In Vostok, the manual controls were locked at launch. The cosmonaut had to enter a six-digit code to unlock the controls. The first three digits of the code were placed in an envelope inside the sphere, within easy reach of the cosmonaut. The second set of three digits was to be radioed to the cosmonaut in the event he (or she) would be required, by judgment of the ground controllers, to activate the manual system.

As Korolev accompanied Gagarin to the hatch of Vostok 1, however, he handed the cosmonaut a slip of paper that contained the second set of three numbers. Just in case.

As it turned out, Gagarin never activated the manual controls. His automatic attitude and retrofire sequencers worked fine. He had a heck of a problem when the Vostok's service module didn't detach cleanly, and there was the very real risk of burnthrough around the porthole at his feet. But at that point, the only attitude control system the Vostok had was on the mostly-separated service module, so the manual controls wouldn't have done him any good.

As for Mercury, yes, there were similar sets of instrumentation. Mercury had more redundant controls for critical functions, including replaceable fuses for some items. Most importantly, the American test pilots selected to be astronauts absolutely insisted that their spacecraft have not one but two different manual control modes available (Manual Proportional, and Fly-By-Wire). And that manual control was to be used for a significant portion of each flight.

I'm pretty sure the early Mercury orbiters had something like a mechanical globe display that showed the pilot his orbital track, similar to the device in the Vostok. However, both it and the periscope were removed from the long-duration spacecraft modified for MA-9 and (the unflown) MA-10. Later, on Gemini, such a display was dropped, due in large part to the fact that mechanically driven displays couldn't keep accurate to the rather fluid orbital changes made during rendezvous maneuvers. Gemini crews simply took maps with orbit tracks drawn in. If they wanted to know what piece of real estate they were over, they just looked it up on the map -- or asked Houston.

-the other Doug

You know, guys -- this forum is very interesting, yes. It captures an ongoing process of speculation (some learned, some not as learned) about a wide variety of subject matter that falls generally within the topic of UMSF.

But that's mostly what it is -- a process of speculation.

The images that some of our wizards generate for us are mostly kept on other sites, or (in full resolution) only on the given members' computers. And a majority of that imagery is generated from lossy jpg-encoded public releases that aren't good for anything except making pretty pictures from. The small minority of images and other data processed from the PDS releases is another matter -- but those are in the definite minority on this site.

I'm not saying it's not worth archiving the process. It's a fascinating example of interaction on a mostly scientific-process kind of level. But, seriously -- we're not, most of us, professionals in these fields. And those of our little band who are professionals are documenting their work in more permanent forms, anyway. (Actually publishing them, in books and professional periodicals, etc., etc.)

I guess my point is that, while this forum is a wonderful experience for most of us, great history it probably ain't. Worrying about whether my pearls of wisdom, as embodied in my 1,000-plus posts here, will be saved for future generations, well... it just doesn't keep me up at night.



-the other Doug

So, Bob, you're saying you wouldn't welcome a visit from the Starship Humpyerleg, which has traveled all the way to Earth from the Dog Star?

-the other Dog

I've watched all of Part 1 and the second half of Part 2, and I'm really rather disappointed. There are some nice touches, some (rather rare) moments that are right on -- and then comes another string of horribly over-dramatized scenes, in which the characters act totally out of character with even the fictional portrayals they had been building up.

The "soul-searching" von Braun, being asked to support not only manning the third flight of the Saturn V but sending it to the Moon, has already been mentioned, but it is truly one of the awful moments. From what I've read, von Braun and his team were very well satisfied, by August of 1968, that AS-503 (what became Apollo 8) would be quite safe to fly men on. Heck, by May of '68, a month after Apollo 6, they knew what had happened with AS-502 and were confident of the fixes.

In actuality, when von Braun was asked about sending men to the Moon on AS-503, his response was "It makes no difference to the rocket how far we go." No soul-searching there, he was confident of his gargantuan baby.

And then there was the very concept of suggesting that the Apollo 11 crew, while on the Moon, was visually tracking Luna 15 and watching it detour to avoid landing right on top of them (or so the narration would have had you believe). That was pure fiction -- and not very good fiction, either.

As for the good moments -- there was the scene with Korolev in which the crew designing their lunar lander came in to complain that they didn't know if the Moon's surface was hard or soft, and it made a lot of difference as to how they designed the landing gear. The team was specifically complaining that there was no one who "had the authority to determine" whether the lunar surface was hard or soft. Korolev, with a long-suffering look that said all too much about how many idiots he had to deal with every day, grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled on it, while stating aloud what he was writing, "The Moon's surface is hard. S.P. Korolev. There, give them this and GET OUT!"

The sequence of the Soyuz 1 flight was actually well done, too. It looked good, and the sequence when the fellows sent to meet the landed capsule came upon its charred, shattered remains was really effective -- and heart-wrenching.

The actors did their best, though not everyone was well-cast physically. For instance, there was a fellow playing Korolev's assistant (not Glushkov -- I don't know if they even named him) who physically resembled Korolev a lot more than the guy who was playing Korolev. He was a bear-like, heavy-set man, was Sergei Pavlovich, and while the actor playing him captured the essence of the man quite well, he was a short, wiry kind of guy. Entirely unlike Korolev in real life.

So, I thought they did a very good job capturing the frustrations of working within the Soviet system, and had some very nice CGI animation. Other than that, it was fictionalized docu-drama, which left out a lot of the really interesting things (like von Braun breaking his arm escaping from Nordhausen) and put in their place tired old cliches.

Of everything in this genre, about the only thing I've seen which was even worse in script and general execution was the extremely distorted travesty they made out of an already distorted book, the Shepard/Slayton piece, "Moonshot." That thing just plain stank.

-the other Doug

Say, I don't know if anyone has mentioned this (or even noticed it out there), but at the nasa.gov website dedicated to the Return to the Moon, there is a nice animation of the proposed new lunar mission.

It's linked through this site -- NASA - How We'll Get Back to the Moon -- the link is in a gray box on the right side, about a third of the way down the page, labeled "Learn More." It's a 29MB Quicktime file.

Nice, impressive CGI animation.

-the other Doug

Although, with the threat to our intrepid explorers from energetic cosmic rays, perhaps we really need to be thinking about a manned Mars-orbit outpost with its habitat(s) buried in one of Mars' moons.

What do y'all think -- Deimos or Phobos? Phobos gives you better resolution of the surface, but Deimos gives you longer periods over a given stretch of real estate. Of course, with a comsat network that becomes rather less of an issue...

So, if we have to dig in, which would you prefer? Or, perhaps, neither -- use materials from one or the other (or both) to create shielding for a set of habitats that you then place into a different orbit altogether?

-the other Doug

p.s. edit -- I figure the energetic cosmic rays all come from things out there in the Universe that blowed up REAL good, hence the connection to this topic...

Amen, Bruce. Amen.

-the other Doug

Good! Sergei Pavlovich deserves this kind of honor. It's long overdue.

-the other Doug

Agreed -- though, to be fair, the MERs were specifically designed to find traces of water in the minerals. They may not have been designed to fully characterize the soils and rocks, but the MER instrument suite was targeted at discovering water and water alteration to rocks.

So, assuming we do find some samples of the original impact melts, we sure do have the right set of tools available to determine their water histories...

-the other Doug

I totally agree with that last quote. If you want to get *really* scared, watch the opening sequence from the original series, "Connections." It demonstrates, almost viscerally, how vulnerable our modern technological society is to minor breakdowns in the daisy chain that keeps everything moving forward.

This is one reason I tend to say that, in order to survive this (hopefully) transitional period between dwindling energy and resources into a period of much cheaper and more plentiful energy (and thus the ability to get to hard-to-reach resources), we're going to need to use every tool at our disposal. Every resource, every scheme.

That's why I can't side with the Greens, for instance, in their desire to reduce our dependence on technology. We're *way* too far down the road for that. If we are to survive, we need to use every dreg of technology we can possibly dream up... at least, in my humble opinion.

-the other Doug

All I can say, Bruce, is that I seriously disagree with you on this point. I believe it is spiritually important -- nay, imperative -- for human beings to explore. In person. But you know I believe this. Everyone here knows it. More than a few agree with me, and I don't consider them, or myself, insane.

