Artemis Completes its Lunar Mission

The latest edition of MEW No.324 has a one page article on the Artemis 1 Lunar Mission with NASA's Orion spacecraft.

When you sit and think of all the work involved in the mission, designing, building, proving and then sending the spacecraft out and bringing it back so successfully, and what the mission involved, what a stunning achievement and what brilliant feat of engineering that was.

Not exactly model engineering in the workshop perhaps, but very grateful and pleased that such an article was included in MEW.

The only thing that amuses me, for want of a better phrase, is that at the conclusion of the mission, after all that technical expertise so briliiantly demonstrated, what happens at the very end is that the spacecraft still just splashes down into the ocean by parachute.

Talk about a basic anticlimax end to the misssion! Like they haven't got round to thinking about that bit yet, not changed in 60 odd years; I guess they will get round to improving/updating that in due course.

Chris

Chris

You need to look at this then.

**LINK**

You can even see one in the space museum Leicester.

https://spacecentre.co.uk/blog-post/returning-earth-without-splash/

Edited By Buffer on 19/01/2023 13:25:20

I temember seeing one of the early manned capsules in the science museum in Kensington.

i was born in 1953 so it was 1965, probably before.

You know how kids think everything look big?

I thought it looked very small.

If the astronaut had farted he would have to have breathed in first or there would not have been room for the fart.

And to escape gravity they've got to put that dinky little thing on the top of a huge rocket and make it tough enough to survive re-entry

If they could I think Elf and Safety would ban spaceflight, you can't even go up a ladder and clean a window nowadays

Hi, this Apollo Capsule was in the London Science Museum in 2012, apparently it took 500 million man-hours to develop.

Regards Nick.

Come on be fair they have not banned cleaning windows either.

Thing is, how else would you do it? Other options involve taking more fuel and more rocket engines into space, which would vastly reduce the available pay load of the launch vehicle.

Parachuting onto water is probably the easiest, the most gentle* and most cost effective option

*water is hard when hit at speed, but not as hard as land is !

I think something like a giant lacrosse racket fixed the the front of a Globe Master and catch it as it falls. 

Edited By duncan webster on 20/01/2023 00:43:46

John Doe 2 - the point I was making there was that they had developed all this clever stuff, really clever stuff, I can't even really comprehend how clever the design and engineering is to achieve it all, getting the damn thing up into space, sending it to wherever, talking and directiing it all the way there and back - and then when they have it back in the Earth's atmosphere they just dunk it in the ocean, like we can't be bothered to design some really clever solution to getting it to come down exactly where we want on some space airfield or whatever. It's like not a complete job being done.

Cost effective it may be - though how much does the pick up ship etc cost to get it back to dry land, but not the most convienent and complete solution surely?

Chris

Edited By ChrisH on 20/01/2023 22:47:31