To The Moon and Beyond

On the 25th May 1961 President John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of congress saying “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and safely returning him to Earth.” It was made at a time when America was reeling from the seeming spectacular achievements of the USSR. They had launched Sputnik I, the first satellite into elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. They followed this with by putting a live animal into orbit followed by the first human, Yuri Gagarin in April 1961. Even though Sputnik only transmitted its signals for a few weeks and burned up in the atmosphere within months it, and Gagarin's Vostok I mission was a single orbit, to the world it looked like the Russians were vastly more advanced than the USA where its very public failures had this joke doing the rounds “how does the son of a rocket scientist in America learn to count 3,2,1 Oh Hell”.  Setting a goal of rea

At the heart of the Saturn V that took man to the moon in 1969 was the Rocketdyne F1 engine. It remains the most powerful single combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket engine ever developed,  Five of these monster engines powered the S1-C first stage. The F-1 burned RP-1 (rocket grade kerosene) using liquid oxygen (LOX) as the oxidizer since of course rocket engines also operate in space where there is no oxygen to burn fuel with. Each second an F-1 engine burned 788 kg (1,738 lb) of RP-11 fuel and 1,789 kg (3,945 lb) of liquid oxygen generating 1,500,000 (1.5 million) pound feet of thrust (6.7 Mega Newtons) and each were more powerful than all three space shuttle main engines combined. Four of the five engines were mounted on gimballs allowing for adjustments to trajectory of the rocket after launch. In the two and a half minutes of operation before all the fuel in the first stage was used up the five engines of the S1-C first stage propelled the Saturn V to a speed of 9

OK, Lets get this out of the way up front. NASA did not fake the moon landings, and quite frankly anyone who seriously thinks they did is deficient in the brains department. There are quite a few reasons why I think this way so lets review them. I am though going to take a different approach to others who feel like I do. Firstly lets look at what we know and can prove: 1) Did the Americans build rockets capable of launching satellites and manned capsules into low earth orbit. Clearly the answer is yes. The technology developed in the late nineteen fifties through the nineteen sixties was increasingly complex, more capable and the missions leading up to the moon missions clearly happened. Mistakes were made, Yes, three astronauts died in the Apollo I fire but lessons were learned. 2) Thirteen Saturn V rockets launched from the Kennedy space center between 1967 and 1973. At 363 feet tall or 110 meters its pushing credibility a bit much to even suggest they would have gone to such l

I have had an abiding interest in the NASA and in a wider sense humanities efforts to leave our planet since around the age of seven or eight when I watched in some awe the splashdown from one of the early missions to land a man on the moon. I don't remember which one but it left an indelible impression. I followed the progress of Skylab, the very successful Russian space station program and of course the NASA space shuttle overshadowed by the two disasters. More recently it is the widely unreported progress as the International Space station is continually expanded. In the back of my mind has always been the question why have we not been back to the moon in almost fifty years and why haven't we already got a permanent colony on Mars, it certainly seemed like we were heading that way in the early nineteen seventies, I think I know the answer to that now, which I will share with you later. But what reignited my interest, or more correctly brought it back to the surface, was