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" In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did. "

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" Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets. "

Henry Spencer

About

Beginnings

First

" Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time. "

" Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular. "

" Testing a parachute drop of a heavy object is not simple. "

" Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap. "

" As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first. "

" On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system. "

" Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent. "

" My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research. "

" The communications delays between Earth and Mars can be half an hour or more, so the people on the ground can't participate minute by minute in Mars surface activities. "

Henry Spencer

People

Earth

" The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered. "

" The original specifications for Apollo navigation called for the ability to fly a complete mission, including a lunar landing, with no help from Earth - none, not even voice communications. "

" Technically and financially, it might still make sense to give up on Ares I and simply write off the money spent on it, but politically, that's probably impossible. "

" SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing. "

" Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. "

" Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane. "

Henry Spencer

Flying

Much

" Large solid rockets have never been a very good way to build launchers that might have crews on top, especially because of the problems in getting the crew away from a failing launcher. "

" It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission. "

" Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try. "

" Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense. "

" If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better. "

" Rocket engines generally are simpler than jet engines, not more complicated. "

" Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts. "

" In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful. "

" The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work. "

" NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length. "

" Solid-fuel rockets can't easily be shut down on command. "

" Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along. "

" Speaking of photography, while the Apollo 8 crew shot hundreds of photos, there was one that got everybody's attention: a blue-and-white Earth rising over a gray moonscape. "

" Historically, the U.S.'s big launchers fly seldom enough that their costs are dominated by annual upkeep of facilities and staff, not by the actual cost of each launch. The expensive part is maintaining the launch capability, not actually conducting launches. "