Sorry - you can make a B-52 bomber, you simply need a facility that can do the heavy machining and fabrication to crank out the airframe, fabricate the body, build the engines and put together the avionics and everything that gets stuffed into the large tube that is the actual plane. You do not need to set up an assembly line if you are going to crank out a single ‘hand made’ plane, you just need heavy manufacturing facilities. It is in setting up an assembly line that it will take years to set shit up. Same with any other manufacturing problem, easier to treat something as a prototype and simply find a facility large enough to crank out a single copy. Hell, Ed Wells here in eastern CT [up until I lost track of our mutual buddy and lost track of Ed] had a facility that was zoned for heavy manufacture and actually had the machines to crank out heavy turrets and assorted heavy bits for the old diesel submarines. [I assume that since at the time back in the late 90s he was in his upper 60s and was looking to sell the shop off and retire the shop has been sold, the equipment has been scrapped and the area rezoned to something fluffy like convenience stores and condos. Really huge shame to lose it, but shit happens.]
Look, we went, we returned, we may not have the actual equipment that took us there, but it is not impossible to do. We don’t need to come up with all new spiffy crap, we could replicate the original equipment - it isn’t like we can’t send a crew in to the Smithsonian and blueprint everything and crank it out as a one off prototype. A B-52 is easy peasy with a heavy manufacturing facility. An Apollo mission is not impossible, we did all the research already, we can make a new set to send up - we could probably even replicate the ancient computers we used. All we would need to be willing to do is shove money into the project.
No doubt. But you aren’t going to crank out a working one in under a year. Even a one-off.
Exactly. And that stuff takes a bit of time. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it relatively fast. But it’s not happening in a month. Or even 3 months. The engines alone aren’t going to be done in a month.
That’s my point. Even a “simple” thing like a B-52, which is still in operation, couldn’t be rushed to completion in an “Armageddon” like scenario.
No, actually, in this case, we couldn’t. Unlike the B-52, in this case. We could replicate things that look like the original equipment, but we literally no longer have the engineering knowledge to make exactly the same stuff. We’d have to substitute and replace or recreate. None of that can be done super fast.
And in that case, there’s a fair amount of engineering involved to determine how any changes affect the design and performance. No, that’s not impossible, but it’s not something you can throw together in under a year. As noted above, it’s not just a matter of throwing money at the problem. Throwing more money and engineers at a problem minimizes the timeframe but only to a point. With infinite time and infinite engineers, you still can’t reduce the time to 0.
In this case, it’s better to use the rockets we already have than try recreating the Saturn V.
To reiterate the above - a large jetliner takes many months to assemble. When you already have all the parts and just need to put them together like a big kit.
The idea that a big heavy machine shop is what is needed misses the point. Most of what you want is the opposite. You need precision machining, usually of exotic alloys, and a lot of hand work as well. As I wrote, there were parts to the LM that had to be hand made, because they were so delicate that they couldn’t be machine made. And lots of the parts needed custom tooling. Even to make just one. There are many things that can’t be made in a conventional machine shop. Most in fact. You are talking techniques like chemical milling, spark erosion machining. Plus alloys that need custom creation. And a lot of hand assembly.
If you were given the LM in the Smithsonian, there is zero chance you could replicate it. Just having it in front of you doesn’t tell you how it was made. You can measure it, but you need to know lots more than dimensions. You need to know the precise alloys, heat treatments, and in the case of the LM, how the hell did they make something that is about as flimsy as a coke can that big, and not mess it up.
