Why I am so saddened by Neil Armstrong’s Death
August 26th, 2012
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My admitted sadness from the death of Neil Armstrong has been received in a way I didn’t expect. A lot of people have asked me why it was such a big deal and what made me feel so personally affected by it. Obviously, Neil Armstrong was a great guy, a highly accomplished test pilot and astronaut and someone who was willing to take on a mission of unknown dangers and extreme demands. But why is it so sad for me, personally? I never knew him. He was 82, hardly a young age, and he died peacefully of natural causes. Great, heroic people die all the time, and sad though it may be, we can’t sit around getting depressed over it.
So let me explain my reason for such sadness:
The Apollo program is often held up as the prime example of the United States and indeed Western Civilization at its best. A goal of the grandest of proportions was proposed and achieved, in a relatively short period of time, with overwhelming success. Only six missions landed on the moon from 1969 to 1972, but those few missions provided some of the greatest photographs, films and accounts humanity has ever known.
The Apollo Program is over. That in itself is not tragic, as it was expensive and could not last forever. What is tragic is what the past forty years of space exploration have been. Lacking leadership, necessary finances and a worthy goal, NASA has wallowed as an agency with an uncertain future. No serious attempt to reestablish deep space exploration has been undertaken since the Apollo Program. After Apollo came Skylab, a brief, but accomplished program using Apollo technology. But would become so underfunded and ill equipped that once they ran out of suitable surplus Apollo hardware, they had literally no way of getting to the space station, resulting in it crashing to earth. Next came the Shuttle, a spacecraft with the worthy goal of making access to orbit cheaper and safer, but built with such design compromise that it achieved neither.
Today we have an agency in crisis. Plans for exploration in deep space have been scaled back and have a questionable future. While the rover Curiosity has been a triumph, the future of unmanned space exploration is uncertain. NASA has spent more than thirty years perusing projects that produced little more than artist conceptual drawings before being scrapped. We cannot even send a man into low earth orbit, much less beyond earth orbit.
Neil Armstrong was the greatest icon of the glory days of space exploration, and his past is yet another step away from that past. With every death, the Apollo program is pushed further into our past. Though he was the best known, the first, the most iconic of the men to walk on the moon, there were others. Twelve men explored the surface of the moon. Most of them (eight in total) are still alive, although now one less. These men are getting older, the youngest being in their late seventies. This, of course, won’t last forever. There may not be any left in ten years. Walking on the moon has thus passed from human memory to history.
Those who walked on the moon so many years ago believed they stood on the cusp of a new age of exploration and that they would live to see many more missions. Sadly, Neil Armstrong would not live to see humans return to the moon, at least not after Apollo-17. He would also not live to see the space program once again receive the funding, recognition and mission goals it deserves. He died in an era of turmoil and uncertainty for space exploration. That is tragic.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Space, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 26th, 2012 at 6:36 pm
I too am saddened and depressed by his passing, for the reasons you mentioned, and more. Neil Armstrong embodied for me the essence of the modest, quiet hero. He accomplished much and did great things in his life, but was always turned the accolades away from himself and gave credit to others who made the things he did possible. The Apollo Program itself, while expensive for its time, provided much for this country, and a lot of it goes beyond the tangible and physical and touches more the spirit and psyche. Just to know that such things are possible and can be achieved if one has the will is a lasting tribute to the better and nobler aspects of the human spirit.
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August 26th, 2012 at 7:15 pm
It’s not just NASA or the space program but Western culture that in some ways reached a high-water mark with the Moon landings. Yes these were unarguably American accomplishments, but as flag-bearer for everything the West stood for and had progressed towards since the Enlightenment. One cannot help but feel that we have slipped back from that zenith, and it is unlikely that we will see such a peak again any time soon.
And this will get worse every time one of those that stood on the moon passes and reminds us that we have left the promise of their accomplishments slip away.
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August 26th, 2012 at 9:04 pm
Yes, I agree. We need to stop feeling sorry about our accomplishments, start setting some ambitious goals and have the audacity to actually mount a serious effort to make them happen.
I feel like if you imposed today’s social and political climate on the Apollo missions, they would not have happened.
