AdamSmith

A most remarkable achievement of Mission Control was quickly developing procedures for powering up the CM after its long cold sleep. Flight controllers wrote the documents for this innovation in three days, instead of the usual three months. The Command Module was cold and clammy at the start of power up. The walls, ceiling, floor, wire harnesses, and panels were all covered with droplets of water. It was suspected conditions were the same behind the panels. The chances of short circuits caused apprehension, but thanks to the safeguards built into the command module after the disastrous Apollo-1 fire in January 1967, no arcing took place. The droplets furnished one sensation as we decelerated in the atmosphere: it rained inside the CM. http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-13/apollo-13.html

I really do think it was Buzz (or Collins?) who said: The worst time to panic is in an emergency.

Of course being in space flight rather than air flight they had (in some of the modes of operation) slightly more leisure to work out solutions than you do. But they did apparently get quite vexed toward the later hours when they really needed to start getting the CM back into operation and ground control was still not confident of its restart instructions and the flight crew said, rather firmly, Look, something rather than nothing.

This business about how close-run it all was, has another piece (of many) that came out in Apollo 13: how, in contrast to the almost magically lightweighted Lunar Module (its skin famously being the thickness of 3 sheets of kitchen aluminum foil), it turned out that the Command Module was much more robust than even its own designers really knew. From its being powered down for the 2 days or whatever it was that they were on the free-return trajectory and living in the attached LM as the lifeboat, to preserve what little remained in the batteries etc of the Command Module that they would of course need to survive re-entry, then that it actually returned to operation when the crew went back in and went through the 200-step restart procedure. The whole interior was dripping with condensation that should have shorted out the switches, but miraculously they all worked.

Hold-Down Arms and Tail Service Masts Four hold-down arms had to secure the Saturn V firmly on the mobile launcher during assembly, transportation to the launch site, and its stay on the launch pad in all kinds of weather. These devices also had to have the strength to hold down the launch vehicle after ignition, until all engines registered full thrust. Then they automatically and simultaneously released the Apollo-Saturn for liftoff. They did not, of course, have to overcome the full power of all the engines; the great weight of the fueled vehicle counteracted much of the thrust, As an indication of the unusual design requirement, James D. Phillips of KSC Launch Support Equipment Engineering Division won the 1965 steel-casting design contest sponsored by the Steel Founders Society of America for the design of the casting forming the base for the hold-down arms.36 The arms would weigh over 18 metric tons each; the base was to be just under two meters wide, and not quite three meters long. They would stand 3.35 meters high. Nevertheless, in contrast to the huge Saturn vehicle, the hold-down arms seemed much too small to anchor - even momentarily - the huge rocket. On 17 February 1964 the KSC Procurement Division issued a contract to Space Corporation, Dallas, for the manufacture of 16 hold-down arms for the mobile launchers. The cost of the fixed price contract was $676,320, with completion date set for 25 July 1965.37 http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4204/ch13-4.html

Another bit to show how close-run the thing was, was that the 4 'hold-down arms' that kept the rocket on the ground until the 8.9-second ignition sequence had carried out successfully and all the sensors agreed that all 5 engines had reached full thrust, had to all 4 release within, if I recall, 50 milliseconds of one another, else the difference in release timing would cause the rocket to tip over. Which of course had happened in the pre-Apollo (pre-Von Braun) days.

PS I actually did know personally (how else? ) the Rocketdyne people that did it. I mean I knew them much later in their careers .

Fuck you, cracker. You can look it up. Jealous of Alabam?

They may like this too: When von Braun finally got some authority over the US rocket programs and started building rockets that didn't fall over or blow up on launch, the rest of the US space establishment ( such as it was) started calling his Marshall operation the 'Chicago Bridge & Iron Works' for what everyone but Marshall saw as Von Braun's absurdly conservative over-engineered structures.They did however function and survive in flight which was not a prominent feature of our rockets to that time. That conservatism in making the Saturn V structure much stronger with cross-bracing and a central structural member that others argued were unneeded allowed Marshall at the last moment to add that fifth F1 engine in the center that let the whole thing carry out the Apollo mission, a hairily close-run thing from the standpoints of mass, survivability of the LM, etc.

So warning in advance: this is strictly for nerds. From the Apollo 11 flight journal: http://history.nasa.gov/ap11fj/01launch.htm PAO: We're through the region of maximum dynamic pressure now. [As it flies through the air, the rocket must withstand an aerodynamic pressure imparted by its speed through the molecules of the atmosphere. This is like the pressure felt on a hand stuck out of the window of a fast-travelling car. In the rocketry situation, two things are happening to vary this pressure: the vehicle's rising speed makes it higher; the rapidly thinning atmosphere brings it down. The interaction of these two variables leads to a point in the ascent when the aerodynamic pressure, denoted by the letter 'Q', reaches a peak. This is known as Max-Q and is the point when weaknesses in the rocket's structure are most likely to be found out. It occurs at 1 minute and 23 seconds into the flight.] My only value-add is the boldfacing above.

In 2005 I stayed a week at the Mandarin Oriental in Shanghai. With the hotel's full knowledge and approval there were a bevy of working girls for sale, very explicitly, in the basement bar every night. Prostitution is a well entrenched and openly accepted part of life in all the coastal Chinese cities. (I know nothing of the interior.) I was so taken with these girls that I did not look into the boy scene so I cannot advise Oz here!

Now you shattered my illusions.

LMAO Scientists Say To Let Farts Fly On Airplanes http://blog.sleepinginairports.net/2013/02/18/scientists-say-to-let-farts-fly-on-airplanes/

Happy 10th anniversary to this forum and site! In a fruitcake coma after the holidays, we let Jan. 6 slip by unremarked. That was (right?) the day in 2006 when this site went live, under the name maleescortreview.com. THANK YOU, OZ! The community your platform makes possible is invaluable to many of us. And thanks to long-serving TampaYankee for moderating and helping the forum take flight. Here's to the next ten!

Another bad one...

Also note that Boston recently withdrew its bid because of not wanting the cost, the disruption, nor the useless infrastructure left behind.