BTW, where's Eric gone?

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

"In like a lion, out like a lamb."

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In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1

I guess that's the English equivalent of the German saying: "Jumped as a lion and landed as a bedside carpet".

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

I like the German version much better.

Similarly Eric's page discussing ongoing life science experiments involving primates and frogs ignores the heck out of Gemini. Eric argues that Biosatellite 3 was launched to test the duration of a complex organism in space prior to Apollo. To him it's "suspicious" that the poor monkey's health deteriorated necessitating an early end to the mission.

And then a subsequent mission involving frogs didn't even have a provision for recovering the specimens alive, which is supposed to "reveal" NASA's skepticism of their ability to keep things alive in space. (Nevermind that it was never the plan to recover the frogs. They were surgically instrumented and demotorized, making their hypothetical post-flight lives as frogs fairly pointless. That's cruel, perhaps, but it makes it a lot cheaper to run the experiment.)

In light of these "secret" missions, Eric tries to point out that even though NASA was collecting data and making decisions that life could not be sustained in space, they launched Apollo 11 "anyway".

What the heck was Gemini for then?

"Did NASA have two separate space programs?" asks Eric. The answer is no -- they had many concurrent space programs. Apollo was the manned landing on the moon project. There were other projects to investigate life sciences, space sciences, and a whole host of other research projects that had nothing to do with Apollo. Eric tries to tie these other projects to Apollo when they don't fit, and he completely ignores the massive project whose sole, stated purpose was to prepare for Apollo.

And the only specific hazard Eric identifies in space is radiation. Neither the monkey nor the frogs suffered any radiation effects. The monkey died from complications of dehydration and the frogs were half-dead when they were loaded on the rocket.

Eric?

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

And never forget Anita and Arabella who had to die in space because of the lack of flies...

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Including Corona...which actually was secret. :-$

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"That's Not Blight. It's New Jersey" - The Wall Street Journal

Before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, before Europeans rounded the Cape of Good Hope (Africa) and sailed into the Indian Ocean, the Chinese were a sailing giant. They had a sailing fleet of over 100 vessels, some over 300 ft long (when European ships were about 80-100 feet long maximum). These ships set sail on a series of expeditions from China, and sailed down around Vietnam, into the Indian Ocean, across to the coast of Arabia, and then on to the Eastern Coast of Africa. These voyages were led by a man named Zhang He. After the seventh voyage, political upheaval in China created a change in philosophy, and China became more inward focused. They decided long voyages were dishonorable, and they burned the huge sailing vessels and destroyed the ships logs.

This is a vivid example of technology being lost through political decisions. History abounds with repeats on small and large scale of even accidental loss of abilities and knowledge. Examples include

The burning of the library at Alexandria. No one knows the full extent of what information was lost, but what we do know is depressing.

When Rome began to fall, the Dark Ages set in for Europe. The Romans had running water and sewers, but when the people with the knowledge of how to maintain the systems were gone, the systems began to degrade and fail. The return of sewage in the streets, leading to cholera epidemics and the plagues.

The pyramids of Egypt - we don't really know how they managed to build them, to move all that heavy stone and assemble it on the desert plain, without heavy mechanized equipment and without even the wheel and axle. There are no written records to describe their techniques. Oh, we have some good guesses. We know engineering principles that they probably understood, and we can duplicate techniques using their level of technology, and we have managed to piece together a pretty good guess. But it is not certain - it is how they probably did it. It shows there were techniques that would work, not that these were the only techniques they had. Information lost to time.

A large engineering company working on government contract decides that it costs too much to pay employees, so they lay off or drive off many of the older, experienced employees (read senior engineers). Then some time later they hire up a bunch of new grads straight out of college - bright and shiny. Suddenly they have difficulty completing projects - delays, problems in testing, failing to consider possibilities, etc. They failed to consider the expertise provided by the experience of those older engineers which helped them know how to do the job. (The government gave them a negative rating on their contract performance evaluation over that. Not to mention lawsuits from the former employees.)

A small manufacturing company has a process to surface treat steel that involves baking the metal objects in an oven in a nitrogen rich atmosphere under pressure. The process is a complex chemical behavior, depending upon size and shape of the object, pressure, time, temperature, etc. The company is owned by a Chemical Engineer and his wife. The company is certified to perform these operations and has a good success record. Then the man dies. The wife tries to carry on the business. A new project is received, and attempts are made to perform the process on the new job, but it is unsuccessful. The surface coating is not developing evenly, not coating as expected. Multiple attempts are made, with variations in the pressure, temperature, and heating time. The results are not satisfactory, and the company is removed as a qualified vendor, because the loss of expertise of 1 person.