The ISS is in an inclination (51.7°) that makes it wholly unsuited to lunar intercept trajectories with the Moon which is at 18.3° and 28.6° inclination to Earth’s equator. The Soyuz capsule does not have the duration for a Lunar mission, is not designed to dock with any kind of lunar landing module, and does not have adequate thermal protection to survive a trans-Lunar reentry speed. Solar sails are a nascent technology and even if there existed a system capable of deploying a sufficiently large solar sail to develop a measurable amount of thrust for a hypothetical five thousand kilogram payload, which would be tens of square kilometers in surface area to get a net acceleration of, say, 0.001 m/s[SUP]2[/SUP] assuming perfect reflectivity and with the trajectory being exactly parallel to solar impingement, the duration it would take you to get up to lunar intercept speed (~1.02 km/s delta velocity relative to Earth stationary coordinate frame) would take far too long (approximately 2 weeks) with the attendant habitat and provision requirements to sustain the crew. There exists today no working lunar landing vehicle or ascent module, although this is frankly the least challenging part of this problem. In short, this cannot be done with extant or “off the shelf” systems.
“Old kit”, as you so casually refer to it, consists of systems and components that have not been produced for decades, for which many of the subcontractors with their attendant processes and systems are long gone, and using manufacturing methods and “tribal knowledge” that has been lost in the turnover through a couple of generations of aerospace engineers and technicians. I strongly doubt there is a single engineer working today at a detail engineering level who has direct experience with the Apollo program and the hardware used therein. The surplus equipment itself has not been maintained or even particularly well-documented, and the avionics and many age-sensitive parts that would have to be replaced are simply not possible, which would then require reengineering the systems to use new parts, an effort that would likely cost more than just redesigning the systems anew using modern methods and materials.
As for the time it would take to perform this, if we were to take away the logistical, contractual, legislative, and budgetary hurdles and focus strictly on the technical effort, assuming a comparable mission capability and tolerance for risk as the Apollo program, it would break down something like this (estimates are roughly based on the actual Constellation/SLS timelines with adjustments for time lost due to budget issues and requirements mismatches):
[ul]
[li]Developing a new super heavy lift launch system rated for crewed operations: 5-8 years[/li][li]Developing a vehicle integration and launch support infrastructure adapted from the Apollo/STS systems: 2-3 years[/li][li]Developing a crew-rated command module: 4-6 years[/li][li]Developing a crew-rated service module: 3-5 years[/li][li]Developing a new crewed lunar landing vehicle: 2-5 years[/li][/ul]
So if all of these efforts were performed concurrently the long pole becomes the booster system (just as it was with Apollo) we’d be looking at a minimum of 5-8 years to be able to perform an Apollo-like mission, which happens to be just about in line with the actual Apollo program. There is often the assumption that using Shuttle-derived systems (as the SLS largely is) will speed development, but in fact the differences in the mission requirements and radical detail changes required mean that you are still essentially starting anew, even if there are some major components, such as main and upper stage engines, solid rocket boosters, et cetera, which can be adapted from existing systems.
One of the major tent poles is the flight software, which is the one component that takes up no space in your mass allocations or thermal protection requirements but ends up consuming every bit of management overhead and then starts to overrun the budget even before you have a single piece of hardware built. One might assume that you could just adapt flight software from an existing source, like, say, the Shuttle, but in fact even if you could find a modern computer to compile your heritage flight code directly to, when you make significant changes to the vehicle configuration and operational sequence you essentially have to start from scratch. Given the criticality of the code–a single bit, flipped at the wrong time and not caught by the error checking routines that actually make up the bulk of the code, could cause unrecoverable catastrophic loss of crew and vehicle–it has to be phenomenally reliable, which means not only person-centuries of effort in writing the code but person-millenia spent in regression testing and correction. Until we can develop a compiler with synthetic intelligence which can test and fix its own code, this is largely a labor-intensive process that takes as long as it takes; frequently years before anything like a workable flight code is ready for full integration testing. Software is the bane of a program manager’s existence, and he or she will come to hate even the most simple appliance with embedded code.
It may seem like we’ve done this before so we should just be able to turn around, copy what we’ve done, and do it again in a fraction of the time, but in fact much of the experience and discipline knowledge gained during the Apollo program has been lost, and what we are left with is faded microfiche of system specifications and upper level assembly drawings, specification and product control drawings to parts built by suppliers who went out of business forty years ago, and some coffee-stained early-Seventies Xerox copies of NASA technical memorandums superficially detailing the problems of getting a computer with 16 memory registers running at 480 kflops to perform some remotely useful calculations.
