An interesting list of the close calls that many space missions had
http://www.astronautix.com/articles/thespace.htm

If just a couple more of them had been disastrous, how much of astronautical history would not have happened or would have been heavily delayed?

It depends on the era you're talking about. I doubt that a couple more deaths in the 1950s & 60s would have caused many more delays. The costs were high but the prize of being the first into space, the first into orbit and the first on the moon was worth it to the men and women who worked in the program. But over the years as space explortation became less pollitically motivated and more scientifically motivated the loss of a crew would cause more delays becuase there is no longer the ego to win.

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"Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time... and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain

Would the crashing of Apollo 10's LEM into the moon with its two astronauts have resulted in the cancellation of the program, or merely a poignant 1971 Apollo 11 instead of 1969?

I would vote for a frantic attempt to identify and fix the problem in time to meet Kennedy's deadline of the end of 1969.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

But wouldn't they have technically sent men to the moon already?

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Moraliser Overtax Porn

But as Kennedy said in his 1961 Moon speech:
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth"!
http://www.luminet.net/~tgort/moon.htm

The mission was to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.

It would have been a lot easier without that second phrase... 8-[

Edited to add: darn, I've been trumped... :wink:

I like this one:

All that happened during the flight, then the poor sob gets shot at besides!

Wasn't there an incident with the Mear (sp) where a cargo vessel slammed into it while performing an automated docking maneuver? Come to think of it, they don't list any Mear incidences. I seem to recall there being quite a few in the later stages of its life.

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. . . My moustache is touching my brain!!!!

Politicians always want to stick in these niggling little details that restrict the creativity of the engineers....

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I like the way that this is put up to chance as if the flip of a coin could have turned a close call into a disaster. In fact I think it is a tribute to all those people who worked tirelessly to make the program a success. They didn't catch every contingency, no one could, but they caught a lot of them. When the unexpected did turned up, they worked the problem and brought things back under control.


I think that the attitude of Gene Kranz:

Chris Kraft: This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever faced.
Gene Kranz: With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.

Is the reason that there were so few of the close calls turned into disasters.

It's an interesting compilation, but a few of them are stretches to be called hazardous.....just a few random thoughts looking through the list:

How does this differ from any other scrub?

Is this correct? Wasn't one of the objectives of the 2-man EVA to investigate the possibility of spacecraft to spacecraft transfer? Even just station keeping (as opposed to docking), would such transfer not have been a contingency?

And they were proven wrong.

From memory, the failure of one of the chutes caused a ~5 mph increase in splashdown velocity, which was well within safety parameters.

However, there was no danger to craft or crew.


There is no doubt that space exploration is a hazardous pursuit. However, the words of Gus Grissom still resonate:

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

There would have been two ways out, actually. Technically, 'the decade' (note that Kennedy did not say 'the 1960s') ran from 1961 - 1970, just as the first year of the 21st century was 2001. Plus Kennedy made that speech in 1961, so you could also call 'the decade' ten years from the date of his speech. So that gives two ways to spin an Apollo 10 disaster (or Apollo 11, come to that) as long as NASA could have got back on track before the end of 1970...

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Fin
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