I don't want to imply that NASA are or were 'stupid'. There wasn't enough money to do everything. I guess what I really meant was that the people controlling the finances were being rather short-sighted
Okay, Mr. Frieling scanned his article and provided it to me to post here. He holds the copyright and all that.My suggestion is that for anybody who has a question about why Skylab B never flew, download this doc, print it out, and read it. You'll find it informative.
Fascinating article, thanks very much for obtaining it.It doesn't really paint a picture of a second Skylab, even on a 'replica' mission, as being scientifically worthless, though. In fact it really does seem to say that the budgetary pressures led to a lost opportunity.With the beneft of hindsight, and with what we now known abuot how long it took to get STS and a space station, is the scrapping of the hardware now seen as a mistake?
Well, rather than cutting something, you point out to those holding the purse strings that NASA has a mandate to do things cheaper, including a space station. Spend a comparatively small sum now, and save yourself a much bigger sum a few years down the road. It's about thinking medium rather than short term. Were the politicans really so short-sighted?
I suppose if you had to cut something, maybe postpone Viking. It was a massive program and there was no particular hurry to get to Mars since the Soviets were making a bit of a mess of it.
Of course, in my favourite 'alternate history' scenario, NASA would have evolved the Saturn family, creating a 'universal LV' derived from Saturn-1b with an F1a on the first stage, capable of similar payloads to STS;
perhaps that first stage could be made recoverable.
Yeah, it's fun to imagine what *might* have been...
I'd have kept the 8xH-1 configuration, for two reasons. First of all, if you keep the payload down a little bit, then you can tolerate the loss of an engine or even two (depending on when the second one fails and which one it is). That gives you higher over-all reliability. Secondly, it means you don't have to keep a low-volume production line open for the F-1 engine. In fact, you're economizing, because the Delta also uses essentially the H-1 engine.
No doubt--first-stage recovery was part of the plan as late as 1961, before the rush to the moon began. The question is, would there have been a sufficient number of launches to make recovery worthwhile?Optimistically, NASA might have flown maybe six a year, supporting a Skylab-like space station? I suspect the key factor would have been getting the Air Force to drop the Titan III-C in favor of the Saturn IB, just as it actually did agree to drop the Titan in favor of the Shuttle. The Titans III-C, -D and -E flew a total of about 60 times in the 20 years from the late 60s, so that's another three missions per year, for a total of nine. That's nothing like the flight rate that von B and crew were thinking of in 1960 when they proposed recovering the first stage, but maybe it still would have been enough, I dunno.
Quote from: Kaputnik on 11/28/2008 08:32 amQuote Yeah, it's fun to imagine what *might* have been...Yup, it is fun. A waste of time, but fun nonetheless . Must get back to work....It's no longer a waste of time if you manage to turn it into a readable novel, then sell the book...
Quote Yeah, it's fun to imagine what *might* have been...Yup, it is fun. A waste of time, but fun nonetheless . Must get back to work....
There was a good argument for going to Mars at that time--NASA had been developing a series of ever more ambitious Mars missions since the 1960s, but a setback in 1967--the cancellation of the Voyager-Mars program--had slowed everything down. Viking returned NASA to the more ambitious exploration strategy that it had been on before. Of course, that's a programmatic argument, not a scientific one. There's no reason to do any of this. Why not shut down the Mars program for a century or more and wait until all of our technologies have improved dramatically? Mars will always be there? Then again, why not do that for human spaceflight? We can just cancel it for several decades and wait until somebody creates a better class of humans.(And yeah, re Viking, that expensive mission had an unexpected result: so much emphasis was placed on the search for life that when it was not found, the US did not do another Mars mission for 17 years. A better approach might have been a less ambitious and less expensive mission than Viking.)
I suspect the key factor would have been getting the Air Force to drop the Titan III-C in favor of the Saturn IB, just as it actually did agree to drop the Titan in favor of the Shuttle.
1-Would it be fair to say that with such a complex, expensive, and high-profile mission, 'I don't know' wasn't an acceptable answer?2-One more technical question- how feasible would it have been to assume that Skylab-B, if launched in the mid to late 1970s, would have had the capacity to survive in orbit long enough to work in conjunction with STS, acting as the core of a small US space station, perhpas something designed to act as a stepping stone to Freedom, in the way that Gemini did for Apollo?
Quote from: Kaputnik on 11/30/2008 01:22 pm1-Would it be fair to say that with such a complex, expensive, and high-profile mission, 'I don't know' wasn't an acceptable answer?1-Yes.
1-Would it be fair to say that with such a complex, expensive, and high-profile mission, 'I don't know' wasn't an acceptable answer?
Could you go a little more into details. Viking did much more than looking for life. You don't always get the answers you desire. This is science.
Quote from: Proponent on 11/28/2008 11:36 amI suspect the key factor would have been getting the Air Force to drop the Titan III-C in favor of the Saturn IB, just as it actually did agree to drop the Titan in favor of the Shuttle. Never.
It [the Saturn IB] was more expensive and had no west capability.
Don't forget the T-IIIB types in the yearly flight rates.Titan was a family, Saturn IB wasn't