He lost me at the signature.
Indeed, it's the standard Aulis equivocation. They reproduce the work of someone they claim to be appropriately educated and experienced and expect the reader to bow to that expertise when it comes to interpreting relevant facts and drawing conclusions. But they eliminate the opportunity of any critic to conduct a proper
voir dire. Either make a proper argument from expertise or don't.
It's non-standard and is meaningless boasting to put that blank "PhD" up there. Either you describe your specific academic standing -- and that includes your affiliations -- or you just use your name.
And of course "Kouts" does neither. At least at one point, Commonwealth custom favored postnominals more than Americans. Memberships, such as in the Royal Society, degrees (even baccalaureates), and -- of course -- orders of chivalry were more commonly listed than we would do in America. So we can accept that perhaps "Kouts" is just being old-school Commonwealth. But since "Kouts" is unwilling to offer any intellectual accountability behind the claim, it's more likely to be just pretentious posturing -- hoping people will really take his rambling nonsense as the real offerings of a real physics PhD on the American space program. Just more "Bill Woods" and "Una Ronald."
And "The author has completed...?" That's clumsy at best.
And blatantly false, because his bibliography omits all the sources one would normally go to in order to find technical information about Apollo. "Kouts" has relied heavily upon reports to and by the political organs. I might expect a non-American physicist to be able to discuss, in round terms, the engineering problems faced by the American space industry. I do not -- in any way -- expect an New Zealand physicist to have notable insight into American politics and fiscal policy for a nationalized space program. Not without a suitable
voir dire, which Aulis denies us (as usual).
The man is also changing voice from line to line.
Which says "inexperienced writer" to me. Skill in writing on scientific and technical matters is something I would expect from anyone claiming a PhD, regardless of the field.
Not this cute hiding of "MB1" -- that is, a series of articles published by the same author...
And published only in blatantly conspiracy-mongering venues. Why would someone who has legitimate subject-matter expertise and a legitimate opinion on the state of the American space program need to hide behind pseudonyms and fringe pulp mags? It's said he desires to keep his professional life and personal writings separate, which tells me this is not his area of professional specialty -- in which we have to treat it as a lay opinion, not an expert one. And he pierces his compartmentalization by making sure we know he holds a PhD in physics. He's not keeping his alter egos separate; he's carefully walking a line between claiming just enough to be believable -- if we believe him -- and making sure we'll never find out whether his expertise is genuine or not. "David Groves, PhD" all over again.
Indeed, I was hoping to find some documentation for his claim that the lunar module APS was impractical because it was mated too close to the descent stage top surface. He makes the claim as if the impracticality were documented elsewhere, with references. The reference, of course, is to his own writings. And when I follow the reference, all I get is the same naked claim with only a grainy, unrevealing photograph of the docked LM stages without the insulation blankets in the way. Naturally I wanted to know what "external" source told him his facts -- which are wrong. The "surface" underneath the APS is a 0.5-mil (0.013 mm) sheet of kapton. That's roughly a tenth the thickness of common cling wrap. It disintegrates almost instantly when the oxidizer is pre-injected, and the APS plume passes through the open center section of the LM descent stage, around the now-useless DPS. Some of the stuff you see flying away in Apollo 14, 16, and 17 launches is this yellow kapton flim.
Padding your footnotes and references by referring simply to places where you've made the same unevidenced claim previously is a long-standing trick to convey the illusion of scholarship.
Actually, on a quick read, essentially all of his problem stems from a failure to understand scalability.
Which is something physicists generally don't have to deal with and generally don't care about. A big reason the Wrights succeeded and Samuel Pierpont Langley failed -- Langley was a well-funded, highly respected physicist of his day -- was that Langley erred in trying to scale up his glider designs to a full-sized manned airplane. The Wrights had vast experience actually designing and building machines. They knew they couldn't just multiply dimensions by a scaling factor.
He seems to think that achieving a higher reliability on a more challenging mission (longer duration, higher re-entry velocity, etc.) is simply taking what had worked for a previous mission and making it a little bit better.
Indeed, which is something a real aerospace engineer would laugh heartily at.
...is a qua[l]itative change, not merely a quantitative one.
Indeed. We know Avcoat works. We've known since my father was in high school that Avcoat is a reliable method of rejecting heat during atmospheric re-entry. We didn't use it for the shuttle because the shuttle had a vastly larger surface than had ever been made out of a single layup of Avcoat. Hence, unexplored territory. And because the shuttle had to be reusable, and Avcoat is an expendable thing. There was no provision in Apollo for reusing the spacecraft, so an expendable heat shield was acceptable.
Orion is different. It's big -- bigger than any previously single Avocoat layup. And we have to figure out how to bond it to the spacecraft in way that it won't come loose, but such that we can still reuse the Orion carcass for other missions by attaching a new heat shield. It's smart, moving forward, to want to separate the reusable parts of a spacecraft from its expendable parts. And it's smart, moving forward, to see if we can learn from the shuttle how to manufacture and attach an Avcoat heat shield using a tiled method.
This is all new engineering. It's not a matter of making the same fruit tart recipe your mother made for years and switching out the
crème patisserie for lemon curd.
I feel this is someone who like me grew up in the L5 Society days...
Weren't those great days? In my extracurricular activities lately I've come to meet a number of the artists who envisioned those times (those who are still alive, anyway). What a vision there was.
And he hasn't accepted emotionally that the next step is fully as high as the step before, and what worked for Apollo really doesn't get us there.
And more darkly, that the social, financial, and political climate that made a giant step like Apollo happen is not likely to happen again in our lifetime. This is why von Braun left NASA. The sparkling toruses at the Langrange points were all well and good for
Colliers and
National Geographic, but von Braun could see that NASA had neither the will nor the support to get there. Still don't, in many estimations. That's what plays into "Kouts'" scheme. There are legitimate criticisms against SLS and Orion, from all manner of perspectives. It's not hard to spell out a gloomy plot for a story surrounding it. And then -- as you say -- all you have to do is suggest that the gloom comes from having predicated the system on something that should have easily succeeded, but has evidently failed.
...the Syd Mead submersible parked outside.
For the part of my profession that deals with designing things that aren't necessarily going to be built as real functioning objects, Syd is my hero. When I illustrate, I illustrate (as best I can) in his style. (I can't draw figures.) His illustration workshops are amazing for teaching you how to think about how something
should work, yet still excite the imagination. For the past decade or so, however, he has relied more upon his studio artists, which dulls the mystique a little. (Obligatory tips of the hat also to John Eaves and Rick Sternbach, guys I've learned a lot from -- and hopefully vice versa.) But if you want the real old wizard of imaginary space, you want Ron Cobb. Ron almost never relied on studio artists and will sit down with you and spend three hours talking about designing spaceships whether you're the head of Warner Brothers art department or a seventh-grader from Oklahoma. Among the books I own, only a handful are bequeathed to specific people in my will; Cobb's autographed copy of
Colorvision is one of them. I wish I had met Ralph McQuarrie, because I put him in the same camp as Cobb.
The tremendous imagination and hope these folks had for the future is still inspiring. But no, it's not our present or our future. The nationalized space program is not, and will never be, what it was in the 1960s. That doesn't mean we won't still continue to innovate. But to expect that it will require only an incremental step beyond Apollo is just unrealistic.
