For the last decades there were so many km of textlines spent pointing out the
construction / manufacture details and documents of e.g. the F1 engine had;
oooh gone lost. Gone.
Some even went as far as to salvage a spent F1 from the ocean floor to get to
grips with F1 details. While several F1s in reasonable condition were on show
at the Cape. Not one word about them.
Like that Atlas D standing in the Smithsonian museum garden in rain and wind
for so many years (I saw it standing there in 1969)... despair, naysayers,
because it was used for a (successful) launch years later !
Now at present we are all going for an international lunar base craze once
more, proving the reason why Saturn was turned down (the lack of political
incentive vs the USSR) looks like FAKE NEWS.
As to tracing or exploring lunar subsurface lava ducts for a lunar base use,
mentioned often on this list: not one word. As to looking for water in lunar
South Pole craters... I wonder but it is the right spirit I hope and maybe.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Henry Spencer
Sent: maandag 22 juli 2019 18:38
To: Arocket List
Subject: [AR] Re: What happened to the Space Shuttle?
On Mon, 22 Jul 2019, David McMillan wrote:
... The *real* gems in the NASA archives are (IMO) the decades of
experiment and test results, which will generally include the critical
bits of "why we tried this," "what didn't work," "why it didn't work,"
and (hopefully) "this is what *did* work and why."
There's a surprising amount of stuff that works in aerospace
engineering where no one really knows *why* it works -- someone with a
huge R&D budget decades ago just kept throwing spaghetti at the wall
until something stuck, worked out how to duplicate and productionize it,
and then everyone just kept following the recipe (mostly blindly) for
years or decades to come.