The Apollo 11 mission had so many complex stages from take off to the moon landing. The one where the craft had to do a 180 degree turn to dock back on the command module, soon after the Saturn V tanks had been ditched, comes to mind.
So with todays technology, how would we simplify the process. Are so many undockings and dockings of various vehicles necessary.
What will change with Apollo 2019 moon mission including man on moon part.
I’m not an engineer but I’m guessing there are a wide array of procedures that would now be handled by computer that had to be done by humans on the original Apollo missions. And that meant that the Apollos had to be designed so that humans had the layout and the equipment to do all these things.
Yes, the Saturn V had over 80 thrusters and motors. As well as the multiple stages you mentioned. However, it was pretty much the only feasible way to accomplish the mission. The Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was initially flat out dismissed by NASA but advocacy by various proponents and the realization that landing the command module on the moon would require a ridiculous amount fuel in the CM and launch vehicle.
I think the fundamental difference today is that the vehicle would be assembled in low earth orbit at the ISS. This vehicle doesn’t need to be aerodynamic. Perhaps this vehicle parks in Lunar Orbit, with smaller landers doing the lunar exploration. Supply drones would be necessary to supply fuel.
Complexity, in itself, isn’t really a problem if it’s what’s required. As they said in the wonderful miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon”, astronauts are smart - they’ll figure it out.
That said, sure - simplifying things would be great. But the Apollo program developed the way it did as a product of its very specific time. Get there before the decade is out - that meant do it fast. Had more time been available maybe we wouldn’t have done it with throwaway components that could only be used once.
As already stated, today’s computing power changes everything. So does the desire to maintain a presence on the moon. Apollo wasn’t really set up to do that, despite the hopes of the people involved (including my grandfather, who worked on the lunar module at Grumman).
So I think anything we do today should be considered its own thing, not Apollo 2.0, despite the many lessons to be learned from what we did before.
Some of the unused lunar modules were sold for scrap. I wonder what they went for.
There was a SF story (Heinlein IIRC) where the trip was Earth surface => Earth orbit (change ships) => lunar orbit (change ships) => lunar surface. This was used for regular lunar trips but I could see an Earth orbit to lunar surface trip using a space station.
I may be wrong about this, but I believe the ISS’s orbit has a much-too-high inclination for it to be practical as a way station for lunar missions. In a similar vein, are there any reasons for having any kind of way-station in the first place? When a component is left behind because it isn’t needed for the next stage of the mission, what’s wrong with just leaving it there in whatever orbit, all by its lonesome or docked with other components needed for other stages?
You have a life saving station in orbit, a place to make repairs or more likely, keep a lifeboat.
Why did NASA elect to send the command module and the LM on the same rocket? Why not take them to orbit on two smaller, less complicated rockets?
Maybe because with 2 rockets you double the probability of a mission failure? Even if the rockets were smaller than the Saturn V they would still be complex.
We would do it like SpaceX is doing Starship.
Starship (aka BFR aka “Big Fucking Rocket”) is a rather larger rocket than a Saturn V. It has a similar payload, though, due to the cost of reusability.
A single launch of Starship is not enough to get to the Moon and back. However, the craft can refuel in orbit. By doing so, it can achieve a delta V of 6.9 km/s with a payload of 100 t. It would take maybe a half-dozen flights to fully fuel, but that’s ok since the craft is fully reusable.
The full lunar landing and return cycle needs more than 6.9 km/s, but since most of the payload will be left on the moon (largely being things like shelters, power systems, rovers, etc.), it should be plenty. And if not, the 100 t can be reduced to 50 t or some intermediate value–still enormous compared to what Apollo landed.
Since all the complexity happens in LEO, and doesn’t even require humans, failures are much easier to deal with. Once refueled, you have a nice self-contained rocket with a huge amount of capacity. No extra rendezvous or staged vehicles or anything at that point.
And all this for a much lower cost than Apollo, since the vehicles aren’t thrown away on each use.
As already mentioned, a direct return from the Moon means taking a spacecraft that can fly straight from the Lunar surface to the Earth, and landing the whole thing intact on the Moon. That takes a huge amount of fuel.
So it became necessary to split the return spacecraft into two parts: a lander + ascent module that went down to the Moon, and a command module + service module that had the necessary fuel for the return flight and the equipment necessary for reentry and landing on earth.
This alone necessitated the ability for the two parts to rendezvous and dock in space. So the initial separation & docking (where shortly after launch from earth, the command module flips around and docks onto the lunar module) doesn’t require any additional hardware. It’s just one more thing to do with the same hardware they’d need anyway for other parts of the mission.
