Word: apollos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...build a Mars-worthy spacecraft. Winged ships like the shuttle are clearly out--useless in the wispy Martian atmosphere and unreliable even close to home, as two shuttle disasters have shown. That means a return to something closer to the capsule model that served the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs so well. Boeing Aerospace has already been designing a podlike crew transfer vehicle to get astronauts to and from the space station and to take a little of the load off the shuttle. The design won a lot of backing in Congress and the space community after the Columbia disaster...
...reason you're seeing the Apollo-like configuration come back," says Volker Roth, a Boeing engineer, "is basically its safety and robustness during the first 100 miles and the last 100 miles of any space trip." Such a comparatively simple vehicle could be ready relatively soon, but the loose time frame of the Bush plan doesn't call for the craft to fly before 2014. That decade-away projection puzzles Charles Allen, head of Boeing's Orbital Space Program. "By 2007 we could be doing major systems tests," he says. "I don't see any problem with that...
...thornier than the design of the spacecraft is the problem posed by all the fuel, food and water such a mission would require. The Apollo flights to the moon were gas-up-and-go trips that lasted no more than 12 days. You could fill the tank and the larder once before you left and carry along everything you would need. Not so when you're looking at 14 months of round-trip flight time between Earth and Mars and perhaps a 1 1/2-year stay on the planet to catch the next Earth-Mars alignment back home. Even...
...true too that the moon may be an appealing launchpad because lunar gravity, just one-sixth that of Earth's, makes payloads a lot lighter and launching them a lot easier. But things aren't quite that simple. An Apollo astronaut confessed that after his lunar module landed on the moon, he had the sobering realization that before he could return home, he would again have to get the ship moving very, very fast. As any astronaut knows, the two most challenging tasks in operating a spacecraft are starting and stopping it. If it's possible to avoid additional stops...
...wheels in the dirt, it's going to act fast. Almost immediately, it will extend its robotic arm and begin sampling the soil directly in front of it. This will allow it both to calibrate its instruments and get the data flow streaming back to Earth. The Apollo astronauts used to do something similar, spending their first moments on the moon collecting what they called a contingency sample--a clump of lunar soil and rock they would tuck into a spacesuit pocket so they would have something to show for the trip if a sudden emergency forced them to turn...