Established Member
The flat earth society of the middle ages has been transformed nowdays to the flat brain society where you cannot contradict the masters or you are led to ridicule and the inquisition.
Thank God that Jules Verne is not alive today in the age of mockery!
Last edited by zoisnick; 2005-Sep-13 at 09:05 AM.
Honored Member
You want lunar surface photographs? Here's where you find lunar surface photographs. Lots of them. Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.Originally Posted by zoisnick
Now enjoy all the pictures and cool it with the unsubstantiated complaints.
Honored Member
The quality of the content of your posts seems to be deteriorating.
Note to moderators: Shouldn't this thread be in Conspiracy Theories?
Established Member
Here is every picture taken on the moon during the Apollo missions. They are only small, rough scans, but there are many thousands of them:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/research/apollo/catalog/70mm/
Once you have the number of a photo you want, you can search the internet for a better copy if one exists.
At Kipp Teague's Apollo Archive you can get many high-resolution scans, although most of them are at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal as posted by Maksutov, above:
http://www.apolloarchive.com
Here's an excellent series of photos that zoom in on the landing sites:
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/A...ing_sites.html
Edited to add: The above link hasn't come out right, but is intact when I try to edit it. It's showing three dots in place of the letters "lan" for "landing". Will try another way:
Landing sites
Last edited by Kiwi; 2005-Sep-12 at 10:50 AM. Reason: Fixed typo
Established Member
You may be right that my tone was not the correct one. I was answering to CRAN who mentioned the flat earth society. Is his comment ok to your standards?
Thanks for the information.
Bad Post-Doc
I think this quote got lost in the shuffle and deserves pride of place. because, you know, if it was in Armageddon, it has to be true!
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Established Member
http://www.mufor.org/mars/damla.jpg
I like how they based a “New Physics” on faulty data. Take the so-called D & M Pyramid the ... enormous five-sided structure. I am no “Photo Expert” but it looks to me the pyramid has four uneven sides with uneven corners. The peak of this “structure” is at a slight angle to the plan of the base. What appears as the two western(?) sides is the shadow of the peak. There are all sorts of patterns in nature, you just have to look for what you want to support your claim and you are hailed as a genius by certain folks who can not do their own logical thinking.
Vulcan Administrator
Woo-woos seem to live in a world where a "perfect right angle" is anything between 70 and 110 degrees, and "exact same time" means within the week.
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.
Member
LOL! This is awesome! At first I thought it was for real, then I scrolled down and saw the mice... I can't stop laughing!
Established Member
G'day ChromeStar
Think about this: how is it that you can see the tall buildings in a major city from 10 kilometres away, but you can't see a coin on the ground 50 metres away?
The rovers are a couple of metres across. Galaxies are 100,000 light years across. In other words, it's angular size.
Established Member
Zoisnick
Please note Kiwi's links, especially the link to the Lunar and Planetary Institute. You can look at thousands of Apollo photos there. The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is the place to see high-resolution scans of many of these photos.
In other words, the information is out there. You just have to know where to look!
Order of Kilopi
I think you said that there is a lot of photographs.
Where are they ? I only see the same ten panoramas on the surface of the moon showing pretty much the same things.
Every single Apollo photo can be found here"]www.apolloarchive.com]here[/url] There are way more than ten.
Why didn't they take some closeups of the landing area during their ascent?
Firstly they were busy during the ascent. Secondly there is film of at least the Apollo 11 ascent taken from inside the landing craft and also some from the CSM.
Why isn't Armstrong and the rest of the austronauts touring the universities of the World creating a pro-space exploration sentiment?
They do wht they can, but they are only human and only have so much time. Armstrng has stated that he can only attend about 1% of the requests he gets for appearances and thaths him doing it nearly full time anyways.
ARMSTRONG: Well, I recognize that I’m portrayed as staying out of the public eye, but from my perspective it doesn’t seem that way, because I do so many things, I go so many places, I give so many talks, I write so many papers that, from my point of view, it seems like I don’t know how I could do more. But I recognize that from another perspective, outside, I’m only able to accept less than 1 percent of all the requests that come in, so to them it seems like I’m not doing anything. But I can’t change that.
Why did Clementine give us only two or three pictures?
Try having a look here
Where are the pictures from Luna and Zond soviet missions?
The Russians have released some of their images, but most are only available in hardcopy. No one to my knowledge has bothered putting them on the net and the Russian space agency isn't interested in do it.
Why are they hiding the fact that Mars has life as shown on photographs released (water, trees, bushes and snow).
Why in Cydonia on Mars they did not show a closeup of the castle like structure? (when we were in orbit a couple of years ago).
Why in the book The Arctic Circle they ridicule NASA?
