I suppose that there may be a question of magnitude as a probe gets away from Earth and closer to the Sun. Please explain how the risks are greater than astronauts spending a year or more on the space station. Not arguing, just asking. Meanwhile, there is still discussion of sending a man to Mars.
I realize that this is a hijack of the OP but that is OK with me. The Venus loop sounds to me like a good use of the Saturn V. Wrap a willing astronaut in a lead suit, give him a camera and some scientific sensors and let him become and international hero.
Secondary question: Is there any scientific study that indicates that people that have been launched into space have had shortened lives or quantifiable heath problems? We know about football players but what about astronauts? I’m kind of thinking that the astronauts are better off but I don’t know.
The space station is safely inside the Earth’s magnetosphere, which shields astronauts from most of the nasty radiation that travelers going to Venus or Mars would have to deal with for a year+.
The problem of weightlessness for extended periods is also very much an open problem for long-term space travel. Bone density is lost after long trips up to the space station, and while that’s not really a huge deal for a space station astronaut returning to normal life on Earth, it may be for an astronauts asked to undertake an extensive program of study of the Martian landscape before the orbital mechanics line up for the return home.
Does this book address von Braun’s opinion of the aerodynamic ‘fins’ at the bottom of the Saturn vehicles? I seem to remember reading that he felt they were nothing but dead weight, that they were completely useless (and they must have weighted tons!) I can’t think of any rocket (of even moderate size) since that uses them.
NASA hosts the whole book online here. I’ve at least skimmed most of it and I can’t remember anything about the fins, but I tend to find myself reading it around 2 in the morning, so it’s certainly possible I missed something.
Stability is important, and I suspect a key part of the issue was man rating the vehicle. Control of the rocket’s direction was done by gimballing the engines. This means that the entire stack pivots about its centre of gravity. The upper stages were oxygen/hydrogen fuelled, and the vast majority of the volume of those stages was taken up by the very low density liquid hydrogen. The S-IC stage was kerosene and oxygen, and hence both much larger, also much denser. The centre of gravity of the stack would have been quite low. This means that the astronauts could have been nearly 300 feet above the pivot point of the stack, whipping away at the end of the rocket as the F1 engines 350 feet below gimballed away. Worse perhaps than the effect on the astronauts, the control system for the rocket was located at the top of the third stage, also a long way above the centre of gravity. This contained a complete inertial nav system that piloted the rocket to orbit. (And famously kept working perfectly when Apollo 12 was struck by lightning, an event that dropped all power to the command module, including its navigation system.) Maintaining stability of the control system in the face of such a configuration would not have been fun. Adding passive stability with a set of big fins was probably a good idea.
Yeah, that all definitely makes good sense. Von Braun was certainly your stereotypical Teutonic technocrat. He was all about the hardware, yet I can’t remember ever hearing him get into much detail regarding the ‘manned-rating’ aspect of his rockets.
And not to start a GD or anything, but everyone knows how he infamously refused to be even a little bit conciliatory as per his (not insignificant) role in Germany’s forced labor camps. Given how atrocity-laden those things were, and how unbelievably sweet things worked out for him here, would it have killed him to issue one apology and get on with things?
I still admire the guy. If there is one person you can say who got us to the Moon before the Russians its definitely von Braun. But still, nothin’?
I think once you open that dorr it’s the end of your career. As long as you say nothing, everybody who needs you (and all your friends, of which VB had many) can pretend you had nothing to do with it. Von Braun claimed, at least, that he visited manufacturing facilites and saw no evidence of slave labor. Probably he wasn’t being totally honest, but it’s not outside the realm that they swept everything under the rug when the big VIP who wasn’t a true believer was coming to town.