30
votes
Accepted
Were the Saturn V construction plans destroyed?
No, the blueprints were not destroyed or lost.
(This is) a claim John Lewis made in his 1996 book, Mining the Sky, that he went looking for the Saturn 5 blueprints a few years ago and concluded, ...
- 128k
23
votes
Accepted
If I wanted to reconstruct an entire Apollo mission's crewed spacecraft trajectories, what are the key sources of historical data I'd look for?
To answer the question literally: you'd be looking for NASA Apollo Trajectory (NAT) data files.
The report Apollo Mission 11, Trajectory Reconstruction and Postflight Analysis Volume 1 (PDF) provides ...
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16
votes
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Historically, how risky are first launches of new rockets?
Alright, I went ahead and skimmed wikipedia's orbital capable rockets list and put them all into an excel file along with whether their first launch was a success or a failure! They're sorted by date.
...
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14
votes
Accepted
What is the scientific reason for selecting July 20 1969 for the moon landing?
The reasons for that date were:
There were a number of considerations which determined the launch windows for a lunar landing mission. These considerations included illumination conditions at ...
- 128k
9
votes
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Provenance of the Apollo 11 landing presented in a NASA PR film
The lines:
Altitude now 21 thousand feet. Still looking very good. Velocity down now to 12 hundred feet per second.
and
We're now in the approach phase of it, looking good. Altitude 52 hundred feet
...
- 170k
9
votes
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Is there any publicly available logging, or "Wayback Machine" for DSN Now activity?
I have been looking into this as well. As I have been told by one NASA employee, there is no easy way to get old data, but there is a way if you're willing to go through lots of data. NASA saves old <...
- 206
8
votes
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What part of the Earth was visible to Apollo 8 when the Christmas message was broadcast in 1968?
The reading began at 03 14 06 56 of the mission, which is to say, 3 days, 14 hours, and almost 7 minutes after launch. They launched at 12:51 UTC on Dec 21, 1968 (just before 8 a.m. at Cape Canaveral)....
- 21.5k
6
votes
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Where to look for historical or reconstructed orbit data for early NASA missions - Mercury-Atlas 6 for example
For the record, @Uwe said this in a comment, which @uhoh considers an answer:
The MA-6 Technical Report on http://ibiblio.org/mscorbit/document.html shows some trajectory parameters in Table II on ...
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5
votes
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What pictures did Mrs. Hart show to Congress?
If you skip forward to p11, there's a transcript of her description of the images - it looks like there were three pictures, all connected with the isolation tank tests. It's also worth noting that it ...
- 7,846
5
votes
Accepted
Looking for a document that describes SSME test failures
2+ years later, I finally found the document. My stupidity in mistyping the document number, plus a really non-intuitive title on the document, are what kept me from finding it for so long.
The real ...
- 188k
4
votes
What part of the Earth was visible to Apollo 8 when the Christmas message was broadcast in 1968?
The other answers show in more visible terms but there is a more direct way of seeing who could have heard it.
Remember that radio and light are both electromagnetic waves and we have a direct ...
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4
votes
Were the Saturn V construction plans destroyed?
I'll add that at least in the case of the Rocketdyne F1 Engine (those five huge engines at the bottom of the Saturn V) there seems to be some instances of either missing or never-existed notes and ...
- 149k
4
votes
Accepted
History of investigation of lunar and Martian surface gravity
There are two small moons of Mars called Phobos and Deimos discovered in 1877. Using orbital mechanics the mass of Mars could be calculated from the observed orbital period and the orbit diameter of ...
- 49.3k
3
votes
Accepted
Arrhenius' calculation of the temperature of Venus
One possibility is that he assumed the atmosphere of Venus contributed about the same elevated temperature as it does on Earth.
If one uses his believed albedo value of 49.6 for the Earth and performs ...
3
votes
Accepted
Is there an API for accessing old TLEs of non-historic objects?
There is https://space-track.org which provides you with pretty much all publicly available TLEs since the beginning. You have to register with an email address and ...
- 149k
3
votes
If I wanted to reconstruct an entire Apollo mission's crewed spacecraft trajectories, what are the key sources of historical data I'd look for?
Found Saturn V full trajectory numerical data in tabular format:
Report No. 61291 - AS-506 "G" MANNED LUNAR LANDING MISSION POST-LAUNCH OPERATIONAL TRAJECTORY FOR JULY 16, 1969
Other full ...
- 3,043
3
votes
History of investigation of lunar and Martian surface gravity
Answering your first paragraph:
But did Newton already calculate the Moon's gravity to be about a sixth that of Earth?
His calculations were off. Principia Mathematica, volume 3, proposition XXXVII ...
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3
votes
Looking for a document that describes SSME test failures
See:
https://gandalf.azureedge.net/shuttle.html (If anybody knows the docents for Endeavour or Enterprise in Los Angeles or New York please pass this link to them)
Specifically to answer your question ...
- 923
2
votes
If I wanted to reconstruct an entire Apollo mission's crewed spacecraft trajectories, what are the key sources of historical data I'd look for?
I found a method to directly plot the full trajectory of S-IVB (NASA id: -399110) from launch to CSM separation and beyond, being data available on NASA Horizon server:
Full trajectory w.r.t. Earth:
...
- 3,043
2
votes
Which Cubesat Cameras Actually Worked in Orbit before 2019?
I have seen pictures from CubeSats, but you are right they are hard to come by. In addition to the camera failures you allude to, there is the issue that many CubeSats (especially those with cameras) ...
- 4,484
2
votes
Resources where one can find RD-171MV engine technical specifications? (e.g.TWR, Expansion Ratio, Isp, Thrust, Chamber pressure, O:F ratio)
РД-171МВ — модификация двигателя РД-170/171...При этом тяга двигателя осталась прежней, а удельный импульс тяги стал выше.
RD-171MV - modification of the RD-170/171 engine ... At the same time,
the ...
- 7,903
2
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History of investigation of lunar and Martian surface gravity
According to an article in the NASA ADS journal, Measuring The Moon's Mass:
It can be seen that the lunar mass was known to about +/- 50% between 1687 and 1755, +/- 10% between 1755 and 1830, +/- 3% ...
- 170k
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