As for 3-6 months or “inside of a month”? It takes 2-3 years after contract award and system/mission requirements review (i.e. at the point where they are done with contracts and budget negotiations and start building and assembling the launch systems) to put on an Atlas V or Delta IV launch, and these are fully designed launch vehicles in current production that have less capability and complexity than a system required to delivery and return a crewed vehicle to the Lunar surface. I don’t know what kind of Michael Bay-influenced view of aerospace technology you have developed, but those aren’t even remotely plausible estimates. Even if there were an existing super heavy launch vehicle in current production–say, if the Russians were still building the Energia rocket, or if NASA had developed a Shuttle-derived crewed heavy lifter–it would still be 3-5 years to develop the integrated system, do some kind of minimal all up testing (e.g. analogous to the Apollo 6 and Apollo 8 missions), train crews, develop and test software and mission specific equipment (MSE), and otherwise be even marginally confident in the practical reliability of the system and the capability to cope with off-nominal conditions.
In fact, despite what you saw in the entertaining but factually inaccurate Ron Howard-directed movie, nearly every procedure and process used to “rescue” the crew was not improvised or made up on the spot but was part of an existing and well-developed plan to deal with the multitude of horrors imagined by mission planners and engineers. Remember how a roomful of engineers slapped together an adaptor for the CM LiOH cartridges? Previously done. Restarting the LM descent engine? It was in the technical design requirements. The use of stellar sighting to align the CSM for burn? Not only considered but practiced by both Gemini and Apollo crews. Remember that one fat, egg-sucking Grumman program manager standing beside Gene Kranz, prevaricating on whether the LM could be used as a ‘lifeboat’ while being so mercilessly mocked by Ed Harris? The reality is that as soon as the news went out about the Apollo XIII failure hundreds of engineers and technicians flooded back to the Grumman facility in Bethpage, N.Y. where the LM was assembled as well as the hundreds of other subcontractors before the calls could even go out, and stood by at ready to support through the entire duration of the Apollo XIII recovery.
The successful recovery of Apollo XIII vehicle wasn’t some kind of MacGyver-ish effort by a few ragged, clever engineers and a crew so tough and brave that neither vacuum, nor radiation, nor freezing cold could penetrate their patriotic dedication to returning alive to Mom, God, and country; it is a tribute to the contingency planning that went into the design of the Apollo/Saturn system long before any piece of metal was ever cut, through the training of both the crew and mission controllers, the dedication of literally tens of thousands of engineers and technicians who spent sleepless nights worrying about and planning for all the possible things that could go wrong, and not the least the margins built into the system to allow it to do more than the specifications notionally said it could do. The efforts of the crew and mission control, while crucial to the successful recovery, were just a consequence of all of the groundwork that had been laid before them, without which there would have been no possibility of recovery. (Lovell actually described the recovery and return flight as “mostly tedium, interspaced with occasional bouts of terror and fear that we’d never see our families again.”)
In space missions, problems don’t just “work themselves out”, and you can’t just patch up broken equipment with a little solder and chewing gum. Things work because you’ve designed them to work well past their rated specification, because there are redundancies, and because you’ve planned for every possible contingency that it is practicable to mitigate. And even with that, missions and vehicles operate on the ragged edge of failure at many crucial points which no amount of bravery or ingenuity can compensate for.
And your point is what exactly? The “hardware” you see sitting out in front of Johnson Space Center or in the Smithsonian is exactly that; mechanical hardware, and not a complete set of avionics, consumables, energetics, power supplies, et cetera. This stuff doesn’t just freeze into some kind of stasis after the Apollo program was cancelled; it continues to age, corrode, and rot. Apollo, being a “build and fly” program, didn’t have any kind of aging surveillance or service life extension program, and I would guess that most components were specified and designed to something like a five year service life, if that. Items like ordnance devices, insulation wiring, certain electronic components, and certainly consumables like the LiOH canisters have design lifetimes, and while there is some margin built into them after more than forty years they cannot all be expected to function reliably. And reliably is paramount; a single failure–especially a limit failure which may apply to components which are nominally redundant–can spell loss of crew and vehicle, which would certainly occur if you tried to take the Saturn V stack from JSC, put an Apollo CSM and LM atop it, and fly it out of Kennedy Space Center, which by the way does not have the facilities to assemble or launch the Saturn V as they’ve been subsequently modified to support the Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”) and the in-developement Space Launch System. This isn’t even remotely in question; you cannot take any of the existing stages or systems that have been sitting in uncontrolled conditions and make them flight worthy without extensive rework and reverse engineering.