You’d have people protesting that the Saturn-V was a frivolous use of energy and petroleum and others protesting that the missions carried plutonium-238 powered RTG’s. Others would say that building such a large rocket was sabre-rattling since some of the technology could be used for ICBM’s. Others would get angry that other countries were being used to host tracking stations. We’d hear “Why are millions of American dollars being used to give Australians jobs?”
Finally, the whole thing would be cancelled, because it would be decided that walking on the moon might be considered violating holy ground to Muslims, and we would not want to risk offending them. The President would make an apology to the Muslims of the world for even considering sending a man to the moon.
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August 27th, 2012 at 2:06 am
I too am saddened by Neil Armstrong’s passing. I did a school report about him in the 3rd grade and remember drawing a muscular arm to decorate the cover. He was a dedicated, adventurous, independent and dignified man. He represented a set of values that seem to be lacking in American culture now.
His passing represents a marking point in history- the first man who walked on the moon has no more stories to tell.
NASA has had its ups and downs, but for all its mistakes and bureaucratic inefficiencies, it has produced some wonderful things. I’m willing to give them more than just a second chance. Some better cash management on the part of the government could certainly find its way for an increased budget to NASA and some interior culture tweaks may be all that’s needed to breathe some new life into the organization.
We can mope around about how great the past was, or we can try to turn things around for the better. Really, that’s our only choice. It’s the choice that honors those like Neil.
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August 27th, 2012 at 10:17 am
Leaving aside all of Neil Armstrong’s accomplishments, and all the things that made him, personally, someone to be admired – he was a symbol. As you said, HE WALKED ON THE MOON.
In a few years, there will be no one alive who has walked on the moon.
Charles Duke (born 3-Oct-1935) is the youngest of the twelve.
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August 27th, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Just had to share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNNOyIKThP8&feature=g-all-u
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August 28th, 2012 at 5:06 am
You know, I’m not so down on the space program since the Apollo missions.
Skylab and Mir paved the way for the ISS, allowing oodles of reasearch to be done on all sorts of topics.
The Hubble space telescope has taught us all sorts of things we never really knew about the universe.
NASA put a solar powered radio controlled car ON MARS which wandered around for us for years learning about the red planet.
And now NASA have followed it up with a giant nuclear powered radio controlled car which zaps rocks with a laser.
What part of that last sentence isn’t awesome?
Could the world have done more? Sure, definitely, we’ve been through something of an economic boom in the past twenty five years and maybe haven’t pushed the boundaries as far as we could, but they’ve moved back a hell of a long way.
Should we have done more? Tough call. I mean, frankly there’s enough stuff on our own planet that we haven’t sorted out yet. Imagine if we’d put the entire space program budget into fusion power? Or AIDS research? Electric cars? Maglev rail infrastructure? Ocean exploration?
A century from now I suspect our descendants will look back at the first “generation” of the space program and see the Apollo landing for what it was – a massive and largely superfluous PR cherry on top of an interesting science and engineering cake. Since then, the PR gimmick has gone and space exploration has become a science and engineering playground and definite progress has been made.
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August 28th, 2012 at 9:27 am
I’mnotreallyhere said:
I see your point. One thing that is important to remember is that as far as NASA is run, the manned space program and unmanned space programs are different sides of the coin and are funded and administered separately.
I suppose my big problem is with the manned program. I believe manned spaceflight is important and must continue, not simply for the scientific data it returns (which arguably can often be done by robotic missions) but because it is part of mankind branching out.
It’s a long process. First we get to the point where we can reliably send humans to orbit. Then to deeper space missions. Then we have outposts on the moon and mars. After that comes more contained communities and finally full-blown colonization.
We will not live to see colonies of humans who live their lives on mars, but we might see outposts and research stations. That is a very big step toward humanity moving from a single-planet species to a fully space-faring species and perhaps, in the distant future, even going beyond the solar system.
One of the problems with NASA is what their mission has been since Apollo.
