The End of the Era ...

[MikeKardec]

Contrary to many on this site I consider the end of the Era to be 1973, the year we got bored with going to the moon and chose not to return, the year THIS horrifying photo was taken --



There is no Skull Island, no Land That Time Forgot, no Atlantis ... we saw our limits and we decided that we would simply live within them rather than to venture back into interplanetary space. The end of an era that possibly started with a prehistoric man and a dug out canoe.

Today I visited Norton Sales, liquidator to the space program --









I bought this --



-- a switch off of an Apollo Command Module. There is actually no one left who can assemble the systems or even locate all the plans to the systems of a Saturn V rocket. Gone. A skill, like pyramid building, vanished from the earth.

I once bought my niece a T Shirt, it read: "My parents got to see a man land on the moon but all I got was Freaking Facebook!"

We went to the MOON, Dudes!

 

[Stearmen]

 

[2jakes]

One of the main reasons for the cancellation was the costs.
From 1964 until 1973, $6.417 billion ($41.4 billion in 2016) in total was appropriated for the flights.

The blueprints and other Saturn V plans are available on microfilm at the Marshall Space Center.

 

[MikeKardec]

Now, I'm certainly not trying to prove anything, my feelings only, but when I was talking with the owner at Norton he said that he was getting more inquiries to "study" (read scan) parts than to buy them. Basically private companies are attempting to recreate individual part designs from the 1960s to build the rockets of tomorrow.

A pertinent article --

https://vintagespace.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/the-lost-art-of-the-saturn-v/

Here's an extract ... not that the author (or myself or anyone else) is necessarily correct in saying that the knowledge is completely lost. It's just an indication of a passing era and that we may not be better off, though we may be happy that those additional tax dollars have stayed in our pockets --

"The Saturn V fell out of favour with NASA in the mid-1970s; Apollo was no longer a viable program and NASA had begun to favour the reusable low Earth orbital space shuttle. There were no immediate plans to return to the Moon or any foreseeable need for such a powerful launch vehicle. In the intervening nearly 40 years, the technology behind the Saturn V has been all but lost.​

The division of labour on the Saturn V’s construction proved, in retrospect, to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed the rocket to be completed at an incredible rate, certainly responsible for the success of the Apollo program.


But on the other hand, building the rocket at such a rate and with so many subcontractors means the people who oversaw and understood the actual assembly and overall working of the Saturn V were few. Each contractor recorded the workings of their stage and records survive about the engines used, but only a handful of engineers from the MSC knew how Saturn V puzzle fit together.


It is possible to work backwards to recreate individual aspects of the technology, but the men who knew how the whole vehicle worked are gone. No one alive today is able to recreate the Saturn V as it was.


Worse is the lack of records. Without a planned used for the Saturn V after Apollo, most of the comprehensive records of the rockets inner workings stayed with the engineers. Any plans or documents explaining the inner workings of the completed rocket that remain are possibly living in someone’s basement, unknown and lost in a pile of a relative’s old work papers.


Two Saturn Vs remain today as museum pieces, but it is likely that the rocket will never see a rebirth and reuse in manned spaceflight.

Yes, NASA put men on the moon with 1960s technology, but that technology doesn’t exist anymore."​

 

[2jakes]

Now, I'm certainly not trying to prove anything, my feelings only, but when I was talking with the owner at Norton .....

"NASA put men on the moon with 1960s technology, but that technology doesn’t exist anymore."​

I appreciate what you’re saying and it may very well be that 1960s technology has gone
“the way of the dodo”.

It may not be happening in my lifetime.
But I believe there will always be fellas that will be picking up the gauntlet.

Just like those two brothers back in 1903.

 

[2jakes]

And thanks Stearmen for the video of Alice

She could punch me to the moon & I would’ve gone with a smile.

I have a soft spot for that character which I like so much.