I’m not sure how we could make it any simpler today. The Constellation program (started in 2005, canceled in 2009) was similar but with one major difference: The crew capsule was to be launched on a separate, smaller rocket (Ares I), while the heavy lift rocket (Ares V) would launch everything else without crew. The two would rendezvous in earth orbit, much like the two halves of the Apollo did, and continue to the Moon. This way, they would end up with a smaller human-rated rocket that could also be used to ferry astronauts to the ISS, and the Ares-V didn’t need to be human-rated.
In 2009, NASA decided to abandon this plan (which was underfunded and delayed anyway). Instead of developing the Ares-I, they invested in several private companies and worked with them to develop crew launch capabilities. They continued with supposedly simpler, cheaper version of the Ares-V, now called the SLS. Except now, I think the SLS is supposed to do an Apollo-like single-launch trip to the Moon.
Reusability only save money if you are making multiple flights. When your marching order is to put a man on the Moon by a specific deadline, reusability doesn’t necessarily help.
No doubt. Apollo was done the way it was to get to the Moon as early as possible. Since we are no longer engaged in a space race, there’s no need to take that approach. And besides, we aren’t going to spend 4% of the Federal budget on the project, the way we did with Apollo. So if it’s happening at all, it needs to be relatively cheap, and that means reusability must play a part.
Note that for the Starship approach, reusability is necessary for the refueling trips if nothing else. Otherwise it ends up being even worse than Apollo: building a half-dozen giant rockets for a single trip to the Moon.
Did you miss the news that the President ordered NASA to land a man on the Moon by 2024?
Launches to orbit are easier now. I could envision launching a larger Command Module and Landing Module first and hooking up with a larger Crew Module in orbit. If you wanted to get fancy, the Crew Module could link up with an Earth Decent Module in earth orbit to bring the crew down in a tail-first manner. All in all, I could see a larger payload to the moon allowing for a longer stay and more toys.
I’ll believe they’re going to accomplish that when I see enough money appropriated by Congress. Trump’s not the first president to give NASA orders to land people somewhere (usually Mars). They all want to do another JFK thing, but none followed up with the necessary expansion of NASA’s budget. We’ll see if Trump is different on that.
Oh, to answer the OP, we need to make sure the first person to step onto the Moon doesn’t flub their line.
A big part of current plans to return are not a great deal different to the original. The really big ticket issues are not a lot different to 50 years ago. The energy requirements and efficiencies in how the mission is staged haven changed.
Some questions were answered by Apollo, and he answers remain. - Can we manage the various rendezvous operations? The answer is yes. The complexity of swinging the CSM around to pluck out the LM, and in particular the lunar orbit rendezvous are now a trivial question. We rendezvous with the ISM as a matter of course, and managed to rendezvous with orbiting satellites (especially the HST) without effort. If anything rendezvous operations will be much more prevalent.
Building a staging orbiting platform in orbit around the moon is the big change from 50 years ago. But it makes just as much sense now as it did 50 years ago to have a dedicated lander. A direct ascent mission makes as much sense now as it did back then. Not much. You don’t win anything, and buy into a whole massive about of technical risk. The energy budget goes out massively, meaning everything costs vastly more for no useful gain.
I like to point to episodes in technical maturity. We have not advanced all that much technically in the last 50 years when it comes to spaceflight. We are still using 50 year old rocket motor designs. The SLS is nothing more than a warmed over STS system that was already being designed when the Apollo missions were being flown. The most recent progress has been in optimisations to the general principles. We have reduce costs with newer production methods, and computer aided design and manufacture help enormously. But the Boeing 747 first flew a few years before the moon landing. 50 years hence and there is a very good chance that if you take an international flight, it will be on a 747. It is a newer model, much developed, but undeniably a 747. A moon landing is not going to be that much different. In that time airfares have dropped in real terms drastically. We hope that a return to the moon will have dropped in cost at least a reasonable fraction. But one would go about it in much the same manner.
Great post, and I agree. Nitpick:You exaggerated the 747’s lifespan a bit, at both ends. It first flew right when Apollo 11 was happening (and entered commercial service soon thereafter), not before.
And, it stopped flying commercially last year. So, not quite 50 years, but almost. Since around the turn of the millennium, an international flight has been more likely to be on a 777 (or A330 or A380, later a 787 or an A350…).
But your overall point is spot on.
Really?
This link begs to differ: