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

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" 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. "

" Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket. "

" One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test. "

" Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Change The World

" The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly. "

" 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 Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch. "

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

" 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. "

" Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020. "

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

" 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. "

" The key virtue of orbital assembly is that it eliminates the tight connection between the size of the expedition and the size of the rockets used to launch it. "

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

" 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. "

" Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. "

" 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. "