After the Apollo program the main focus was on the Space Shuttle. The idea behind the Shuttle was to break free of the expensive ELV launch systems used to send the first missions into space. The Shuttle was supposed to be “cheap, routine” spaceflight. A reusable spacecraft that could do quick turn-around, reasonably cheap runs to a space station. It would never be as cheap as an airliner, but perhaps on par with the SR-71 or something. Something you could run without each launch being a major event.
This was a very worthy goal and would have changed spaceflight. It would have also opened up the moon and more distant exploration, since getting to orbit is half the problem. If you look at the missions NASA profiled in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, they were very impressive. A shuttle to bring humans to a space station as a way-point to the moon and beyond. Space-based tugs with nuclear rockets would take humans even further. Think about the mission shown in “2001 A Space Odyssey,” where an orbital space plane takes passengers to a rotating space station where they board a second spacecraft to go to the moon.
So what happened?
The Shuttle did not even remotely live up to what it should and could have been. First, the government made the requirement that it be the ONLY NASA space vehicle. This was horrible. It’s difficult enough to build a fully reusable spacecraft, but forcing it to be a heavy life vehicle killed most of the potential. It’s like driving a dump truck to the supermarket.
The budget was cut repeatedly for the design and it was decided that it had to make maximum use of Apollo-era infrastructure. The Shuttle was transformed from a two-stage, fully reusable winged spacecraft to carry humans into a weird hybrid of a side-straddling heavy life space plane strapped to a massive tank and SRB’s.
The result: The shuttle was more expensive than capsules. It had some amazing capabilities for LEO operation, but it lacked the ability to take humans any further. Cargo capacity was about as good as a big ELV, but more expensive. It had a complex TPS and no launch escape system. It proved to have about a 1-2% chance of loss of vehicle and crew.
The Shuttle was only somewhat reusable. The Orbiter could be reused, but it had to be completely torn down and refurbished. All the systems had to be removed and rebuilt. The tiles all had to be inspected and many re-set. The engines needed to be removed and refurbished. Even the windows sometimes needed to be re-ground.
The SRB’s are only somewhat reusable. After recovery the thrust vector control system is only good for one mission. The electronics and actuators need to be replaced. Really, all that is salvageable is the big metal tubes that are re-packed with solid propellant.
The external tank is a complete loss. Granted it’s “just a big tank.” However, that big tank is made of a high tech lithium-aluminum alloy, precision manufactured and packed with sensors and special plumbing. The tank alone is one hundred million dollars and thrown away with each mission.
After it became obvious that the Shuttle had not fulfilled its mission, NASA continued to focus on the whole “Cheap, safe, routine” access thing. Again, a worthy goal, but they never had a good solid program they focused on.
First it was the NASP, which was supposed to be the next thing throughout the 80’s but canceled in the early 1990’s. They spent some time and effort on the DC-X/Delta Clipper concept before shelving that. Then came Venturestar, which received a massive investment, before it was completely disbanded, after going over budget and after a tank test failed (no, they didn’t even give it a second try with a different tank design). The hardware and facilities for Venturestar were sold off as surplus at a huge loss.
What NASA needs is a coherent plan and they need to stick to it. They need the budget necessary to achieve it. My feeling is either do it properly or don’t do it at all, but don’t do a half-assed job of it.
I’mnotreallyhere said:
I tend to think that government research dollars are best spent on “Pure science” as opposed to “applied science.” Private industry is good at R&D with the aim of providing a viable product, such as a drug, transportation method or power source. But there’s no money in basic research for the sake of curiosity – such as particle physics, space exploration and such.
Pure science does yield data that can be used to produce usable products, but it’s hard to predict what kind of products will develop from it or how long it will take to get that data or how much that data will be worth. Also, the data is often very general and therefore can’t be patented.
Private for-profit enterprise therefore does not usually build sophisticated space telescopes or facilities aimed at pure research.
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August 28th, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Here’s to hoping that, at least on historic timescales, Apollo really was on the cusp of a new age of space exploration. From what I understand, Curiosity and its follow-up mission are intended to search for water on Mars. If found in high concentrations, we may be looking at a key stepping-stone for another stage in exploration, the use of materials not brought from Earth for missions.
