Henry Spencer
Henry Spencer
Henry Spenceris a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also wrote The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book Managing Usenet. While working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the U.S., starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
CountryCanada
Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time.
Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.
Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.
On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system.
Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent.
Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap.
Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020.
My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research.
NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.
Large solid rockets have never been a very good way to build launchers that might have crews on top, especially because of the problems in getting the crew away from a failing launcher.
It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission.
In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this.
In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful.
In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.