 

[scotrace]

I'm just thinking out loud here- Wouldn't technology created in the 1960s, no matter how advanced at the time and no matter its accomplishments, be completely obsolete today anyway? I'm certain we will, at some point, begin manned space flights again (I understand such a flight to Mars is in the works). But it makes sense that we would, having learned so much from those Apollo flights, only do so when new discoveries and technology make it feasible. I don't think anyone would use much of the workings of a 60s rocket to get to Mars, any more than we'd use a carbureted engine in a new Cadillac or equip it with a rotary, corded landline phone. It's old tech, it served its purpose well, but it's a hay wagon compared to what we'll be able to do in 2025. I would sincerely hope that any project to send people to other planets would employ from-scratch thinking and create something completely new and groundbreaking, just as NASA did in the 60s when they created so many all- new materials which became commonplace in the earthbound world.
But I agree that the Golden Era really stretched into the early 70s at least. The reverberations of The War, Great Depression, Baby Boom, etc., were still being felt and those who were present at the creation were still alive.

 

[GHT]

I'm just thinking out loud here- Wouldn't technology created in the 1960s, no matter how advanced at the time and no matter its accomplishments, be completely obsolete today anyway?

You think so? There was a time when you could cross the pond in three hours and without an on board computer.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The rocket itself wasn't especially complicated by rocket standards, and didn't use any mysterious, ultra-advanced technology. The first stage was simply a cluster of five very large engines that burned kerosene -- bought from Esso -- and the upper stages burned liquid hydrogen. It wasn't a very efficient system -- the first stage got about four *inches* per gallon -- but a rocket is a rocket is a rocket. Technologically, it wasn't too far removed from Dr. Von Braun's first big success, the V-2. It was just much much bigger. It was the guidance system that was ultra-sophisticated by the standards of the 1960s and was the real heart of the Apollo system.

Not everyone was all that impressed by the Apollo program in the 1960s. I followed the space program closely as a kid, and even then I was aware of the criticism that it was a huge boondoggle, and that going to the moon just to beat the Russians there wasn't a particularly efficient use of funds or resources. It was an impressive accomplishment, but it was also something of an anti-climax when you looked at the TV and saw little men walking around on the surface of the moon and you said to yourself, "OK, now what?"

By 1972, that just wasn't enough -- in fact, by 1970 it wasn't enough. With the program having accomplished its political purpose with Apollo 11 -- "nyahh, nyahh, ya Rooskies, we beat ya" -- the Nixon Administration cut off funding for Apollos 18, 19, and 20. The hardware had already been contracted and completed for the missions thru Apollo 17, so those were allowed to run to their end, and that was it. Some of the hardware under construction for the cancelled missions was diverted to Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, but there was no longer any political need for further moon exploration, so there wasn't any.

At its heart, the manned space program of the 1960s and 1970s was less about science and exploration than it was about two great powers wagging their missiles at each other -- it's not a coincidence that the decline of the Apollo program coincided with the rise of detente. Without a political motivation to drive it, all the program could do was quietly shrivel up -- which it did.

 

[2jakes]

I will always remember where I was on that day when they landed on the moon.
We had a break and we could have watched the telecast but our sergeant refused.

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1969.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Once the Soviets launched Sputnik, even the educational focus of the United States changed. That small beeping satellite, more than anything that Madalyn Murray O'Hare accomplished, was the real reason that prayer and Bible reading in tax supported public schools ended. The new emphasis was on science and math- because we knew that those kids in the USSR were hard at work cracking their books and we found the thought of second place to be abhorrent. Time spent in prayer or reading the Bible was seen as time that could be better spent on math and science.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, that and the fact that Catholic organizations had been lobbying against public-school *Protestant* prayer since the mid-1940s.

The influence of Sputnik on education in the US, however, cannot be minimized. The whole modern concept of "STEM" can be traced directly back to the Cold War fear that Soviet kids were getting a better technical education than American kids -- which, in fact, they were. Unfortunately, this post-Sputnik push also led to the introduction of "New Math," which didn't quite work out as planned. To this day, I can't do math of any kind beyond the level of a fourth-grader.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I will always remember where I was on that day when they landed on the moon.
We had a break and we could have watched the telecast but our sergeant refused.

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1969.

Sitting on the living room couch, with special permission to stay up late. I was the only one in the house who saw the first moonwalk live -- my sister was two years old and oblivious, and my mother was fast asleep in the next room. She couldn't have cared less about it. But I stayed up far into the night and watched as much of it as I could. Decades later a friend with "contacts" slipped me archival video recordings of the original CBS coverage of most of the moon missions, and I've watched them many times since. Cronkite playing with his model rockets never gets old.