Beyond that statement, I shall not descend into the argument you're trying to provoke. Can't we just do what Doug wants, and all agree to disagree on this issue, wherever we land on it? And not keep trying to engage it? Otherwise, we'll just keep offending each other and just keep getting our posts pulled (understandably) by Doug, who doesn't want to see this kind of argument being played out on his forum...

Please?

-the other Doug

The Apollo deep cores were retrieved using segmented tubes. There was an initial "long tube" that was just under a meter long, and IIRC three extensions of about 30 to 40 cm each that were screwed onto the previous tube segment.

Because the suits were so stiff it was difficult to drill the tube completely into the ground, with the drill head going down to surface level, a total of about 2.5 meters of tube were provided, but the deepest core was just more than 2 meters deep.

There was one point at which you *did* see the crews carrying around a 2.5-meter tube, though -- when they extracted the cores from the ground. The whole tube, all four pieces, was pulled out of the ground and then unscrewed into its constituent segments. This provided some serious difficulty on Apollo 15, as well, and they ended up returning the long tube and the three extensions as two separate units, as opposed to breaking them all down into their individual segments. (And yes, these cores were returned in bags, exposed to the crew air environment, as opposed to being placed inside sealed vacuum containers. They wouldn't fit inside the SRCs.)

The heat flow probes were emplaced in a similar fashion, by attaching a succession of hollow tubes to the drill. However, the heat flow probes were simply placed directly into the hollow drill stems (which, for the heat flow holes, were *not* open at the pointy end). Thus there was never a question of the physical surroundings of the heat flow probe, and there was never the possibility of a drilled hole collapsing before the probe was inserted.

Interestingly, the way the drill was designed, you had to drill your heat flow holes first and *then* drill the deep core sample. The heat flow drill stems attached to the drill slightly differently than the sample tubes, to allow for the pushback of material filling the sample tubes. Once you attached a sample tube to the drill, you couldn't use it to drill heat flow stems into the ground. This was a specific concern on Apollo 16, where the HFE electronics box was torn from its cable after the first heat flow hole was drilled, but before the second hole had been drilled. Charlie Duke went on to drill the core sample, and was reminded that he couldn't drill another heat flow hole after he did this. He responded that, if they could by some miracle fix the HFE electronics cable, he was simply planning on trying to drop the second probe into the deep core sample hole.

On all of the missions that included the HFE (four in all, although it was only deployed successfully on two), the alternate plan in case the drill failed was to dig a long trench and bury the probes lengthwise... which never made a lot of sense to me.

-the other Doug

Good points, Bob. And Shaka, as for the importance of knowing how volatile-rich the targets were when given craters were formed -- I would think that this would cause more than just morphological differences. We ou ght to be able to see differrences in the rock types making up the ejecta.

I would think that ejecta from a volatile-rich target would be mineralogically quite different from that from a dried-out target. Without plugging that potential difference into our analysis of the minerology around each type/age of crater, I don't think we're going to be able to come up with analyses that make sense.

-the other Doug

This just points out another truth behind the funding levels required for planetary missions. If you let your scientific goals dictate the mass of the spacecraft, you have to accept the additional cost of a larger booster to get you there. If you let the cost of the booster drive your total mass budget, then you have to sacrifice some of your science objectives in order to "afford the ride."

A fifth of a billion dollars just to get yourself on a path to Mars... no wonder there are so few missions that can fit under the Discovery mission cost caps.

-the other Doug

Don, you must be confused between the deep cores retrieved by the Apollo crews using the lunar surface drill (whose primary mission was to emplace heat flow probes) and the shallower core tube samples collected using what were called "Hoover tubes." The shorter core tubes were attached to extension handles and pounded into the ground using geology hammers.

The small core tubes gathered cores ranging between 15 cm up to 60 to 70 cm, depending on the number of roughly 30-cm tubes used. A single core sample collected material up to about 25-30 cm (though the lunar ground compacts so quickly that many of the core sample attempts only collected 15 to 20 cm of material). Starting with Apollo 12, the crews screwed two Hoover tubes together to collect "double core" samples, and Apollo 14 attempted one "triple core" sample, screwing three different core tubes together. However, most of the material from this triple core attempt slid out of the tube as it was extracted from the ground.