As for “send[ing] a crew in to the Smithsonian and blueprint everything and crank it out as a one off prototype,” as aruvqan suggests, this highlights an almost complete failure to understand what makes a launch vehicle a vehicle rather than an industrial art sculpture. Sure, you can take apart a vehicle piece by piece; measure, weight, and sample the components; generate detail component and assembly prints; source built-to-print physical replicas, and finally assemble something that looks just like the original article. I have literally done this, so I’m not wildly speculating from an armchair or making shit up out of thin air. What you can’t do, however, is replicate the design intent and knowledge which went into how it operates; what margins it can work to; what issues, workarounds, or other tribal knowledge necessary to make it function reliably; recreate the software or complex proprietary parts and materials which have not been produced in decades and for which only scant information exists; and otherwise have any prayer of making a flyable replica. In fact, we wouldn’t even want to do this. The Apollo/Saturn system was marginal in terms of safety (which a multitude of problems that would have been corrected in future evolution), structurally overbuilt by due to not having highly refined analysis tools and test instrumentation, and relied on avionics which are more primitive and less reliable than an 'Eighties era Hewlett-Packard calculator.
If you seriously compressed the process of developing a new super heavy launch system, you could possibly get the schedule down to somewhere around five years; maybe slightly less (by “less” we’re talking a count of a few months) if you got lucky and everything fell right into place, which in my experience across many aerospace programs on a range of scales, never, ever happens even in the sauciest wet dreams of program managers. You can eliminate the time spent in design reviews–which are, frankly, mostly a waste of time–and curtail the testing to the minimum necessary to get to an all up uncrewed flight test, and cross your fingers that every test is essentially successful and valuable, and that you don’t encounter any major anomalies that require extensive investigation or redesign. You can adapt from existing systems, and use non-space qualified components which don’t have lead times measured in the many dozens of weeks, taking the risk that they’ll be sufficiently robust to survive in the space environment without doing the extensive long duration characterization testing to assure high reliability. You can do all of this, but in the end, you still need to perform the system requirements analysis and engineering studies in order to assure that you have a vehicle in which all of the components work together and don’t induce environments and conditions which cause destructive effects in one another. You need to at least internally review conceptual designs, built development articles, test to proof loads or destruction, secure vendors capable of producing a reliable product, perform the necessary quality checks to verify that what you ordered is what you got, plan a concept of operations (CONOPS) in which all of the tens of thousands of individual components and systems come together in the correct sequence, put it all together, and hope/pray/clench that you haven’t missed some minor detail like a voltage mismatch or dissimilar metals in contact isn’t going to result in catastrophic and unrecoverable loss of vehicle.
This isn’t going to happen in a few months, or even a couple of years. Hell, it takes a year or more to design and build up a small satellite or high altitude sounding rocket with a team of just a few dozen people who all know each other by first name and drinking preference. Once you get into teams of thousands of people working for hundreds of different vendors, requiring formal interfaces and engineering specifications just to keep straight who is doing what to whom and exactly how Stage 1 talks to the Guidance Control Module through the intervening upper stages, you are going to spend a couple of years just doing all the systems-level design before you even produce a single engineering print or component level specification. And, as I addressed earlier, your long pole is inevitably going to be all the flight software and supporting test suite, which absolutely has to function at all times without fail and will end up as the shitcan that all other problems during development get kicked down into to resolve.
That is the reality of going to space. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in a cartoon fantasy.