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August 30th, 2012 at 10:14 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Well, there were protests about the Apollo program; lots of community organizers (among others) decried spending money on space when people were hungry back on earth. And public support cooled very rapidly after Apollo 11. The vast majority of people don’t get why manned space exploration is important – it’s not the science, it’s (I hate to use the term, but it fits perfectly) manifest destiny. “Because it’s there.”
That doesn’t mean that we need to spend tons of the people’s money on it though. Amazingly enough, the current administration more-or-less has the right idea: set up ways for NASA to do the hard technology development, but leave the more mature technologies (like delivering humans and cargo to LEO) to the private sector. It kills me to see ostensibly free-market politicians embracing huge government programs like the Senate Launch System.
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August 30th, 2012 at 10:57 pm
cthulhu said:
The current administration has some things right. One thing they are missing is giving a nasa a good clear-cut path and mission. What is NASA supposed to be shooting for? It’s very hazy and not well defined.
Contractors have always built the hardware for the space program. One of the problems we have now is that we have good privately built spacecraft for ISS resupply, but not much else. NASA has been dragging its feet on taking it further and seems to be unsure what path to take.
Then as far as SLS: Well, we need an ultra-heavy launch system. That seems clear. If you want to go beyond earth orbit and also be able to have things like next generation space stations and telescopes, you need the ability to put more than 100 tonnes into space in one shot. Multiple launches gets cumbersome, especially if you have to put in orbit 200 tonnes or more.
In hindsight, we really should never have abandoned the Saturn line of launch vehicles. But oh well, you can’t go back.
NASA will likely need to shoulder the burden for that, because there’s such limited commercial potential for that. Nobody has a 100 tonne communications satellite.
SLS looks horrible, however. It uses a limited number of very expensive engines to build a very expensive launch system that has limited capacity over existing systems and will be flying half-empty most of the time anyway.
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August 31st, 2012 at 5:44 am
Well, as far as “spending tons of people’s money on it” goes, I think we need to keep things in perspective. In its 15-year existence through the early 1970s, the total cost of Apollo was about $20 billion in 1970s dollars. Adjusting for inflation to 2010 it would be about $110 billion, or, assuming a 15 year program, about $7.3 billion per year. I was reading a government budget report just this week that said that Obama spent $77 billion this year in food stamps alone, so over ten times the yearly budget of Apollo spent for people that, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t provide for their own family’s needs. And we’re not even talking about direct payments of cash to people who do not work but in many cases are able to. At least the people who worked on Apollo showed up for work. For the record, I don’t have any moral objection to helping honest people who might be down on their luck through no fault of their own, but this subject of “wasting money on space exploration” or “it costs too much” always comes up in these discussions, and I really have to wonder if those who bring it up have looked at the numbers and come to realize just where our money is really being wasted.
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September 2nd, 2012 at 2:32 pm
drbuzz0 said:
With all due respect, you’re wrong on all counts in the section of your reply that I’m quoting here.
(1) You do NOT need heavy lift to go beyond earth orbit or put big things into orbit. In fact, heavy lift is a detriment to those things, not an enabler. Think about the terrible risk you’re taking by doing a monolithic launch on a heavy lifter: something goes wrong, you’ve lost everything. This is not a sane engineering tradeoff. It is well known that the way to make something reliable is to build lots of them and operate them regularly: this is true of cars, airplanes, computers, televisions, nuclear reactors, and rockets. Some things you just can’t find out without operating the system. There are learning curve effects on launch, recovery, and on-orbit operations that dramatically reduce the cost as well. A heavy lifter is going to be much more expensive than a moderate lifter, and consequently its flight rate will be much less – nobody’s going to pay to launch on the heavy lifter unless they really need it. You stated that yourself. If the flight rate is dramatically less, then its reliability will be as well. This is inescapable engineering fact.
(2) So, if you don’t build a heavy lifter, what do you do? Modular design and on-orbit assembly is the way to go here, and this is a place where NASA can really lead the way. There is a lot of work needed to prove out these approaches in a full-scale engineering sense; NASA can jump start this inevitable path and work out enough of the nitty-gritty details so that the commercial sector can take over. In my thesis, this is NASA’s true role in space exploration.
