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The Apollos That Never Were, Hardware fates and the dynamics of the program
jmknapp
post Jun 19 2008, 07:47 PM
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I was reading up on this mission and have a few questions:

1) Some of the instruments, e.g., LAMP (or LAVA LAMP, haha) will be used to identify any water ice in the "permanently shadowed" parts of polar craters. But with the Earth at least, the pole is said to have migrated quite a bit. Is the Moon conversely so locked in synchrony that its own pole can't wander appreciably? Seems like even if transient, it might not take too long to burn off any ice.

2) I was wondering what the first "earthrise" opportunity might be for LRO postcard purposes. According to the available SPICE kernels the initial orbit comes in around longitude 90 over the south pole and so from the point of view of earth circles without eclipse initially until it eventually precesses around or whatever.

3) The launch has been delayed by a month. Is there any possibility this mission might be cancelled? I.e., has NASA (read: US Congress) ever cancelled a mission where the spacecraft had essentially been built?


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ilbasso
post Jul 23 2008, 08:22 PM
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QUOTE (jmknapp @ Jun 19 2008, 02:47 PM) *
I was reading up on this mission and have a few questions:

...

3) The launch has been delayed by a month. Is there any possibility this mission might be cancelled? I.e., has NASA (read: US Congress) ever cancelled a mission where the spacecraft had essentially been built?


Sorry for the late reply here, here's another Yes answer. Apollos 18 and 19 had the hardware completely built. They were forced to cancel essentially because the money was not allocated to run the support operations.


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dvandorn
post Jul 24 2008, 02:03 AM
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In terms of the Saturn Vs for the later Apollo missions, the scoop is this:

In mid-1969, the Apollo Applications (later renamed Skylab) program management decided that the "wet workshop" concept, in which what would become the Skylab workshop would have been launched as a fueled and active rocket stage that would then have been outfitted as a workshop after it was orbited as the second stage of a Saturn IB, wasn't going to work. It was much easier to get a good, well-stocked workshop if you didn't have to fill it with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

Problem is, a Saturn IB wasn't capable of orbiting a "dry," pre-outfitted S-IVB workshop by itself. For that you needed a Saturn V.

So, in July 1969, just after Apollo 11 was completed, it was decided that the workshop needed a Saturn V. At that time, the Nixon administration had shut down the Saturn V assembly lines; there were enough built to fly Apollos out to Apollo 20, with none left over. If Skylab needed a Saturn V, that meant Apollo 20 would have to be canceled. Which it was, though the announcement of its cancelation was not made until January of the following year.

So, as of January of 1970, there were eight Saturn V rockets in various stages of assembly. None more would be built. They would have supported Apollo flights out to Apollo 19 plus a Skylab flight.

After the Apollo 13 accident, more conservative heads in NASA management and in the Nixon administration decided that we didn't need to make all that many more moon landings. (The NASA attitude was that we had been lucky, and if we kept flying these things indefinitely we'd start to lose crews. The administration attitude was mostly that they wanted more money to prosecute the war in Vietnam.) So, two Apollos were canceled as money-saving measures.

However, contrary to popular belief, the two missions canceled weren't Apollos 18 and 19. The missions canceled were actually Apollos 15 and 19. Apollo 15, up to that time, was scheduled to be an H mission like Apollos 12-14, with a lunar surface stay of around 45 hours, two 5-hour EVAs, and no lunar rover. After the cancelations, of course, the missions were renumbered and the first J mission, with extended stay times, 3 EVAs and a lunar rover, was moved up from Apollo 16 to Apollo 15, and the later missions renumbered accordingly.

Not that the crews were shuffled. Scott and Irwin simply began training for a J mission about a third of the way through their training cycle, and Young and Duke had the privilege of flying the first J mission taken away from them.

So, when Apollo and Skylab were finished, there were two complete Saturn Vs left over. Portions of them have been on display at KSC, JSC and MSFC over the years.

And in terms of mission costs, IIRC each Apollo mission cost roughly $100 million to fly, though I believe that included the amortized costs of the launch vehicles and spacecraft. That would be equivalent to something like two-thirds of a billion dollars in today's terms. If you just counted the costs that hadn't already been spent -- final assembly and test of the spacecraft/launch vehicles and actual launch and missions operations costs -- I bet the $10 to $20 million a mission would be about right. In today's dollars, less than $100 million per each additional flight.

