Here’s a list of all 60 female space travelers so far (as opposed to the 477 male space travelers so far):
Except for the one Russian space traveler in 1963, there were none others until 1982. There was a feeling among a lot of people at the time of that woman cosmonaut in 1963 that putting a woman in space was just a bit of show business having nothing to do with real “science”. It took until the 1980’s for there to be a general acknowledgement that a woman could be just as good at what an astronaut did as a man.
So, can someone explain this to me about the design of Discovery? There’s a famous scene where he’s jogging and it looks like he’s jogging on the inside of a circle. Now, earlier in the movie, it’s been established that gravity is simulated in a spinning space station. However, what exactly or where exactly is Discovery spinning so that there is simulated gravity? Somewhere inside its “head?” But when the pod doors are opened and the pod comes up, the pod is oriented toward the “bottom” of the ship and the Pod Bay room has gravity. So, yeah, can someone explain where that jogging scene is supposed to be taking place?
The habitation area in the sphere spins. If you remember, Bowman and Poole are shown ascending/descending a ladder which couples with a rotating area. That connects them to the weightless part of Discovery where the pods are stored and where the main control panel is. (Actually they are rotating before and the central part is not, but it looks the same.) In one of the EVA scenes you can see one of the astronauts at the window, not spinning.
It is not clear to me exactly where the centrifuge part is - it looks like between the command part on top, with windows, and the pod bay. Clearly the outside of the sphere does not rotate, since there would be a lot of equipment behind the rotating walls between the crew part and the hull.
ETA: The pod bay does not have gravity. The astronauts use the grip shoes seen in the Orion shuttle and Aries, and the pods are tethered until they are extended and launched. The astronauts in the pod bay area never drop anything, and when Bowman or Poole is in the command area he is belted in to his seat.
Shawn does have a point, though. Although Dave and Frank are presumably wearing the “grip shoes,” the actors move about the pod bay set as if they’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to be weightless. When they’re checking out the AE-35 unit, they’re leaning on the workbench.
It’s always seemed weird to me that Kubrick makes an effort to show zero gravity in some scenes, but doesn’t bother in the pod bay scenes at all.
The habitation area is in the sphere at the bow of the ship, oriented from “side to side” as you face the bow, that is, perpendicular to the direction of travel. The set appears to be bigger than actually would fit inside the sphere. Yes, the scenes in the Pod Bay look like they’re in full gravity, but they really should’ve been weightless. Bowman and Poole don’t walk or act like they’re in zero-G or are wearing grip shoes.
No. Consider Apollo: the in-flight failure rate was 9.1%, with no fatalities. Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons performed flawlessly. At least one of the Mars rovers has exceeded its design life by about a decade.
My point is that “bound to” is not realistic. “Might”/“could” are more in line with historical performance – yes, it would be ridiculous to figure on success and not build in redundancy and flex, but to expect problems does not match our experience.
An airplane pilot may tell you that flying is hours of boredom bounded by moments of stark terror. For spaceflight, replace “hours” with “months”. There is a huge amount of not very much out there, and a very long distance between here and nowhere else. You could probably have the entire crew in SA for basically the whole trip (reducing life support failure probability) and the computer spending weeks or months in sleep mode.
In fact, I suspect that keeping Bowman and Poole conscious for the whole trip would have been more of a disservice to them. Imagine being awake for billions of miles of more void. Even HAL would not have been needed at AI capacity over that time: a simple monitor system could wake up whatever crew and equipment might be needed to handle the unforeseeable.
Check again: Galieo, Cassini, and New Horizons all had minor problems and glitches although none serious enough to not to call their missions a complete success.
With Apollo, there was a HUGE ground force supporting it and transmissions or communications could be done with a minimal delay. As Discovery got further out, the time for any communications would stretch into the hours.
By having crew members on board, there could be a more instantaneous reaction if there were any problems, however unlikely.
Of course, there would be observations being made for the entire journey. Even if the primary mission is Jupiter, they would be monitoring things such as any asteroids they passed by.
Yes, I do know that one of the major plot points was that HAL was so powerful and sofisticated that it could monitor and control the entire ship without assistance.
One of the plot points of 2010 was that they were far enough away from Earth that they relied on the crew of the Leonov to make decisions rather than wait for orders from headquarters.
Not quite related but there are parallels and bare with me as I try to explain them.
In WW2, the top British admiral, Tovey would travel with his ship, KGV rather than waiting at headquraters for information to arrive that was limited at best. He felt he could make better decisions by being with his ships.
Same with a top German Admiral, Lutjens who sailed with his ship Bismarck rather than try to command from the German naval office. His boss Raeder more or less let Lutjens call the shots on his raiding cruises.
The point is that by being with the ship, command decisions are more easily made and running with 2 staff is very slim pickings.
Another point (although another Sci-Fi movie), the crew in Alien was 7 and they were on an even longer trip and were pulled out of SA when the computer found an interesting diversion.
An overall philosopy, plan for the worst but hope for the best.
I don’t disagree with any of the points made here. Just that a crew of 2 (with 3 in SA) is ridiculosly low plus there could have been some females on board.
