So, who wants to win 1 million Euro?

[Peter B]

With manned space though, you need to be just about perfect. If a satellite or probe goes wrong, if a rocket explodes on the pad, it sucks and it's heartbreaking, but it's 'only' money and man-hours gone. No one is dead.

There's a long distance between "just about" and "actually."  If you're waiting for perfect, you're never going to get anything done.

There's a passage about this in Murray and Cox's book "Apollo the Race to the Moon" where lead engineer Joe Shea keeps reminding staff that "the good is the enemy of the better"; smart engineers will always find some way to make their system better, but at some point you have to stop the tinkering and lock in the design.

In many ways Apollo spacecraft and Saturn boosters were expedient designs - all sorts of improvements could have been made, especially if the production lines had remained open - but the time limit imposed by Kennedy provided its own limit on how long the engineers could spend improving things.

ETA: It's interesting to compare Apollo to later unmanned missions. For Apollo, Kennedy imposed a fairly arbitrary time limit. But for missions like Voyager, New Horizons and various Mars missions, planetary alignments provide natural time limits. I remember, for example, that New Horizons came within a month of missing out on getting a gravity assist from Jupiter which would've slowed the voyage to Pluto considerably.

[Donnie B.]

I think you meant "The better is the enemy of the good", though.

[Allan F]

That was pretty much my basic point. Modern tech would mean a lot of changes. Which is one reason why the conspiracy theorists are so wrong when they ask 'Where are the blue-prints?'

National Archives on microfilm?

[Peter B]

I think you meant "The better is the enemy of the good", though.

Oops.

Yep, that one.

[raven]

I've heard both forms used to be honest.

[cjameshuff]

And Saturn V wasn't some ultimate ideal space vehicle. It was big, but the F-1 engines were rather low performance. And all the material choices were made based on what was available at the time, many of which may have to be substituted, the designers didn't have the benefit of modern computer modeling, etc.

Just comparing kerosene engines...

The Rocketdyne F-1 got a sea level specific impulse of 263 s (exhaust velocity 2580 m/s), and a thrust to weight ratio of something like 75.

The RD-170 used for the Energia used an advanced staged-combustion cycle and got 309 s (3030 m/s) at sea level with a thrust to weight of 82.

The just-qualified Merlin 1D uses the simpler gas generator cycle of the F-1, but gets 282 s (2730 m/s), higher than any other gas generator engine. It has a much higher thrust to weight ratio: 150. It's rather smaller, but they're working on larger engines.

Overall vehicle mass fraction shows similar improvements. And the Saturn V was all built to 1960s standards in terms of electronics and instrumentation, and none of it was designed for modern manufacturing techniques. Just getting the mechanical stuff converted over to modern CAD/CAM systems would be an enormous effort. You're really better off starting from scratch.

[Allan F]

If some superwealthy person, like an arab oil prince, decided that he wanted to have one of his sons go to the moon and do a little walk, how long would it take from he committed his money, until an actual manned launch could be tried?

[Noldi400]

If some superwealthy person, like an arab oil prince, decided that he wanted to have one of his sons go to the moon and do a little walk, how long would it take from he committed his money, until an actual manned launch could be tried?

That's more or less the question I asked that started this sequence.

[Glom]

Just a small thing like interior lighting. On Apollo, the crew cabin were lighted by flourescent tubes. The instrument panels had hundreds of small lightbulbs. Replace all with diode lights, and you save a lot of weight and electrictiy consumption. Also diodes are more robust than other light sources, and don't break as often. Less electricity consumption could mean you could simplify the wiring, saving weight again. I don't know about fuel cell efficiency, but I suspect they're lighter and more reliable now, again saving weight. The guidance computers and gyros also lighter, less energy, more reliable, more flexible. All these gains could be translated into greater crew comfort, safety, endurance, capabilites.

Even simpler because much of the instrumentation would be instead displayed by digital screens instead of mechanical gauges which require their own plumbing and lights.

[gillianren]

If some superwealthy person, like an arab oil prince, decided that he wanted to have one of his sons go to the moon and do a little walk, how long would it take from he committed his money, until an actual manned launch could be tried?

I don't think you can say with any certainty.  Too many variables.

[Allan F]

If some superwealthy person, like an arab oil prince, decided that he wanted to have one of his sons go to the moon and do a little walk, how long would it take from he committed his money, until an actual manned launch could be tried?

I don't think you can say with any certainty.  Too many variables.

Closer to 10 than 5?

[raven]

If you want just a flyby, Space Adventures has been planning such for quite some time now.

[Noldi400]

If some superwealthy person, like an arab oil prince, decided that he wanted to have one of his sons go to the moon and do a little walk, how long would it take from he committed his money, until an actual manned launch could be tried?

I don't think you can say with any certainty.  Too many variables.

True, but I think what we're wondering is how much of the bottleneck is research and engineering that is just going to take time, and how much is budgetary?

One major difference between the Apollo program and the projects being worked on now is that the Apollo was a single-goal mission, and everything was built with that end in mind. Hopefully future engineering will be more toward multi-use hardware.

[Abaddon]

Just a small thing like interior lighting. On Apollo, the crew cabin were lighted by flourescent tubes. The instrument panels had hundreds of small lightbulbs. Replace all with diode lights, and you save a lot of weight and electrictiy consumption. Also diodes are more robust than other light sources, and don't break as often. Less electricity consumption could mean you could simplify the wiring, saving weight again. I don't know about fuel cell efficiency, but I suspect they're lighter and more reliable now, again saving weight. The guidance computers and gyros also lighter, less energy, more reliable, more flexible. All these gains could be translated into greater crew comfort, safety, endurance, capabilites.

What you say is true, but LED's tend to be soldered in place. Much more difficult to replace, and generally not field serviceable, but traditional bulbs are. Put it this way, (speculation ensues), had A13 been built with modern technology, would they have been able to accomplish the return journey?

[ka9q]

had A13 been built with modern technology, would they have been able to accomplish the return journey?

Why not? For one thing, modern avionics would use far less power so the extreme constraints on battery power and cooling water that Apollo 13 experienced would be much less of a problem today. The computers and guidance system could still have been used to conduct the engine burns instead of having to do them by hand.

I've also questioned the Apollo practice of not using solar arrays. With them, they would not have been totally dependent on batteries, fuel cells and their complex reactant supply systems though of course they would still need an oxygen supply.