The thing that really grates me is that, in the late '70s, some of the people on the Appropriations Committees were told what the actual costs of the additional missions would have been versus the potential for additional science, and a large majority indicated they would have been glad to support the appropriations for the additional missions. Such are the portraits we paint of lost opportunities... *sigh*...

-the other Doug


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mcaplinger
post Jul 24 2008, 01:55 PM
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QUOTE (dvandorn @ Jul 23 2008, 07:03 PM) *
And in terms of mission costs, IIRC each Apollo mission cost roughly $100 million to fly...

That number sounds low to me even in 196X dollars. It'd be interesting to know what the true savings of deleting the two missions, if any, was.

NASA usually doesn't do a very good job of realistically accounting for the actual incremental costs of flying a mission (witness the estimates of how much a single shuttle flight costs; I've seen numbers that span nearly an order of magnitude.) I could imagine that any published figure was low-balled significantly. Of course, it'd be harder than you might think to compute the costs.
Even figuring out retroactively how much you spent can get hard on a big project smile.gif

This is getting pretty off-topic for LRO.


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Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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ilbasso
post Jul 26 2008, 05:22 PM
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QUOTE (mcaplinger @ Jul 24 2008, 09:55 AM) *
That number sounds low to me even in 196X dollars. It'd be interesting to know what the true savings of deleting the two missions, if any, was.

NASA usually doesn't do a very good job of realistically accounting for the actual incremental costs of flying a mission (witness the estimates of how much a single shuttle flight costs; I've seen numbers that span nearly an order of magnitude.) I could imagine that any published figure was low-balled significantly. Of course, it'd be harder than you might think to compute the costs.
Even figuring out retroactively how much you spent can get hard on a big project smile.gif

This is getting pretty off-topic for LRO.


Don't know how reliable a resource it is, but astronautix.com lists the total incremental costs of the two cancelled lunar missions at $42.1 million.
"Total savings of cancelling the two missions (since the hardware was already built and the NASA staff had to stay in place for the Skylab program) was only $42.1 million. "

After Apollo 13, even though the astronauts were all willing to fly despite the risks (almost all of them were test pilots, an inherently risky business), NASA leadership was deathly afraid of losing a crew. Many in management, including Gene Krantz, felt an overwhelming sense of relief to have the last of the moon landings behind them - they just wanted to get the whole thing over with. The prevailing thought was that Congress and the American people couldn't stomach another disaster on the way to the Moon, and would call for the end of NASA's manned space program altogether.

Some of the potential targets mentioned for the cancelled flights included Tycho, Schroeter's Valley, and Copernicus. What a shame we didn't get to see them from the ground!

Oh, and one other fun factoid I like about the Saturn V: There were about 2.5 million solder joints in the Saturn V. If just 1 mm too much wire and an extra drop of solder were left on each of these joints, the excess weight would have been equal to the entire payload of the vehicle.


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ugordan
post Jul 27 2008, 11:58 AM
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QUOTE (ilbasso @ Jul 26 2008, 07:22 PM) *
Oh, and one other fun factoid I like about the Saturn V: There were about 2.5 million solder joints in the Saturn V. If just 1 mm too much wire and an extra drop of solder were left on each of these joints, the excess weight would have been equal to the entire payload of the vehicle.

Where did this tidbit come from? Are you saying all these extra bits would add up to 118 metric tons in a booster which when empty weighs 250 tons? I get the feeling an order of a magnitude was missed somewhere.
Anyway, even if it was indeed 118 tons, if it were evenly distributed across the stages it wouldn't have nearly as big an impact on the payload due to the staged configuration of the vehicle. A kilogram added to the first stage has nowhere near as much payload impact as a kilogram on the third stage, yet the first stage is the biggest and likely to have the greatest number of those solder joints.

The factoid I found cool was that when Apollo 4 lifted off, it had the capacity to put all U.S. manned capsules up to that time into orbit at once. Quite possiblly all the Soviet ones as well.


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