> "The whole mission, however, depended on the titanic Saturn V rocket, a technology that is lost to the current generation."
NASA engineer here. I think it's actually kind of ludicrous to claim that we have somehow "lost" the technology of the Apollo program. We're not living in some sort of space technology dark ages here, where we've forgotten all of the fundamentals of the 1960s 'classical enlightenment'. In fact, the decades since then have provided invaluable experience in the design and use of reusable launch systems, in-space assembly, astronaut medicine, etc.
If the agency and it's supporting industry contractors were given both an executive mandate and the funding to construct a comparable system to Apollo (for whatever reason that would be), today's engineers would not struggle to do it for lack of technical prowess. We might struggle to do it in the current federal budgetary climate (where we can't predict the whims of legislators 3 months from now, much less 10 years from now - and the Saturn V was expensive as hell to operate), but the "lost rocket science" myth is a bit tiring.
I think people tend to romanticize old technology because it did so much with so little. My dad always makes fun of these people by saying "They don't build 'em like they used to: They build 'em better."
I don't entirely agree with his sentiment but it's still for the most part true. I have no doubt that, given a proper budget and mandate, NASA could once again build a heavy lift vehicle like the Saturn V. However, I think we've lost a certain elegance that was present in that age. Sure, our technology is much more capable now, but it's definitely not as 'charming', for lack of a better word.
I think the point that I'm trying to get at is this: I used to commute on NJTransit, and every day I would get into crappy "modern" brushed aluminum railcars with a freight locomotive pulling them. And one day, while I was waiting, a refurbished Pennsylvania Railroad train rolled through with its beautiful shiny brown paintjob, elegant railcars, and even people in period garb. I have no idea what it was for - it didn't stop at our station - but it was much more pretty than anything we see today. My dad was there too, and for once he actually said without irony, "They don't build 'em like they used to."
But who knows, maybe fifty years from now people will see us the same way we see them.
The New York subway occasionally runs historic trains. They're kind of obnoxiously loud and rattly. I assume they were slightly better when they were younger, but I'll take air conditioning over ceiling fans whenever I can.
That said, there's something to be said for the inhumanity of stark modern designs: http://instagram.com/p/egILDiQAS2/
compared to the older ones: http://instagram.com/p/gbwdmTwAZM/
I'll take the legibility of inhuman, stark designs any day.
I'll take working ceiling fans over non-working air conditioning any day.
But... Helvetica!!
Plz n00b, http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fdi/wayfinding-sans-pro/
;)
Agreed. I think one of the key things to recognize about this sort of thing is that while, yes, we could do it "better" with today's tech than we could have with the Saturn V, that's unlikely to mean "cheaper". A new heavy-lift system that performs better than Saturn V will, in the absence of a total revolution in technology, cost more even after adjusting for inflation. Because to squeeze that extra 40% performance out of the same amount of weight and fuel, we'll be putting in 80% more work by 50% more people who are paid 30% more using 120% more expensive materials. The reason being that these programs don't operate on mass production. Each of these launch vehicles is very labor intensive to produce. The only real way around those numbers is to go for massive economies of scale, but then you're talking trillions of dollars spent on tens or hundreds of thousands of launch vehicles, but that's the only way to get to true cost savings.
You might want to check out what SpaceX is doing.
We should really pour that money into a space elevator...
The problem, as far as I last knew, is that we do not know of any materials strong enough!
Nanotubes are strong enough, but we haven't gotten them to sufficient lengths (we need ~1-2 meter nanotubes iirc)
Or then have each vehicle doing multiple flights...
"I think we've lost a certain elegance that was present in that age."
Or a certain cold-war inspired desire for robust rocket technology. Yes, the engineers were working for the sake of a moon mission and what not, but the domestic political motivations were never exploration for its own sake.
They build software far worse than they used to, even if it does take longer to build. Maybe that is why this story got upvoted so much?
I came here to post something like this, though I'm not a NASA engineer. I feel like there's been a few articles that have had the same strange claims of "lost" technologies. They lead the reader into thinking that since 1960 we haven't discovered or done anything significant to be able to recreate the space vehicles of that era.