Not a space vehicle, but was not the P80 flying weeks after it first was conceived?
And IIRC, the Zond version of Soyuz could do a lunar flyby, they actually did one (crewed by Turtles) before Apollo 8. I have read differing accounts whether or not a manned mission (if it had been launched instead) could have survived.
BTW, is not the Proton launcher man rated or was designed to be so?
Successful design ? Do you mean from the Apollo program ?
I wonder if even 50% of the technology from that program is available these days. To throw in modern technology to old design I doubt can be done, it changes everything. I would think 2 years minimum just to get the new design and testing of a lander and other components.
Subcontract and outsource the job to the Chinese., and just send NASA people over there to supervise the technology aand airlift over some high-tech components… They’d have it ready to go in a few weeks. No problems with unions, EPA, bidding contracts, OEO. congressmen, committees.
Now, I’m not going to effort a true opinion here. It’s way outside of my field.
However, it will always amaze me that the Apollo program could get up and running from Kennedy’s famous speech (May 25, 1961) and succeed by July 20, 1969 (8.2 years, near enough). That seems incredibly fast given the stone knives and bear skins technology available then.
But then I get told it would take a similar amount of time to do so again? When all manner of techniques have advanced by astonishing amounts. Computers, materials, supplies and consumables, communications, management and so forth are all so much further along that it’s not even in the ballpark.
I acknowledge the expertise of others in this thread. But a big chunk of the added delay - especially given the extra development of space flight work over the last 50 years - has to be bureaucracy and caution. If I know anything about government work - and I know a fair bit having covered it for years - caution will win out over accomplishment nine times out of ten.
How long would it take to build the pusher plate for the orion ? Seem’s to me that the only reason you would put such a program together, would be for a rescue operation. In the real world, I would hazard a guess that by that time, we would have already had a lunar program and using dedicated mission equipment.
That leaves the question of why we would put together a haphazard lunar mission on short notice and I can only think of two or three reasons. Something is there, and we want to be first on the block to recon the artifact. Second, something from out there crashed and is sending out a distress signal. Lastly, we want to invade someones moon base, that’s lobbing rocks at us.
Is a return trip required? Or is a one-way ticket sufficient?
My guess is you’ve never worked in any kind of engineering job. Where I work (big networking equipment vendor), when we (software team) are asked to add an incremental feature to the stuff we’re working on now, it’s difficult to add anything meaningful in less than three months, even if it only involves a single person. Add people and the complexity (and time requirements) tend to go up, not down.
You beat me to it – and this is true for small projects, too. The Mythical Man Month is still a great book.
Thread-winner!
But just for fun, let’s up the stakes to the maximum. I agree with everything that Stranger said that I’m competent to comment on, and take his word for the rest. Regardless, different rules might come into play in extreme cases.
Let’s say that, if we don’t get one person to the moon by a certain time, the Earth will be destroyed. I can’t come up with any good explanation for that, but let’s roll with it anyway. Of course, if the time is tomorrow, we’re doomed. If it’s 10 years, should be no problem – we did the first moon shot in 10 years and there’s plenty of motivation, assuming the deniers who don’t believe in the calamity aren’t sufficiently powerful, politically. (wink wink)
So there’s some interval between, where we could manage to get someone there, and safety be damned (the volunteer knows they’ll die, so the risk is that we’ll have to send a second one if the first fails – or that we run out of time and poof.)
Even with certain death for everyone on the planet looming as the incentive, I’d be dumbfounded to learn that we could manage it within 3 months, or even six. But then, I’ve been dumbfounded before.
