[AR] Re: body mass and size of Apollo astronauts
- From: Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 14:02:57 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 9 Oct 2013, Ben Brockert wrote:
> > Since the astronauts are the pilots of rockets...
>
> They sure liked to think so, but the rocket was the pilot of the
> rocket. They were the pilot of the reentry and orbital maneuvering
> stage, and often unnecessarily so.
Starting with (I think) Apollo 10, the Saturn V Apollo flights actually
had a manual piloting option for the rocket, as an emergency backup. They
tried it in simulation, discovered that it worked surprisingly well, and
decided it was worth having. It was never used -- even on Apollo 12,
where the spacecraft computer got its brains scrambled when the whole
stack was hit by lightning, the Saturn's computer kept going.
Henry Spencer
henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
(regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)
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