If it's a private book they can say what they like, it doesn't make them right
Why are they trying hard to convince us that today is harder than it was in 1969 to go to the moon and that we cannot properly maintain the space shuttles.
It is harder. They have a smaller budget and the Space Shuttle is a vastly different machine to the Apollo Craft. It's like saying that it's as easy to maintain a SR-71 as it is to maintain a German Doodlebug. The Apollo Craft were one use craft that were launched on top of the rocket. The Space Shuttle is a reusable craft that is launched on the side of a rocket. The Apollo craft didn't have to be maintained, they were built and used up. The Space Shuttles need to be repaired and mintained between each launch. Being side launched they are vulnerable to impacts from things falling off the tank, the Apollo craft were above the Saturn V's fuel tanks and so falling ice (and there was a lot of it) wasn't a concern to the payload (the Apollo craft.) Another thing that makes it harder to go back today is because we don't want to just go, we want to go and have a presence, that makes any new missins entirely different to the one off use and short duration Apollo missions. Having craft that need to return frequently and resupply a base on the moon is an entirely different engineering problem to both Apollo and the Shuttles.
Someone with guts should answer these questions.
They've been answered. Hopefully you'll take note of them.
Order of Kilopi
If it WAS, Just a Week, Quite Frankly, I Wouldn't Mind it, Much ...
As it Is, It's Much More Like, 7 Years, than 7 Days!
That, I Can't Stand ...
Established Member
Peter B thanks.
I would still like to see the pictures from the Russian missions Luna and Zond.
If anyone can direct me to a site that shows them I would appreciate it.
Established Member
Still this does not mean it cannot happen.
Can anybody with engineering knowledge answer the question if indeed the space shuttle could orbit the moon? (assuming the escape velocity from earth was maintained as constant speed in space)
I would appreciate a substantiated answer.
Order of Kilopi
Check out this thread.
Established Member
OK, before we begin, let's clear one thing up: "escape velocity...maintained as a constant speed" is a contradiction. Pick up something. Throw it up in the air. Notice that as it gets further from the earth, it slows down. The same thing happens with objects in space that move away from the Earth (the whole point of the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple is that he realized that the same force that influenced the apple keeps celestial objects in their orbits). "Escape velocity" means that the spacecraft will slow down as it moves away from the Earth, but it's initial velocity was high enough that it will never slow down enough to fall back to Earth (the way your thrown object did).
When the Space Shuttle (or Soyuz, or any other spacecraft, for that matter) is in Low Earth Orbit (~350km up), it's moving at ~8km/sec relative to the Earth. If it slows down, it will fall back to earth; if it speeds up, it will go to a higher orbit. To go to a translunar orbit, the spacecraft will need to accelerate to ~11.2km/sec. In other words, from LEO, it needs to add 3.2km/sec to its velocity.
The Shuttle Orbiter's mass is ~100 tonnes. From LEO, it would need a ~200 tonne propellant tank to provide 3.2km/sec delta-v. That is just to send it to the Moon without going into orbit when you get there. You could finesse the trajectory so that the Moon's gravity loops the spacecraft around and send it back to Earth with little or no expenditure of fuel (this is called a "free return trajectory" and was used on the early Apollo missions in case the Service Module's engine failed).
As you return to Earth, you run into an ugly problem: That 11.2km/sec you left the Earth at is the same speed that you return and re-enter the atmosphere. The Apollo and Russian Zond capsules had ablative heat shields built to take this (once), but the Shuttle's reusable tiles are only made to handle an 8km/sec LEO re-entry. Suppose you want to fire rockets to brake yourself from 11.2 to 8km/sec. As we said before, putting 3.2 km/sec delta-v on a Shuttle takes a 200 tonne tank. But now, instead of sending a 100 tonne Shuttle around the moon, we're sending a 300 tonne Shuttle & braking tank combination. To get that out of Earth orbit on a translunar trajectory, you will need a ~600 tonne booster!
All of this assumes you're only looping around the Moon and returning to Earth. If you add fuel to go into lunar orbit, and the fuel to get out of lunar orbit to return to Earth, the situation gets even worse, and your spacecraft winds up massing well over 1,000 tonnes.
Some HBs complain that the 30 tonne Apollo CSM was too small to make the journey from the Earth to the Moon (though, oddly enough, they never say that about the smaller Zond). In fact, the opposite is true: Sending a larger craft would have been much more difficult.
(Edited to add: All calculations assume storable propellants with a 3km/sec exhaust velocity)
Established Member
The space shuttle, quite frankly, can't reach the moon.
* Delta-v: The Space Shuttle orbiter has a total delta-v of around 0.7 km/s. Even supposing none of that was used up during launch to LEO, from there to low lunar orbit takes around 4 km/s, and to get back would take another 0.7 km/s.
