Quote from: laszlo on 03/07/2024 01:59 pmBut it does demonstrate that good tech existed back when TV was wireless and phones were cabled and apples kept the doctor away.There's a comment that Manly makes about "primitive computers" that bugs me. They were not "primitive" at that time. They were advanced at that time. Forty years from now, somebody is going to make a documentary about the "primitive computers" we had in 2024. Do we think our computers now are primitive? It's a distorted way of looking at history.
But it does demonstrate that good tech existed back when TV was wireless and phones were cabled and apples kept the doctor away.
Quote from: laszlo on 03/07/2024 01:59 pmshould also help with the Apollo Hoax conspiracy crowd There is nothing that will actually convince them. There's an old saying that you cannot use logic to get a person out of a position that logic did not get them into in the first place.
should also help with the Apollo Hoax conspiracy crowd
Amen, brother! I kept having to point out to the "kids" at work that we old fossils that don't understand tech invented and built the internet and wireless networks and that we did it without Google, Wikipedia or cell phones.
Well Apollo 13 & 14 had a big powerful camera seating on one of the astronaut couches: the Lunar Topographic Camera, a KA-74 aparently "borrowed" from the noses of Navy P-3B Orions. No need for EVA to recover the film, unlike PanCam later. But much less powerful than both PanCam and Lunar Orbiter: still better ground resolution than the hand-held Hasseblads. Think it was 3 meters if the CSM flew really low. PanCam did 1 meter and so did Lunar Orbiter. In theory Apollo 8 and beyond could have carried a LTC but procurement only started mid-1969.
Though Ranger was initiated as a scientific program, it was ultimately redirected principally to supporting Apollo. Surveyor, I believe, was Apollo-focused from the get go, and Lunar Orbiter certainly was. But, ultimately, how much impact did these programs have on Apollo?Am I right in thinking that Ranger ultimately had essentially no influence on Apollo? By this I mean that no changes in design, procedures or landing sites resulted from Ranger photography. I'm not at all suggesting that Ranger was not worthwhile. It could, for example, have revealed a lunar surface so rocky that the LM would have required redesign.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/lunar_images/Ranger8toApollo11/Note the creation of Lunar Ranger Charts, two of which covered the eventual Apollo 11 landing zone. Ranger played a role in Apollo planning, but was eventually overshadowed by Lunar Orbiter.
Ditto for Surveyor. Was its value to Apollo not mostly in confirming the assumption that the lunar surface was reasonably smooth and capable of bearing substantial loads?
That's a good point. It would be a good baseline for a team to use as a design. Since the requirements are alot like what Surveyor did. The diffrence would be the rover aspect.
I suspect that there were other late 1960s studies of Surveyor science rovers that just never saw the light of day. When it was clear that the Apollo and lunar budgets were going down, I could see JPL and Hughes deciding that there was no point in continuing to pitch more lunar rovers. But as my Space Review article noted, there are indications that some other concepts were proposed, we just don't have them. Maybe buried in JPL's archives, which are for the most part not accessible to mere mortals.
“In 1967 and 1968, even before TACSAT was launched, we used the TACSAT win as our relevant related experience” to win the classified [JUMPSEAT] satellite contract, which Hughes designated the HS-318, and that for Intelsat IV, which used the HS-312 variant, Iorillo explained. [snip]“With a large satellite configuration in hand, we beat TRW, and others, for the HS-318 and Intelsat IV contracts. These wins came just in time to prevent having to lay off the Surveyor and Intelsat II teams whose programs were ending. Even TACSAT was to end in a year. Thanks to Mr. Hyland’s foresight and faith, the bulk of these people were carried for many months entirely on company funding,” Iorillo noted.[snip]Iorillo also provided a bit more detail on the JUMPSEAT satellite they had to develop. “The ‘green’ program was much more demanding. It was our first entry into the operational world of satellite reconnaissance. And it was not a geostationary orbit mission. The satellite was a multi-mission vehicle carrying an electro-optical precision pointed payload and a very wide band ELINT [electronic intelligence] payload with large steerable receive and downlink antennas. We also designed and built the elaborate ground data processing segments for both payloads along with the satellite command and control station. The Surveyor guys were perfect for the job.”
I have a new, short, article in the works on the early early days of Surveyor. Adds some interesting new information to the story. Alas, it also provides some questions that I can't really answer. Somebody proposed X, but why was it rejected? And did anybody else propose doing X too? Also provides a little bit of information on what companies bid on the lander contract, but again it is limited.I don't know where there may be any remaining files on Surveyor. I suspect that JPL has some, but their archives are not available to anybody outside the organization. NASA sponsored books on Lunar Orbiter and Ranger, but not Surveyor. So we don't know a lot about the decision making, like what companies bid and why Hughes won the contract. The existing NASA small monograph on Surveyor mentions substantial turmoil at Hughes, with reorganizations happening every six months or so, but doesn't go into how NASA addressed these problems. As an aside: management of Ranger after a series of initial failures got a lot of attention, so not having that info for Surveyor is disappointing.Will publish in January. Then will probably do a follow-up article a few weeks later.
I haven't tried in a long time. Last time I inquired about it, I think I was told that essentially you have to be under contract to JPL to write a history in order to see the archives. So they're not going to open them to people who are just interested, even if they have a track record. I think that is a Caltech rule, not a JPL rule. Maybe a NASA historian could talk their way in, but I don't know. Also, I have lots of other stuff that occupies my brain/time (as I've noted before, my day job gets in the way of my hobby). I published about 20 articles this past year, and many of them were the result of doing research out at Vandenberg. That's where I got all those neat launch site photos. Alas, it's not easy getting to Vandenberg, so those trips require a lot more effort and time.For awhile the JPL historian was working on a Surveyor history. But that project got canceled before it really got started.
The Hughes legacy resulting from Surveyor is multi-faceted. First capturing the project was perhaps unexpected, but proved that Hughes could compete technically in the space arena and hold its own against some pretty stiff competition. The spacecraft design that soft-landed on the moon was not significantly changed from the proposal design. Another legacy was the cadre of engineers and managers that learned how to handle complex space missions and spacecraft. A number of future Hughes projects in the NASA, commercial and national security arenas owe their success to those folks who learned how on Surveyor. Also the company proved after a more than difficult development that it was ready to play in the big leagues of space systems development and proceeded to do just that over the next several decades.The Surveyor bottom line is that after all the travail of the development phase the very successful Surveyor missions provided a firm foundation of the upcoming Apollo missions and began the scientific exploration of the lunar surface. Perhaps the greatest legacy of Surveyor was the creation of the Space and Communications Group in 1970. With this reorganization all the elements required for successful space system engineering and management, the project offices and the design organizations, were included in one organization. And if you would like to see Surveyor you can travel to Washington DC and visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum—it’s there in the Lunar Exploration gallery along with Ranger and Lunar Orbiter.