(3) So how do you get beyond earth orbit? You develop on-orbit fuel depots. Again, NASA can and should do the work to prove out this technology at full scale; once you can refuel in LEO, you can go anywhere in a steppingstone fashion.
This trinity of technologies – high flight rate, highly reliable medium lift; payload modular design and on-orbit assembly; and on-orbit fuel depots – will create a reliable, cost-effective infrastructure for continued space exploration and commercialization, with zero need for an expensive, low flight rate, white elephant heavy lifter.
And there’s no real reason to pine after the Saturn launchers, or really any of the Apollo infrastructure: they were all economically unsustainable; the whole lunar orbit rendezvous architecture of Apollo, requiring the heavy-lift Saturn launcher, was chosen purely for time reasons – it was clear that the earth orbit rendezvous concept, while much more parsimonious with resources than LOR, would take significantly more time to develop, and as such could not meet the “before this decade is out” requirement.
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September 2nd, 2012 at 5:40 pm
cthulhu said:
Except then you can have multiple launchers any one of which can cost the mission if it fails.
What if you need to launch a lander, an earth-departure stage and a habitat?
Your launch of the earth departure stage goes well. The lander goes well. Then the habitat blows up. Now what? Just leave the other two up there in a parking orbit for a few years while you build a new habitat and launch it. In that time, the fuel will have boiled off the EDS, so it will be useless. The mission is basically lost.
For stuff like manned mars missions with a lot of capabilities we may well need to launch 300 tonnes into orbit. Better to do that in three launches than ten. Much less complex.
You stated that yourself. If the flight rate is dramatically less, then its reliability will be as well. This is inescapable engineering fact.
cthulhu said:
Again, unnecessary complexity. A lot of launches. Each rocket with its own expensive guidance system, thrust vectoring, engines etc etc etc.
cthulhu said:
A single Saturn-V was modified to place a whole functional space station in orbit. Not a small, incapable space station either. One shot and Skylab was in orbit complete with 283 cubic meters of pressurized, habitable volume. In fact, they cut corners and saved money by sacrificing weight. Rather than a water reuse system, they just send up many tons of water. Rather than resupply flights for oxygen, they sent up a huge amount of oxygen on the initial flight.
Skylab weighed 76 tonnes. Had they built a space station from scratch (rather than using am S-IVB tank) and made it lighter, it could have been bigger still. Two Saturn-V launches could have put a massive space station in orbit.
Skylab was 2.2 billion dollars for its entire program. That would be like 12 billion today.
The modular approach that uses many small modules is much much much more expensive.
The ISS has about three times the habitable volume of Skylab. It weighs 370 tonnes.
It took over one hundred billion dollars to build it. That includes a whopping 32 shuttle flights, most of them with assembly of major components. More flights were required by unmanned spacecraft. And this is considering the program is based on programs and hardware that started construction in the early 80’s.
NASA worked on modules for a space station from about 1981, while Russia worked on Mir-2 modules until they canceled the US space station and adapted them for the International Space Station which finally started being launched in 1998. It is still not complete.
Big launches = fewer flights. To build a space station, you get a fully functional facility right off the bat and you can build a huge one in a relatively short period of time. No need to wait decades and spend hundreds of billions to get a mediocre space station.
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September 2nd, 2012 at 6:19 pm
drbuzz0 said:
No, launch your backup. And same for the rest of your comments. You’re really not getting this, and I don’t have the time to educate you further; there are plenty of online resources if you wish to leave your heavy lift tunnel view…
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September 4th, 2012 at 1:23 am
Lets not also forget his lesser known achievement. He performed the first ever docking in space on Gemini 8. Arguably, this was a more significant milestone as it still impacts what we do today.
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September 4th, 2012 at 10:51 am
You’re right, Armstrong’s performance on GT-8 was exemplary. The struck OMS thruster was a serious emergency that could very well have resulted in our first casualities in the space program. But Armstrong knew exactly what to do. He saved himself, his crewmate, and his ship. When it comes to performance under pressure, the guy was as cool as they come.
He was also a Navy fighter pilot who served in combat during the Korean War. We should not forget his honorable service in the military.
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