* G tolerance: The shuttle was designed for 3 G. A direct entry from transfer orbit would cause between 6-12 G, unless you want to spend even more of your expensive fuel to brake. It takes just as much fuel to break as it took to reach the speed in the first place, so you'd essentially double all your fuel requirements if you do that.
* Heat shield: The heat shield was designed for 25 km/s. A direct entry would be at 36 km/s.
* Refueling: This is the obvious solution to the lack of delta-V on the orbiter. Unfortunately, it wasn't designed to be refueled in orbit, so you have some engineering to do. Secondly, you'd require quite a lot of fuel. Using the rocket equation for a single stage, we have the mass fraction:
Mfuel/Mtot = 1 - Mo/Mtot = 1 - exp(-deltaV/Ve)
With Ve = 4500 m/s (typical hydrogen-oxygen reaction) and delta-V = 4000 m/s, this gives a mass fraction of 59%, meaning that 59% of the initial total mass must be fuel, or 1.43 times the empty mass.
The orbiter weighs 104,328 kg, but assuming that includes the max payload of 28,803, we have an empty mass of 75,525 kg.
All this leaves us with 108,182 kg of fuel to reach a lunar transfer orbit - no landing, no cargo, not even a lunar orbit insertion burn. And my mind boggles to think how large the fuel tank would have to be - hydrogen is a very low-density fuel.
That's one *expensive* vacation...
(I should've let you do the math yourself, but hey, this stuff is fun)
Established Member
Do you mean it is not greatly advertised beyond the hundreds of books, documentaries, etc. written about it? Are you saying there is something fishy about NASA's space program because people are not self-motivated enough to learn about it? If a person is interested in Apollo there is more than enough information available to keep him/her busy reading about it for years to come. But no one can force another person to learn -- ignorance is self-inflicted. If the authenticity of an event is determined by the general public's knowledge of it, then hardly anything is real.
Established Member
Is not not my field, but is fuel capacity problem, no?
Edit to add:the Saturn V needed about 55 pounds of fuel for each pound delivered to the Moon.
Saturn V is *big* monster!!
Established Member
I think you misstated the units. It's ~25 thousand feet/sec and 36 thousand ft/sec, respectively. This equates to ~8km/s & 11.2 km/s.
Just to give some background, should anyone be confused:
In an ideal situation, the maximum delta-v of a rocket can be calculated if you know two things; the mass fraction and the exhaust velocity of the rocket. Note that you can work the equation backwards: If you know the required delta-v and the rocket's exhaust velocity, you can calculate the mass fraction and, knowing the mass of the empty spacecraft, the mass of fuel required. This is what Astrosmurf and I did. Our results only differ because we used different values in our calculations.
- The "mass fraction" is the mass of the rocket fueled over the mass of the rocket unfueled. In both Astrosmurf's calculations and my own, we simplified the expression to show the mass of the fuel and the Orbiter. The thing is, the fuel must be in a tank, so I used the max mass figure (~100 tonnes) to compensate.
- The exhaust velocity is derived from the type of propellant used. The Space Shuttle Main Engines (as well as the 2nd & 3rd stages of the Saturn V) use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Astrosmurf uses 4,500 m/sec, although the information I have states the value as 3,630 m/sec. If we use my value in the above equation, the mass of the fuel would be 2.01 times the empty mass. In my calculations, however, I used a different fuel. LH2 & LOX are difficult to store. If we were assembling this in orbit, keeping them at several hunderd degrees below zero during constuction would be a real problem. For the sake of the problem, I assumed storable propellants - Hydrazene & Aerozene 50, which is what was used in the CSM & LM engines. These had an exhaust velocity of ~3.05 km/s.
- Astrosmurf used a trans-lunar injection delta-v of 4 km/s, whereas I used the minimum value of 3.2 km/s. The actual Apollo missions used values somewhere in between (Apollo 11, for example, used 3.4 km/s to put itself on a free-return trajectory).
The upshot of all this is that, although our calculated values are different, both of us used the same methods to calculate them, and both of us came up with the same basic answer: Flying the Space Shuttle to the Moon is not practical.
Edited to add:
Another thing we definitely agree on is that this is fun!
Last edited by Count Zero; 2005-Sep-14 at 12:42 AM.
Established Member
Say...how far out of plausibility would a one-way journey be, then? Still sounds like a massive tank from somewhere....and you still have the lunar orbit insertion to worry about (unless you design a landing craft to be carried in the cargo bay...)
(Sorry for all the ellipses...since Herb Caen left us there've been a lot left over.)
Established Member
I can't help but wonder why you would want to take the shuttle to the moon. It couldn't land there anyway. Better off to use the shuttle to get to a orbital station, and use a separate craft to get to the moon.
