RIP, NASA Moon Landing Engineer John C. Houbolt 33
The Houston Chronicle reports the death of John C. Houbolt, whose ideas helped guide the U.S. moon-landing programs. Houbolt died on Tuesday at the age of 95, in a nursing home in Maine. Says the Chronicle's obituary: "His efforts in the early 1960s are largely credited with convincing NASA to focus on the launch of a module carrying a crew from lunar orbit, rather than a rocket from earth or a space craft while orbiting the planet. Houbolt argued that a lunar orbit rendezvous, or lor, would not only be less mechanically and financially onerous than building a huge rocket to take man to the moon or launching a craft while orbiting the earth, but lor was the only option to meet President John F. Kennedy's challenge before the end of the decade."
Makes me feel so old... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a teenager when they reached the moon, but it makes me feel so old to think back to those days. I'm beginning to feel like we're getting dumber all the time, and I'm pressed to imagine how they conceived of such an approach.
Now all of this high-tech stuff has led to Facebook? Give me a break. Please. If we don't give Facebook to the Chinese, they'll be building the first lunar colony, the way things are going nowadays...
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If we don't give Facebook to the Chinese, they'll be building the first lunar colony, the way things are going nowadays...
Everyone knows that Chinese fake lunar colonies are poor imitations of American fake lunar colonies.
They use substandard fake moon rocks. Ours are the good stuff. You know, made in Taiwain.
Re:Makes me feel so old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever the political motivations, Apollo was freaking amazing. Launch the biggest rocket ever built. In space, couple up to the Lunar Module. Fly to the moon. Orbit moon. Decouple Lunar Module and fly it down to the surface with some spectacular piloting. Drive a car around down there. Blast descent stage from moon. Reconnect with Command Module and fly back to earth.
All with slide rules.
And no, I'm not American.
The guy who made the moon trip really interesting (Score:3)
RIP you steely-eyed missle man (Score:3, Interesting)
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The problem is that we're not standing on those shoulders. We've hooked up our hammocks up there so we can twitter comfortably.
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Your boyhood joy was an illusion. We never went to the moon for the sake of knowledge, it was to prove our industrial might to the world- to prove that capitalism was better then the soviet communism. Knowledge was a product of that and we capitalized on it quite well too. This is the reason China, India and other countries are shooting for the stars too.
The space race was not about gaining knowledge which is why it stopped for a period of time.
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Competing with the USSR was definitely part of our reason for going to space, but competing on the power of knowledge is not a problem (although I'd prefer cooperation). The technocracy of Vannevar Bush and von Braun lasted well into the early '70s, before government was taken over by neo-conservative luddites - and you may recall that the Challenger disaster which put the kibosh on R&D was very much the result of a changed ethic in NASA.
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"Competing with the USSR was definitely part of our reason for going to space,"
Our Nazis are better than your Nazis.
R.I.P. Dr. Hobolt. (Score:3)
A nice dramatization of this is in the 1998 HBO special "From The Earth to The Moon 5: Spider". You can get it on Netflix.
Soviets? (Score:1)
If I am not mistaken, one of the reasons the Soviet Union gave up the moon race is that the rendezvous-at-the-moon approach was considered too complicated for their electronics of the day, so they tried for the "big rocket" approach instead.
However, the shear size of the thing was too much to manage, creating a giant explosion in tests that killed key researchers.
complicated (Score:1)
So sad (Score:5, Insightful)