 

[Fading Fast]

Well, that and the fact that Catholic organizations had been lobbying against public-school *Protestant* prayer since the mid-1940s.

The influence of Sputnik on education in the US, however, cannot be minimized. The whole modern concept of "STEM" can be traced directly back to the Cold War fear that Soviet kids were getting a better technical education than American kids -- which, in fact, they were. Unfortunately, this post-Sputnik push also led to the introduction of "New Math," which didn't quite work out as planned. To this day, I can't do math of any kind beyond the level of a fourth-grader.

As I believe you and I are about the same age, I'm glad my school wasn't up to date and didn't teach the new math. I had multiplication tables drilled into my small brain along with all the traditional ways math was taught as my grandmother helped me and she definitely didn't know "new" math.

Owing to that solid background and my career in financial markets, I can do math in my head faster than most people on a computer. It's not a particularly valuable skill as the computer is more than fast enough for what is needed, but it is a nice parlor trick to spit out a number ahead of someone clicking away on their IPhone.

My girlfriend's nephews - in their late teens and early twenties - have no math skills and think it's beyond crazy that I "wasted my time" learning all that stuff when you can just bang out the answer on a computer. I tried to explain to them how owning the concepts and seeing the equations come together in my mind give me a firmer understanding of and comfort with the math we use everyday to more complex financial work. I got back blank stares and could see the "that's crazy" going though their heads.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'll bear the scars of "new math" for the rest of my life. When I go to the bank to pay in the deposits from work, I have to write out the calculations -- "carry the one, etc" -- to figure out how much change I'm going to need. If you ever get a twenty dollar bill with a lot of scribbled subtraction problems that look like they were done by a grade-school kid, it's one of mine. I was a D student in math from Grade 4 thru the end of high school, and nothing I could do ever changed that. I took two years of algebra in high school, but I didn't retain a single bit of it.

I was listening to "The Quiz Kids" the other night, and Joel Kupperman was on there doing some fancy math problem in his head and I wanted to reach back thru the time vortex and punch him in the face. Bah.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Lookit that! How obviously fake! MOON LANDING FRAUD -- CONFIRMED!"

 

[Fading Fast]

I'll bear the scars of "new math" for the rest of my life. When I go to the bank to pay in the deposits from work, I have to write out the calculations -- "carry the one, etc" -- to figure out how much change I'm going to need. If you ever get a twenty dollar bill with a lot of scribbled subtraction problems that look like they were done by a grade-school kid, it's one of mine. I was a D student in math from Grade 4 thru the end of high school, and nothing I could do ever changed that. I took two years of algebra in high school, but I didn't retain a single bit of it.

I was listening to "The Quiz Kids" the other night, and Joel Kupperman was on there doing some fancy math problem in his head and I wanted to reach back thru the time vortex and punch him in the face. Bah.

If it makes you feel any better, I cannot spell. Both the crazy phonic they taught us and how my brain is wired has left me with no / none / less-than-zero ability to spell. I look a billion words up a day and even ones I know, I get wrong. And homonyms kill me - an hour after I've written something, I can see that I typed "are" but meant "our," but at the time I'm typing it, my mind doesn't process the error.

There are a lot - a lot - of people much smarter than I am in the world, but I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but one girl (many years ago) said that she saw spelling as a sign of intelligence and, pretty much, stopped going out with me because I can't spell. Such is life. Do reasonably complex math in my head, easy; spell "knew" not "new" on the fly, I'll get it wrong 90% of the time.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Some years ago, China proclaimed, that they want to start moon-missions the next years, to photograph the moon completely.

Anyone still heared something about it?

 

[Fading Fast]

"Lookit that! How obviously fake! MOON LANDING FRAUD -- CONFIRMED!"

If our government could successfully pull off a hoax the size and complexity of the moon landing, then I'd all but forgive it for the incredible talent, intelligence, coordination and cover up it brought to the table accomplishing, what would be, the greatest deception of all time.