What is it with the near hero worship of the Chinese space program? This is a program which took over ten years to put someone in orbit based upon incremental improvements of transferred Soviet technology. Not to dismiss the accomplisment of being the third nation to put a person in orbit, but it is impressive in the sense that the bear can dance rather than how stunningly well it tangos. The Chinese space program is nowhere near a crewed Lunar landing; the earliest proposed date is 2025–over ten years from now–and that is unlikely to be achieved at the current rate of progress. And the problem, again, isn’t all teh “unions, EPA bidding contracts,…” et cetera; there are fundamental system engineering, integration activities, and component sourcing issues that just can’t be accelerated past a certain rate no matter how much money or time you throw at the problem. The “all manner of techniques [that] have advanced by astonishing amounts” have certainly given us greater capabilities, albeit largely in the minaturization and automation that have made it feasible and even cheap to replace nature’s flight computer (e.g. a human pilot) with something that is much smaller, immeasurably faster, certainly more robust, and also that doesn’t need to carry hundreds of kilograms of consumables and conditioning equipment just to make sure it remains functioning. If the question were what it takes to put a robotic probe on the moon today, the answer is that it is far faster, and the vehicle would be much more capable, than that in circa 1968. But human beings are the same sloppy, delicate, non-rebootable-failure-prone creatures they’ve always been, and while the state of the art in keeping them alive in the inhospitible environment of space has advanced, it hasn’t advanced all that far, and requires extraordinary effort. (Casual estimates of a crewed mission to Low Earth orbit indicate that 90% of the cost and effort goes into just keeping the occupants alive; estimates on longer duration missions bump that up past 99%.)
A nuclear pulse propulsion launch from the Earth’s surface, while being technically feasible, would be enormously problematic for a large number of reasons including the fact that there is no feasible abort or destruct mode for such a massive vehicle; if it fails to go into orbit, you’ll have tens of thousands of tons of mass moving at suborbital speed returning to Earth wherever gravity and Newton take it. And the testing and development to go from a basic conept–which is all we currently have right now–to a working vehicle someone on this side of dangerously suicidal might consider riding in is far longer than 5-8 years, not to mention the difficulty of selling the general public on the benefits of open-air nuclear tests which will produce hundreds of tons of radioactive fallout.
Even though there are 3 Saturn V’s existing as static displays, they are in no way even close to being flight worthy. They’re made up of a stage there, another stage here, etc. Some are made up of test stages that were never intended to fly a manned mission. The first stage was designed to only work for less than 3 minutes. The second stage only had to work for about 11 minutes. Off hand, I don’t know how long the third stage was supposed to work, but it couldn’t have been more than 8 minutes. They were precision machines designed and built for specific tasks. One task they were never designed for was to sit for 30 years in the open air as static displays. They’ve all been restored (a 2 year minimum project each) to repair the corrosion damage and to keep them from falling apart, but shooting one off? Not a chance. They’re now all displayed indoors at the museums at Marshall, Johnson, and Kennedy space centers.
The Lunar Module on display at the US Space and Rocket Museum at Marshall is, I guess, the closest to a flight worthy Saturn V artifact. It was built for one of the cancelled lunar missions and was always stored indoors. But it’d still have to be rebuilt and upgraded.
What’s the word on the Energia booster? Is it still in production? Would it or one of it’s variants be powerful enough to boost something into a Lunar trajectory?
That was a big factor in why the very second Apollo manned mission went straight to the Lunar Orbit mission, TPTB were worried that could happen. Turns out of course the other side were not anywhere near ready. But yes, had the Soviet moon program proceeded, one component would have been a translunar-capable Soyuz, and considering Soviet-era practices they would have figured out how to make it survivable while still being *really exciting *for the crew and not in the fun sense. The original Soyuz line had long endurance capability - Soyuz 9 did a 17+ day non-docked mission. However for the last couple of decades the Soyuz system in use has been one optimized for the space station ferry/lifeboat role so we could not just upgrade one at the plant either.
If anyone would be so stupid to even try and fuel one up, I would predict a catastrophic failure of every cryogenic system, and the spilling of enormous quantities of bad things. Not that any of the equipment to actually fuel one up exists anymore.
*for the crew and not in the fun sense. The original Soyuz line had long endurance capability - Soyuz 9 did a 17+ day non-docked mission. However for the last couple of decades the Soyuz system in use has been one optimized for the space station ferry/lifeboat role so we could not just upgrade one at the plant either.