hello,
My question actually pertains to this specific notion:
I remember to have heard that, after the russians beat the US on sending the first man into space the US decided that they HAD to beat the russians on putting the first man on the mon.
I seem to recall that the ORDER was to put a man on the moon in less than 10 years, or something like that, and that it was a political decision, meaning that NASA was basically forced to Figure it out and comply with this deadline regardless of whether they thought it was reasonable.
I'm preparing a class on how constraints and limitations (whether of time, resources, etc) sometimes are acually helpfull to spark creativity.
Example from Audi: "We need to win races with a car that's actually slower" which led them to decide they needed less pit stops, which led them to decelop the first diesel racing engine, which was more efficient
I wanted to incorporate the deadline of the Apollo 11 as a nice story/example of this positivity of constraints..
Can you guys give me more details about this whole Apollo 11 situation?
First of all, am I right about this notion?
What kind of clever advancements or uses of available technologies allowed the mission to be succesfull within the deadline (stuff like eliminating things that weren't acually necesary or repurposing some technology)?
Can you point out some innovation or clever solution that would probably have never existed if they had let Nasa take their time and develop the mission without pressure?
Thanks in advance!
I seem to recall that the ORDER was to put a man on the moon in less than 10 years, or something like that
Kennedy's "challenge" was to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
What kind of clever advancements or uses of available technologies allowed the mission to be succesfull within the deadline (stuff like eliminating things that weren't acually necesary or repurposing some technology)?
Oh boy. You could (and people have) written entire books about this, but arguably the single biggest "clever advancement" for the Apollo program was the decision to use Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. This meant that the big, heavy command module with its heat shield stayed in orbit around the moon while a lightweight lunar module was used to land a pair of astronauts.
The alternative to Lunar Orbit Rendezous would have involved landing the entire spacecraft on the moon and then lifting the whole thing off directly from the lunar surface back to Earth. Such an approach would have been extremely heavy. Launching such a lander in one launch would have required a rocket with 8 F-1 engines (the Saturn V had 5) in the first stage. The other alternative would have been to assemble it in Earth orbit with multiple smaller launches. This was known as Earth Orbit Rendezvous.
Today Lunar Orbit Rendezvous seems like the obvious choice but in the 1960s it came with a lot of perceived risk. Orbital rendezvous was not an easy thing to get good at. The primary goal of the Gemini program that took place between Mercury and Apollo was for NASA to get proficient at rendezvous.
If you want more detail on this the entire Outward Odyssey series from University of Nebraska press is an excellent, easy to read start. Michael Collins's autobiography Carrying the Fire is a classic. How Apollo Flew to the Moon is a very highly regarded book that covers the technical aspects in more detail. Finally, the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project has dozens of interviews with NASA officials and former astronauts. Those are all available for free on JSC's website.