Even on the J missions, these Hoover tubes were used at remote sampling locations. One very good sample set from Apollo 17 was a double core tube driven by Jack Schmitt on the rim of Shorty Crater, which gave a nice sampling of the change-with-depth of the volcanic glass material that was staining the surface soil orange. It was this core tube sample that allowed post-mission analysis to definitively identify the glasses as fire-fountain remnants, and the range of coloration over the depth of the glass deposit (from orange near the top, to deep red in the middle, to dark black at the bottom) connected this glassy deposit to the darkening material in the so-called dark mantling unit.

So, even these shallow core tube samples played a pivotal role in the human exploration of the Moon that was Apollo.

-the other Doug

Dark matter. It's so deliciously undefined that it can be used as a chimera, explaining away any mass or gravity anomalies without requiring us to put forth any kind of realistic or organized description of its behavior or organization.

What we observe of the visible universe shows that mass tends to clump. Yes, some percentage of the mass of the Universe is present in a non-clumped cloud of gas and dust that extends between the galaxies and is wrapped into and around galaxies. But the vast majority of the mass we can see and measure is all bound up in gravitationally significant clumps -- from small rocky bodies all the way up to supermassive black holes.

The only thing the theoreticians can tell us about dark matter is that it cannot be seen and does not interact with normal matter and energy -- except gravitationally. Regular matter and dark matter must interact gravitationally, or else the reason for proposing its existence in the first place simply goes away in a puff of logic.

Now, the Pioneer anomaly is, as I understand it, a very slight anomalous acceleration twoards the inner solar system. Which would indicate that there is some unmodeled mass in the inner system that isn't accounted for in our current understanding of the mass of the Sun and inner planets.

If dark matter is responsible for this unmodeled acceleration, should we be thinking in terms of a "clump" of dark matter somewhere in the inner system? Since it begs incredulity to believe that dark matter simply exists as a smooth soup of undetectable matter, do we assume that there is some "extra" mass somewhere in the inner system that can account for this?

If so, where does this extra mass show up in the motions of the planets?

It doesn't.

This leads me to believe that either the Pioneer anomaly is the result of a defect in measurement of the probe's trajectory, or a defect in our model of gravitation. I don't think it makes sense to postulate mass that only affects *some* other masses in the solar system, but not others.

-the other Doug

Mission goals of STS-51L and STS-107 that could not be accomplished by unmanned spacecraft:

STS-51L -- Teacher in Space. Designed to give a human face to exploration of space. Put a regular schoolteacher, not an engineer or pilot, into orbit and have her reach out and share the experience with millions of children, worldwide. Get them fascinated with the concept of a human presence in space. Motivate the next generation of space scientists to work in that field, as opposed to choosing to, say, make rock videos, or invent a new color of lipstick. Motivate them to work on something, to devote their lives to something, larger than they are -- not just to things that, in the long run, make little or no difference to the future of the race.

STS-107 -- Israeli National in Orbit. Designed to give an entire nation (and, with the rather unique attributes of this nation in a historical context, to give an entire *people*) a feeling of being an integral part of the race's off-planet adventure. Giving a people who have, historically, been excluded more often than perhaps any other people, a visceral sense of inclusion in space exploration.

Both of these would be totally impossible for unmanned spacecraft.

What's that, you say? Not scientific goals?

What in the Universe makes you think that we're exploring space for primarily scientific goals?

-the other Doug

Where's the kaboom? There ought to have been an Earth-shattering kaboom!

-the other Doug

In re the discussion of crater morphologies, specifically as seen in the Meridiani area...

First, if Mars' cratering history is anything akin to the Moon's, then a vast majority of the visible craters were made at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. Yes, there has been a continuing cratering process, but the rate has been much slower.

Second, the LHB occurred back in a period when Mars may have had a much thicker atmosphere and a lot more volatiles in and on its crust.

I truly think that one factor in the cratering morphologies is the relative volatiles content of the impact target. I think the old, very subdued craters may have been made by impact into soggy ground (or perhaps even water-covered ground). Sharper-looking craters were made after most of the volatiles disappeared. The former feature subdued rims and ancient crater fill almost level to the rims, while the latter feature much more lunar-like morphologies, arguing against the presence of volatiles in the targets at creation.

So, I would argue that Eagle, Endurance, Fram, Victoria and Corner are all examples of impacts into a dried-out ground target, while Erebus, Terra Nova and other ancient craters in the etched terrain are examples of older impacts into a ground that held an active water table, close to the surface -- if not actually into a body of water.

