The President's Space Initiative Speech

"Bob Noel" wrote in message
...
In article . net,
"Mike Rapoport" wrote:

"Bob Noel" wrote in message
...
In article .net,
"Mike Rapoport" wrote:

No, you have it backwards. The Apollo program happened when all the
technologies were in place. It USED technology, same with the space
shuttle.

um, *all* technology used already existed? Nothing new had to
be developed?

--
Bob Noel

There are always new things being developed over a time span as long as
the
lunar program, but if a request goes out for a special grease and dupont
supplies one with teflon, is that "developed" by the space program? The
liquid fuel rocket technology was developed in Germany in WWII and
further
refined for military use. To reach Mars we need at least the aerospike
rocket engine or preferably a nuclear powerd rocket, the chemical fuels
we
use now just don't have the energy density to reach Mars efficiently.

except that even the liquid fuel rocket technology was not
"in place" for Apollo. A huge amount of work went into
refining/improving and extending the technology so that
something as huge at the Saturn V could be built. It wasn't
merely a matter of building something a little bigger than
the Titan II.

Integrated circuit technology was not in place and had to be developed for
Apollo. (I was at the MIT Instrumentation Labs at the time). In fact a 4
flip-flop counter chip was really advanced and people didn't even know if
they would wear out after say, a trillion cycles. They did track down
causes of bad chips and as I recall the gal who wrote the report said yield
would increase dramatically "if they would just keep their big, greasy hands
off the wafers." This sort of thing had to be discovered and learned.
But IC technology one just one of thousands of areas where the same thing
was going on. The Mars program will yield the same shower of byproducts,
jobs, new companies, etc.