The laws of physics haven't changed significantly since 1960, we understand a lot more about the same challenges of getting things to orbit now than we did even then. Technology, however, has changed a huge amount since then and if our priorities were still to land things on the moon then we would still have great success at it. Priorities and end goals have shifted around the scientific space community since 1960 and the average person seems to think that there's more value in lunar operations than anything else, which is simply not true.
Ignorance of the fact that we don't know enough about what long-term habitation of humans in space means for the body and mind seems to blind people into saying things like "we should have moon bases!", and call for "permanent settlements on the moon!". The research happening on the ISS, very close to home in case things go wrong, is essential to the steps needed to achieve things that people think should just happen because hey, they went there 40 years ago!
I think there's also this naive notion among people who haven't thought it through and/or aren't very familiar with manufacturing processes and the like that if you have the "blueprints" for something, it's straightforward to cart them down to a general-purpose factory and build the thing. After all, if we built it once, how hard can it be to build it again? And even some who may understand that it's not quite that simple still don't necessarily appreciate just how complex and intertwined the relationships are between suppliers, tooling, processes, experts in very specific and narrow domains, and so forth are when building any sort of complex machine.
Yeah, even with the exact blueprints, you couldn't just make a new Saturn V. The tools that made those parts probably don't exist any more, and the properties of metal under stress depend on a bunch of weird circumstances, like exactly how you cooled down the molten metal.
And even if you wrote that down and had all that equipment, the people who actually operated the things are retired or dead. Are you going to operate it the same way they did?
Does your incoming metal to your smelter have all the same properties as it did in the 1960s?
(I'm not a metallurgist, apologies to those who are.)
Yep, we haven't lost the tech, just the in-house skills. Each Saturn V engine had an absolutely insane number of extremely fine welds by master welders. Welding is an art form, and we definitely don't have the same number of welders we used to.
That said, we could potentially replace some of that with new fab techniques. But we probably couldn't do it the same way we did.
I think they're meaning is that it's the engineering that's "lost," not the technology. Most of the "technologies" of the Saturn V are around. But something to replace it has to be re-engineered/re-designed from scratch, which is massive considering how there are plenty of other things from that era that have been subject to incremental and generational improvements continuously. If someone were to make a replica with modern technology every little gotcha that got worked out and worked around in the original would have to be re-discovered and re-worked around.
Sure we still know how to build rocket engines. But we are also reverse-engineering technologies of the 1960s for incorporation into modern systems [1] presumably because the oral and/or written history has been partially lost.
I also think of JPL -- if we stopped landing robots on Mars and other planets for decades, and the veterans of such missions had retired or expired, how difficult would it be to restart this capability from scratch?
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html
If you got an order for ten Saturn Vs tomorrow, how easy would it be to make them?
Maybe lost technology isn't exactly the term, but when a project is completed, people move on and retire, and the supply chain moves on, then the capability to make that technology goes away very quickly. And unless a successor follows on continuously, it can be very difficult to get back to where you were if the need arises.
I have no doubt that the NASA of today could be mobilised to make a better rocket, on cost and timescales comparable to or improved upon the original. But if that is the only way to get back to a Saturn V-like capability, it is fair to say that something has been lost.
I'm sure we'd all believe you better if you had the following: a short hairdo, a white button up shirt, dark framed glasses, and an abacus.
Seriously though, Richard Feynman's death in 88 seems like a loss for Physics, and everyone really. Hasn't stuff like that happened at NASA since the Apollo program, and hasn't it affected rocket science negatively?
You're dead right. The major hurdle isn't the technology, it's purely funding. We already have technology far more advanced than the Saturn V, the VentureStar for example could be built using 90's technology, and they were halfway done with a scale model when the project was canned. This was a fully reusable SSTO that would bring down the cost per pound to orbit by a factor of 10.
I think NASA needs to concentrate on its PR front. Tax payers simply don't see the economic benefit that comes from spending money on space exploration, most see it as a waste. Compare this to defence, tax breaks, or national security which are black holes of money.