Loss of capability and loss of knowledge happen constantly, sometimes through political decisions, sometimes through other motivations, sometimes as an unintended and unexpected consequence. It is easy to see our society as some sort of technological plateau and immune to the processes of history, but that just isn't the case. Those processes are every bit at work on our time as they were in Rome, in Eqypt, in China. The 20th century was a remarkable explosion in ability and knowledge, but Apollo demonstrates that sometimes knowledge isn't enough to make something happen.

As for mention of Genesis and the failure of the parachutes, I have seen a couple comments that perhaps a battery that overheated just after launch in 2001 could have damaged the circuits for the parachute sensors. Just because you can get a flat tire doesn't mean we don't know how to build cars.

The "brain drain" phenomenon is well-documented in discussions of engineering methodology. It is especially acute in aerospace where often companies invest in developing proprietary methods or methods ad hoc to a particular project, and then this understanding is lost through natural progression and attrition. Out at Thiokol there are only two or three people who know how to get the Kevlar-wrapping machines to work. That's because these three people built those machines.

Richard Nixon's budget cuts forced NASA in the early 1970s to regroup and focus more heavily on bureaucratic and political concerns as it learned how to fight for resources. Much of the aerospace workforce was laid off in the 1970s and these people moved on to other pursuits. The cultural changes and economic shifts resulted in lost knowledge.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Any engineering field is susceptible to this, but aerospace seems to be the worst because of the episodic and often uncertain prospects for the various projects.

The amount of knowledge that is carried around in one or two key heads is often immense. Even when there is documentation available, it is frequently lost or overlooked; sometimes the senior engineers are the only ones who remember the "been there, done that" captured neatly in the back of the 2nd file drawer from the bottom, third cabinet from the left on the back wall of room 113B.

BTW, speaking about steel in structures - the metal butt plates used to hold together the cheap, fast wooden truss structures are one reason the roofs of such structures are such a dangerous place to be during a fire. The wood may be relatively intact, but the metal expands and spung! goes the "glue" tying all those joists and rafters together. So it's a little metal that often causes the wood structure to fail.

Sure. Can you handle people who know something about spaceflight? Your first post is getting mighty lonely.

Probably just hit and run.

Considering that Eric has been working on his document for several months, I doubt this is an ephemeral matter to him. Some people just want to float an idea and then move on to something else. Eric has put a considerable amount of effort into expressing these particular ideas for the public.

I should remind him that he challenge us to debate his findings. It's quite rude -- and at this point, quite revealing -- to note that he has remained silent despite several points that have been raised about his comments. Perhaps his blustery approach worked on people who are less informed about Apollo than he (if that's possible), but it will not work on those of us who are legitimate experts. If Eric is avoiding the experts, then it shows his true colors.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

making their hypothetical post-flight lives as frogs fairly pointless.


What sprang to mind was a small tank on a shelf in the Simian Rest Home (real name unknown) at White Sands with these poor froggies; refugees of both the space program and French Restaurants.

I almost dumped my coffee on the keyboard laughing so hard.

In addition to the ones Irishman gave, there are the examples where better technology has replaced older, and so the skills involved in the old technology get lost.

An extreme example would be finding someone who could make flint points (arrow-heads). Guns and steel-tipped arrows have replaced such things. Sure, there is probably an archeologist or two that knows how to do it, but not many.

In science, it is getting harder to find good scientific glassblowers; it's usually cheaper to buy new, rather than repair broken glassware. I imagine a lot of older computer tech is that way, liking finding 8" floppy drives or building an EGA monitor.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Me! Me! I knap on occasion.

Just this past Monday, a friend was showing me a batch of arrowheads that he has recently chipped from obsidian. There may be "lost" technologies and skills, but this isn't one of them.

uncle, uncle, I take it back. ops: It's funny that more people have commented that they make arrowheads than that they make 8" floppy drives
I guess the fact that people still makes flints proves we haven't landed on the moon. #-o

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

I don't know how to make arrowheads ops:

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Based on the condition that you are incapable of moving at a high velocity with large animals of the canine species, then you shall be required to remain in a location that is in the general vicinity of the front door of your domicile.

I know how to make modern arrowheads.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Ada