Space Forum / Space History / August 2006

Air&Space on new lunar lander design
Very nice insights and overview....
http://www.airandspacemagazine.com/ASM/Mag/Index/2006/AM/soap.html
Nice companion piece to my retrospective description

Does anyone know where I can find old literature on Ceres as a planet?
I'm looking for tables, orbital elements, physical characteristics,
etc. of Ceres, not as an asteroid (I know where to kind that), but as a
planet. Presumably, the information would be about Mecury, Venus,

A discussion a few weeks ago about Apollo/Saturn V aborts highlighted
the circumstances in which abort would have been automatically
triggered.  Given the lack of time for a manual abort in some
circumstances in Apollo, I'm wondering whether there might not have

I have recently been reading up on these first two missions of the
Saturn 5.  On Apollo 4, the S4B was re-ignited, sending the CSM to an
apogee of about 12, 000miles.  I wonder if this burn of the S4B had any
'out-of-plane' component, since this does not seem much for 5 minutes

According to NasaSpaceflight.com, NASA is looking at a backup CLV
design that uses 2 3-segment SRB's attached to a liquid fueled core.
The backup CLV design involves a core liquid-fueled stage with 2 J-2X
engines, and twin 3-segment SRBs. The backup CLV height would be about

Poor Pluto, two thirds planet and one third comet.
Or is it the other way around? In any event, this debate
shows the basic flaw of our beloved scientific method.
          "ARCTURUS is his other name,

Where is this piece of Apollo mission hardware ...located...today?
http://www.insideksc.cjb.net:8081/moonshot/MQF/MQFAMANB.JPG
And is it well guarded?   Because I want it~
s

At July 4th I saw in German TV an interview with an older journalist.
Yeah, a journalist was interviewd by a journalist. The old guy said he
once did an interview with Wernher von Braun. Von Braun remarked that
the Shuttle is a bad idea. "Its the second step before the first" and

Only just found out about this. A satellite launched by an American
company called Bigelow???
I've tried Googling this newsgroup but it doesn't seem to have been
discussed much here.

Is 'Fergie' the oldest man to ever make his first flight
in the PLT seat? If so, by how much?
I'm presuming he's being groomed for a quick turnaround
as a future CDR.

While reading a bit of news about the CEV, I stumbled across some info about
the docking system to be used.  It's a fully androgynous system (the
articles say that APAS isn't quite fully androgynous) that uses a much lower
impact docking maneuver than required by APAS.

Given that NASA has been flying T-38s as Astronaut proficency aircraft since the 1960s, and
although they haven't seen as much stress on the airframe as USAF T-38s, they won't last
forever. Any idea as to how long the T-38 will be in NASA service, and what would be a likely

Is this true about "closing down communications":
http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/aiaa/horizons/jun99.html#story
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Replace you know what by j to email

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14489184/
Pat