If NASA heavily promoted the fact that they'd landed on the moon, don't you think the response would be that they were trading on past glories? "Well, that was nearly 40 years ago, what have you done lately?"
Established Member
Using my assumptions listed above, and assuming ~1 km/sec delta-v to enter lunar orbit, 300 tonnes of propellant (200 for TLI, 100 for LOI).
I'm with EvilBob on this one: [rhetorical]What would be the point?[/rhetorical] If you don't intend to return, you can save a lot of weight. Start by chopping the wings off, and the rudder. You won't be needing those tiles, nor any aerodynamic fairings... You can't land, so you can rip out the landing gear... Basically, when you get done it won't be the Shuttle any more. Come to think of it, it would look kind of like the ship in "Deep Impact"...
Bottom line: It would be easier to use a purpose-built spacecraft (though it wouldn't exactly be cheap).
******
You're right about the ellipses. I miss Herb, too.
Established Member
Yes - I rechecked the site where I got the information, and it's definitely ft/s ... I'm so used to SI units that I don't expect seeing imperial ones, especially in an aerospace context.
I'd be interested in knowing where you got your information. I had only second- or third-hand info from various web pages, and since I found the same Isp value for the SSME in two places (stated as 460 seconds or 4500 m/s, which is equivalent) I felt fairly confident about that.
I was using LH2&LOX since that's what the SSME uses. Rebuilding the Space Shuttle Orbiter to use something else would mean a whole new engine as far as I know. I suppose in a realistic situation, you'd compare the weights of the whole system - tank, pumps, engines and the required fuel mass for various fuels to find the most efficient combination. You also have to consider how long the fuel can be stored - LH2 tends to evaporate and leak over time, so if you need fuel for later course corrections, orbital insertions and so forth, aerozine would probably be better since it can be stored long-term. Anyone know what the OMS uses?
The delta-v comes from http://www.pma.caltech.edu/~chirata/deltav.html
Looking at it again, the figure seems to be 3.2 km/s to lunar orbit, so I suppose 4 km/s includes the LOI burn, but then you'd have to add a TEI burn too ... hmm, serves me right for trying to do this while working with other things.
All in all, a useful exercise considering that I haven't done this before...
Established Member
Just a thought. One of the problems cited above is that if you want to return your Shuttle to Earth, you need to slow it down from 11km/sec to 8.2 or so, which would give the need for additional fuel. I was first thinking that you don't need to take all that fuel to and from the moon, you can leave it in an orbit around the earth and do a refuelling, but this would only solve a small bit of the problem (after all, you have to get the shuttle and the refueller to the same speed somehow).
A second solution (kind of) that came to mind: we have often given additional speed to objects by sending them round some planets and so on, using their gravity (a slingshot maneuver, I think it's called). Couldn't you just as well make a trajectory around the moon that brakes the shuttle instead of accelerating it, so that it again has a speed of 8.2 km/s, or even less, as long as it's more than the moon's escape velocity?
That way, you would only need the fuel to go to the moon, but no extra fuel for the return trip.
I'm not thinking that using the shuttle is practical or even feasible, but I was wondering if the use of the moons gravity to brake a rocket would be a good idea in some circumstances.
Honored Member
The problem is, once you get to the Earth-Moon gravity divide, even if you're going nearly 0 km/s, the resulting acceleration between there and the Earth will get you up to about 11.2 km/s by the time you reach Earth. Your velocity prior to reaching the "top of the gravity hill" has no effect on what happens on the other side, except to add to your total terminal velocity. Once you're over the bump, your velocity near Earth is going to be 11.2 km/s or more.
Established Member
There had to be a snatch.
If the idea of slingshot braking (gravity-assisted trajectory braking sounds more scientific :-) ) is in any way feasible, couldn't you then make a trajectory, an orbit around the earth that gave the incoming rocket the same effect, so that your speed of 11.2 km/s (or more) would be slowed by the gravity of the earth, not by the atmosphere or other means (fuel, solar sail, ...)?
And if such a braking is possible, can you do it and still stay in orbit around the earth?
Established Member
Of course not all the thrust is momentum thrust, some of it is pressure thrust. I tried running the numbers on the SSME and came up with an exhaust gas velocity of about 4,300 m/s.
Monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) and nitrogen tetroxide. The OMS has a specific impulse of 316 seconds.Anyone know what the OMS uses?
Established Member
The trouble is, if you only just made it to the moon and went from 0 to 11.2km/s-1 on the way back, and then lost some speed in a slingshot around earth, you could no longer reach the moon (and what would be the point) so you'd need to turn around again some other way.
I think a slinghost requires a hperbolic trajectory so I don't think you could stay in orbit like that - if you time reverse it you end up at the moon, so it can't be a stable orbit.
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