New answers tagged apollo-program
5
The season when the Saturn V launches doesn't matter, especially in Florida where the temperature remains relatively warm year round. The Saturn V was engineered to be very resilient and to withstand almost every weather condition. You can see the launch commit criteria of modern rockets here. As Uwe said, there have been Apollo missions launched in the ...
6
There were several factors in the launch date
The late John F. Kennedy had promised to go to the moon within the decade. This was a secondary concern, but an important one nevertheless
The failure of the Soviet N1 rocket on July 3, 1969. The Soviet program was desperately trying to keep up with the American program. NASA feared the Soviets would overtake ...
1
Page 303 of the Apollo Operations Handbook contains information about the temperature at the time of fill:
The boiling temperature of LOX is −297.332 °F, of LH2 is −423.182 °F, so we may conclude the fuel cell tanks are loaded with LOX and LH2.
In the diagramms of the tank isothermes found by Organic Marble:
we find the temperature for a loading of 100 % ...
8
I don't have a good reference that explicitly states it for this one but I think your conjecture is correct: filled from ground and hydraulically pressurized to a low pressure as liquified gases, then turn the heaters on to get into the supercritical range.
The shuttle Power Reactant and Supply Distribution Handbook (not online) has charts showing how long ...
8
Some Apollo Lunar Sample Rock Containers (ALSRC) have been to the Moon twice according to the Catalog of Apollo Lunar Surface Geological Sampling Tools and Containers:
Serial number 1006: Apollo 14 and Apollo 17
Serial number 1007: Apollo 14 and Apollo 17
Serial number 1009: Apollo 12 and Apollo 16
I didn't spot other items being re-used; for example, the ...
8
First, ignore what Wikipedia claims about attitude indicators. It shows a diagram of the inside of an airplane attitude indicator. I am not inlining this image because -- although some airplanes may use such an indicator -- it is completely wrong about spacecraft attitude indicators.
Let's look at what is displayed on a spacecraft attitude indicator. The ...
2
NASA's official answer is in The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology in the entry for 1963 September 20:
During a news conference in Houston that same day, several NASA officials commented on the President's address. Associate Administrator Robert C. Seamans, Jr., stated that Kennedy's proposals came as no great surprise. He said that many "large areas" for ...
6
Colors were decided quite early in the design process by a committee, and were chosen to be consistent between the CM and LM:
October 28, 1963. - An LM-CM displays and controls commonality meeting was held at MSC to explore areas in which commonality might be achieved and to provide a plan of action. Areas discussed included principles of layout, switch ...
2
During Apollo 5 an unmanned LM flight in Earth orbit was tested, with a inflight separation of descent and ascent stage. This "fire in the hole" maneuver was necessary for a lunar landing abort.
0
Mark Omo's answer seems plausible. However, the official NASA answer was "no." A meeting at headquarters on February 11, 1969 about such a matter concluded that the spacecraft did not have that capability:
The possibility of an unmanned LM landing was discussed at NASA Hq. The consensus was that such a landing would be a risky venture. Proposals had ...
3
According to The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, there was a meeting at NASA headquarters exactly about such a matter. It was decided that the spacecraft did not have the capability at that time:
1969 February 11
The possibility of an unmanned LM landing was discussed at NASA Hq. The consensus was that such a landing would be a risky venture. ...
3
Here is another take at estimating the brightness of the city lights as seen from the moon. As a starting point, let us try to estimate how much light is produced by the entire United States at night. (I would guess that this probably accounts for a significant percentage of the total light produced on Earth, and probably actually a majority of the total ...
34
It appears the answer is "no".
Apollo mission reports describe night-time lights from Earth orbit, but sightings at lunar distances are notably absent. For example,
The sights in earth orbit were spectacular; even on the dark side, where thunderstorms and fires in Africa captured the crew's attention. The earth-orbit timeline provided sufficient time ...
4
An independent calculation. From the ISS, Venus is as bright as the city of Valencia at night. (Other ISS views of Venus had places on Earth that I didn't recognize.) Valencia's metropolis has about 2M people.
In the 1970's Earth's biggest megacity, greater Tokyo, had about 23M people. 11.5 times as many, so 11.5 times brighter. (Maybe less because ...
10
Beyond LEO, once you're a few Earth radii away, far enough to see the entire planet, its nightside is a featureless black, at least to conventional cameras, in every one of the dozens of photos at http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pics-of-earth-by-planetary-spacecraft.html, even the ones that show Earth as only a slim crescent.
Edit: As ...
11
I agree it's unlikely that any space mission would have carried a can of WD-40.
However, WD-40 is a product of the space race itself and was originally used for rockets. The WD-40 was originally not intended as a lubricant, but as water-displacing agent for Atlas missiles. Painting a large rocket adds significant amount of weight, so these were coated with ...
5
In space, soft grease is safer than oil and liquid oil is safer than highly evaporative lubricants.
I suspect they had some very small amount of grease... but NOT for use externally, as the SciFi movie Destination Moon (1950) where the grease freezes solid, demonstrated the danger of that!
From Wikipedia's Destination_Moon_(film); Plot:
En route to the ...
58
It's hard to prove a negative, but the answer seems to be NO.
It's not in D-7434 Stowage and the Support Team Concept, which has tables by location of the typical inventory stowed in the cabin.
It's not in D-6737 Crew Provisions and Equipment Susbsystem, which describes in detail each of the items in the cabin.
It's not listed in the actual stowage ...
39
It's an envelope (for letters, forms etc.) that was signed by one of the Apollo astronauts before their flight.
The Apollo insurance covers are autographed postal covers signed by the astronaut crews prior to their mission. The insurance covers began with Apollo 11 and ended with Apollo 16. The ability of astronauts to obtain much life insurance was ...
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