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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Henry Spencer

Rocket

Space

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Henry Spencer

Flying

Much

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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