-the other Doug

I thought shocked rock beds had been found radial to Hudson Bay, indicating that it is, indeed, an ancient impact crater.

Is my memory failing me again?

-the other Doug

Um... there was an onboard recorder on Challenger that was recovered. It recorded everything that came over the ship's intercom circuit. (I don't believe the Shuttles have anything like the classical airline cockpit voice recorder.)

I've never heard the tape, but I've seen a transcript. It's definitely genuine. The crew is laughing and joking quite a bit prior to lift-off, and have a generally easy air to their conversation after launch. The final words recorded on the tape are of pilot Mike Smith, saying "Uh-oh," probably as the SRB broke its rear strut assembly and started to pivot around its upper strut assembly.

The tape ends with the loss of power to the spacecraft. (If there are any other sounds on the tape, i.e. during vehicle break-up, this has never been discussed in the transcripts or by anyone who has heard the tape.)

-the other Doug

From all reports, Al Bean ate spaghetti *everywhere*. On his Skylab flight, he had spaghetti every fourth day, and he really wanted more. Mike Collins even mentions Al Bean's addiction to spaghetti in his book, "Carrying the Fire."

Even amongst all those down-home jet pilots, though, it fell to North Carolinian Charlie Duke to get the NASA dieticians to put freeze-dried grits on the Apollo menu. Apollo 16 was the first time the Apollo food packs included grits. (Not only did Duke enjoy the grits, he ended up eating most of John and Ken's, too... )

-the other Doug

Yeah, but there may be diamonds in the next one...

-the other Doug

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds"? Surely that's a touch melodramatic, Bruce?

Backup spacecraft are built primarily to ensure that the prime mission will be accomplished -- it's sometimes more wasteful to lose an entire mission than to build a spare spacecraft you can use if the primary one (or, more likely, its booster) fails. Indeed, how many times has a backup spacecraft actually been flown later, on a different mission? I know it's happened a few times, but the majority of backup spacecraft only ever serve the function they were built for -- to back up the primary, and be retired to a museum (or, more often, scrapped) if the primary works properly.

I don't think it's fair to get upset at NASA for failing to fly every backup spacecraft ever built. In most cases, I'm just happy that the primaries were flown. After all, the MERs came awfully close to becoming museum pieces, and they weren't no backups!

Personally, I'd prefer to see missions continue in pairs. We've seen the impact of losing single-spacecraft missions, in whole (MCO, MPL) or in part (Galileo). You have to wait years, sometimes decades, for the primary mission to be re-attempted. Sometimes both spacecraft in a paired mission work, and you get fabulous returns, a la the MERs, Voyagers and Pioneers. But had the Mariner 64 or 71 missions been single-probe flights, backups might not have been ready to fly within the same launch opportunities after the losses of Mariners 3 and 8.

I think it's *always* better to see a third spacecraft in a museum, along with displays of the results of the *two* flight vehicles that completed their missions. Seeing a backup vehicle from a mission that failed in a museum -- now *that* is a tragedy.

-the other Doug

See, this is what I read in the original detailed descriptions of the Return-the-the-Moon portion of the VSE. That the final unmanned phase, prior to manned landings, would include unmanned landings of the LSAM descent stage with a variety of exploration tools subbing for the ascent stage. These tools were intended to be used both in an unmanned mode and later to support manned operations. This mega-RLEP-2 concept would have to wait for the development of the CaLV, of course. It couldn't have been launched on anything smaller.

However, the most recent version of the "Gargantuan RLEP-2" seems to have been smaller, would not use the LSAM descent stage, and yet would have been serious overkill for the relatively simple unmanned tasks planned prior to manned operations. So, I can agree readily that, for the cost, such an overkill approach made little sense. If they were going to actually flight-test LSAM hardware, that would be one thing. But since that wasn't the plan, it makes more sense to scope this back to a less expensive lander.

Of course, I am of the opinion that the CEV/CLV is the only thing that's eventually going to get built before funding for VSE runs out once and for all. But if we can use the strawman of the VSE to get a few unmanned landers doing some decent science on the lunar surface again, I'll not complain.

-the other Doug