On 08/03/2012 10:06, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
wrote:

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:12:00 +0000, Tim Streater
wrote:

If we all had your attitude we'd never have put foosteps on the Moon.

Putting footsteps on the moon was relatively straightforward.

Really? Why bother with NASA at all, then?

I didn't say it was easy, or cheap. It just required organisation, and,
above all, the *will* to do it. But I don't think anyone doubted that it
was possible, or that any magic new engineering was required.

It wasn't exactly magic engineering, but up until the space race and the
need for really good mechanical seals in vacuum the packed gland was how
water pumps on cars were done and they has a serious tendency to leak
and dribble their vital fluids onto the floor. The space race put an end
to all that and modern cars use mechanical seals that were a spinoff of
the space race and/or cold war (useful in submarines too).

The great thing about the Apollo missions was that they took as much
tried and tested engineering and combined it to achieve a goal. They
used as little bleeding edge technology as possible along the way.

Sadly these days you can find plenty of conspiracy theorists that think
the Moon landings never happened. I sort of hope that when the Chinese
go back they will visit an Apollo site to bring back some souvenirs.

By comparison the Space Shuttle had far too many new and novel parts in
it that had quirks that would prove disastrous. Von Braun was right when
he said that you should never sit people on an oversized firework.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown