[X] My Assistant

[DDAVIS]

I have a page on Apollo which is updated annually. Do others feel more optimistic than i do on the prospects for return? I for one won't believe we will leave LEO until the hardware to do it is actually being built.

http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/Apollo30.html

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

A recent piece on the design of EVA suits in (I believe) Space.com involved a poll of spacewalking astronauts for recommendations as to the most important improvement. They were virtually unanimous in wanting to improve the gloves.

[ljk4-1]

If they can stay the course through 2018, perhaps Apollo was not the end:

http://space.com/news/050914_nasa_cev_update.html

[tedstryk]

I firmly believe that we we will return to the moon in the next few decades. With all the countries building space programs, it is a matter of time before one of them, perhaps Russia or China, builds such a program (Russia claims to be already), and I think that when this happens, the U.S. may feel that its feet are being held to the proverbial fire. I think, too, that we should as quickly as possible in such a program have a far side landing. While it might be harder, it would be scientifically interesting and, most of all, would be a great headline grabber after the first mission.

[ljk4-1]

If Apollo 13 had been a success (meaning it landed on the Moon and returned safely to Earth with a bunch of rocks), would the Apollo program have ended even sooner? Or would it have gone even longer?

[dvandorn]

Had Apollo 13 not aborted, I think it's possible that we would have seen the program go through Apollo 18.

The decision to delete Apollos 15 and 19 and move the J missions to Apollos 15-17 was made in July, 1970, about a year prior to the flight of Apollo 15. Had Apollo 14 not been delayed by the Apollo 13 abort, it would have flown to Littrow or Censorinus in October, 1970. Apollo 15 (the original H mission) would have then flown in sometime between February and April, 1971.

After the 13 accident, of course, the Apollo 15 flight date slipped back to midsummer 1971, and since the J mission elements were planned to be ready by about that time, it seemed a no-brainer to jump directly to them. But had 13 not aborted, moving to the J missions starting with 15 would have required not only delaying 15 several months, but also bringing Scott's crew online with the new equipment after they had already completed half a training cycle with the H-mission equipment and capabilities.

So, I think it's possible that if Apollo 13 had landed, the preparations for Apollo 15 would have been so far underway by the time the bean-counters were trying to save a few bucks, in July, 1970, that they would have left it alone and simply canceled Apollo 19.

Landing site selection would have changed, too. Had Apollo 14 landed at the mare/wrinkle ridge location near Littrow (about 50 miles due west of the eventual Taurus-Littrow site visited by Apollo 17), the origins of the dark mantling in the area would have been discovered (black volcanic glass from fire fountains that was emplaced more than 3 billion years ago). So this "presumably young" volcanic unit would have been identified, found to be old and not young, and the allure of Taurus-Littrow would have been lost.

An H-mission Apollo 15 would *not* have landed at Hadley -- that was a J-mission site. It might well have ended up landing at the Davy crater chain, where an H mission would be able to determine whether or not the craters in the chain were impact craters or diatremes.

Apollo 16 was going to land at Descartes, regardless -- that was a certainty. So the first J mission would have gone to Descartes, and Young and Duke's explorations would have been exactly the same as they were in real life.

Apollo 17 might have gone to Alphonsus or the Marius Hills. I think that Apollo 18, with Dick Gordon and Jack Schmitt as the LM crew, would have visited Hadley-Appenine. And it would have been a remarkable wrap-up to the Apollo program.

-the other Doug