Galileo failed to deploy its high gain antenna. Someone worked out a way to use the low gain antenna for data, but it meant data rates were very slow.
For Cassini, someone realized before it got to Saturn that it would have a problem communicating with the Huygens probe, because the different velocities after it slowed to enter Titan’s atmosphere would shift the radio frequencies. They made some adjustments to correct for this although I forget exactly what. Also, someone made a mistake programming Huygens (forgot to turn on one of the radio channels or something like that) and some data was lost.
I don’t know about any specific problems with New Horizons, but I would be surprised if it really worked flawlessly.
This page (scroll about halfway down) has some diagrams of how the interior spaces are laid out. Looks to me like it would all fit, but not very efficiently. There are lots of oddly-shaped spaces left over.
ssgenius, you keep writing that the movie could have had a woman as part of the crew. Sure, if it were made today, but it was made in 1968. You underestimate the cultural difference between 1968 and today. In 1968 there was still enough general feeling that a woman wouldn’t have been able to handle the responsibilities of a long space flight to make it difficult for most people to imagine a woman in the crew of such a flight. Remember, a movie is always mostly about the time it’s made, not about the time it predicts. In 1968, it was still too hard for most people to imagine a woman taking such responsibilities. By 2015, cultural attitudes had changed enough to have the crew of the ship in The Martian be four men and two women (and the commander be a woman). For old movies (and old books and old everything), you have to be able to put yourself into the mental set of the time when the movie was made.
I have never found those conjectural cutaway drawings and diagrams very convincing. It always looks to me like some things have been shrunk, particularly the centrifuge. The main problem with making everything fit is the ridiculously roomy pod bay, which severely limits the space available for everything else we see. I’ve never seen any evidence that Kubrick or anyone else associated with the film bothered to figure all that out, or even cared. I often hear things like “it can’t be wrong because Kubrick was a perfectionist detail freak,” but Kubrick could and did make mistakes.
I’d like to see a three-dimensional model–not a drawing–of the Discovery interior in which everything fits AND matches the scale of the models and sets seen in the film. I don’t think it can be done.
Cool! Hadn’t seen those diagrams before. I’m sure the USAA would have no problem filling in those spaces with all kinds of machinery, storage space and tankage. I hadn’t remembered that the chairs on the Bridge were at such odd angles to the front viewports - you’d think they’d be at more of an angle aft, to give a better line of sight.
Was there an airlock on both sides of the Pod Bay, or just to port?
Yeah, I know what you mean. The centrifuge looks to be 35-40 feet across, and the spherical section at the front of Discovery looks about 30-35 feet. It’s always looked a bit iffy to me, but not completely impossible.
A model would be hard to do, but I wonder if anyone’s ever done the interior of the Discovery in some kind of 3-D modelling or architectural software.
Yeah, you could fill in those spaces with tanks, storage, water filtering systems, whatever, but it still seems like an inefficient design to me. Two small tanks use more material, and weigh more, than a single tank of equivalent volume. All the odd angles make me think there’d be lots of tight corners that wouldn’t be very usable.
If you mean the emergency airlock that Dave uses to get back inside, I think there’s just the one. But the pod bay also needs an airlock to isolate it from the rest of the ship, or else they’d lose all the atmosphere whenever launching a pod.
I’m sure the doors opening onto the Pod Bay are airtight, and the bay itself acts as an airlock. Presumably its atmosphere is drawn off into tanks during landing and launching operations, and then the bay is repressurized afterwards.
I did not look very hard, but one of the things that seems to be missing from the cutaways is a counterbalance. I have to assume that the centrifuge would have a counter-rotating torque compensator of some sort. Which seems like terrific overkill. I mean, just spin the whole ship. Much simpler than the mass of an internal centrifuge and counterbalance.
Yes, there needs to be an airtight door between the pod bay and the other habitable areas of the ship. One of the diagrams on the page I linked shows a door leading from the pod bay to a ladder, with airlocks at the top and bottom of the ladder.
You could probably nitpick the technical details 'til the cows come home.[sup]*[/sup] The only spacesuits are in the pod bay (and the emergency airlock, which you can only get to through the pod bay). If one of the pod bay doors malfunctions and leaks, the crew are screwed. They’ll still have atmosphere in the rest of the ship, but there’s no way to get to the suits so they can fix the door.
Between 2001 and 2010, the bearings for the centrifuge failed causing the whole ship to spin. Not sure how that affects the counterbalance idea.
I agree spinning the whole ship may have been simpler. Tethering it to to a counterweight and spinning them both around their common center of mass would also be simple and could create a long enough radius to avoid some problems. I’ve heard that the short radius of the centrifuge would cause motion sickness. I think I got the counterweight idea from Stranger on a Train or another knowledgeable doper.
Interesting that the OP uses Sally Ride/Steve Hawley as an astronaut couple, considering the reality of the situation. Did he know when he married her? Was she out to anyone at the time? If the controlling agency knew, I don’t think they’d pick them for the mission.
As for Discovery, no matter how much they try, I don’t think they can fit this roominto the sphere. And why is is so large, and so inefficient?
