What about the F-word?
I learned to used vernier calipers at my first job, but never was fast and reliably accurate with them. They are about as obsolete as slide rules today. Amazing those rockets flew.
The Saturn V rocket was the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built until Starship, and powered the Apollo manned missions to the moon. I consider the Saturn V the high point of NASA propulsion engineering. NASA had done lots of other great projects, such as unmanned probes to other planets, the Hubble telescope, and the International Space Station. One particularly interesting propulsion system are solar sails, which will enable orbits and transits that are impractical with chemical propulsion. Unfortunately their acceleration capabilities are probably impractical for human transport, so it would only be used for equipment and probes. My niece, an engineer at NASA, is working on solar sails, so I am biased.
Sadly, most of the propulsion side has been co-opted by lobbyists and bought Congresscritters from "old space" manufacturers. "The longer it takes, the more money we make" has replaced "We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard'" https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/celebrating-the-50th-anniversary-of-jfks-moon-speech/
The most egregious of "old space" sloths is the "Space Launch System" program. Supposedly it will provide human transportation to the Moon and beyond. It is obscenely expensive; in the last 10 years it has spent over $20 billion dollars, and not a single prototype has flown. The rockets are single use only, and each incremental flight is estimated to cost $2 billion. Important Senators have driven funding to their jurisdictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding
In comparison, Elon Musk's SpaceX is building the Starship Super Heavy, which has 50% more power than the SLS. Announced only seven years ago, less than $1 billion investment total has been needed. Each flight will be significantly less than $0.1 billion ($100 million). Over a dozen prototypes have flown, and a full launch to earth orbit is likely in the first half of this year. SpaceX assembled the full vertical two stages in August, which is 30 feet taller, and almost double the thrust of the Saturn V from 50 years ago. Since then, Musk has announced increasing the thrust by another 50% for the next iteration. Essentially no Federal funding have gone into this development.
Last year I visited Cape Canaveral. A Saturn V was on display. We got on a multi-mile tram ride and rode around the actual launch pads and the Vehicle Assembly Building (among the top ten biggest buildings by volume). The Vertical Assembly Building was sized to build four Saturn V rockets simultaneously. Trivia bits: depending on the list, other top ten buildings include the Great Mosque in Mecca, a Nazi-era aircraft hangar (now converted to a theme park), and a Macau casino.
Nope, closed to visitors, and we were redirected to a Visitor Center. The only redeeming part was they had a Saturn V and a F-1 engine on display. If you are driving I-10, feel free to skip this rather uninteresting stop. Most of the center was about Mississippi nature and weather for elementary school kids.
I was looking forward to NASA Mission Control in Houston. I visited once in the 70s. The tour then included one of the actual, active mission control rooms, with rows of built in monitors on long benches, and large screens, just like one sees in the old videos of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo launches. There were two separate control rooms, completely redundant; the tour went through the backup control room. Really cool.
Zip forward to the last day of 2021, and everything has changed. The "Mission Control" center is now a theme park, several miles away from the actual control center. Probably had to be, with parking for thousands, kid-focused "simulators" where they can pretend they are flying something, etc.
Fortunately for us, the parking lots were only about quarter full. Most of the exhibits were actual vehicles and parts of manned NASA trips loaned from the Smithsonian. One cool bit is a piece of actual moon rock could be touched, one of only two pieces publicly accessible. Looked like a well-engineered exhibit that is highly theft resistant. There also was a touchable Mars rock, a fragment from a meteorite that struck Mars and landed on Earth. Yes, I 'm a tourist and touched both. There was hand sanitizer nearby.
A surprising item was a used Falcon 9 from SpaceX which has carried astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. NASA generally has been ignoring SpaceX, while being more than magnanimous for their other vendors such as Boeing. This particular Falcon 9 was retired after three flights.
Some of the newer rockets have flown 10 times. No NASA vehicle, except possibly depending on one's point of view, the Shuttle, has flown multiple missions. I believe this rocket was the only vehicle on display that had actually gone to space and returned, except for a Gemini capsule from the 1960s.
Krem touching a hypersonic fin of a retired Falcon 9 rocket. In the background is a precision mock up of a Shuttle on top of an actual 747 transport plane.
The titanium grid I am touching is flush to the tube on the way up, and acts as control fins on the way down for a vertical landing without parachutes.
The Shuttles usually landed at Cape Canaveral FL. Sometimes they landed at Edwards AFB in California. Those Shuttles were then put on top of a highly modified 747 and ferried back to Cape Canaveral for extreme renovation.
Whether after the extreme renovation and restoration between each flight, one may wonder if the Shuttles were a "Ship of Theseus" or actually the same vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus.
New Years Eve at our campground was basically like last years on Criehaven: very quiet and just the two of us. Even though there about 200 sites and maybe 3/4 full, I think we were the only ones that stayed up till midnight, as I have 66 times before. Admittedly the first few times may have been more cranky baby than celebratory.
[to be continued]
Happy New Year!
Krem and Barbara
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