a malfunction happened. I listened to Neil's biography audiobook last month and the most amazing thing to me was...one of the astronauts heard of Neil's very close call and rushed to his office to see if he was OK. He said Neil was sitting there typing away on a report of the incident as if it were no big deal. We were like 1.5 seconds away from losing him in that training accident.

Bill

[Deleted]

That was not the video I originally saw. In the other one, you could clearly hear the thrusters jamming and malfunctioning. He almost went upside down several times which is not a good position to be in while ejecting. Just incredible really.

Bill