Buzz Aldrin thesis: Line-of-sight guidance for manned orbital rendezvous (1963) | Hacker News Reader

Buzz Aldrin thesis: Line-of-sight guidance for manned orbital rendezvous (1963)

dspace.mit.edu

88 pointsstmw19 comments

Dr. Aldrin's intellectual contributions to manned spaceflight are unfortunately overlooked. He was known as “Doctor Rendezvous”, and he didn't just fly orbital rendezvous missions, he actually helped invent the techniques and then got to demonstrate them on orbit.

Buzz is my hero. He does not deserve to be in Neil Armstrong's shadow.

He isn’t really in Neil Armstrong’s shadow because he chose to be a highly public figure and Armstrong retreated to a private life. He is now much more of a celebrity with his punch and everything.

Indeed - the early astronauts' stick-and-rudder flying skills and physical and mental stamina get a lot of appreciation, less than their MIT rocket science PhD's that led to practical conclusions e.g.: "From the above conclusions, the first guiding rule for initiating the transition from the waiting orbit to the intercept trajectory can be formulated: Simply stay in the waiting orbit until the target reaches the angle 3 from the local vertical, then apply the nominal deltaV in the direction a."

I find this interesting, >Simply stay in the waiting orbit until the target reaches the angle 3 from the local vertical [...]

On terrestrial flight (airplanes) the standard approach to landing glidepath is 3°, while the standard rate turn is 3°/sec (a "two minute turn") — I wonder if 3 degrees is some magic value in flight dynamics, perhaps determined by our local (Eatths's) gravitational force (G).

/Acey

Disclaimer: I haven't read Buzz's thesis, so this is purely an off the cuff observation.

Under DEDICATION:

  In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country' s present and future manned space programs.
  If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors.

“In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country' s present and future manned space programs.

If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors.”

One hell of a postdoc.

Indeed - that dedication is one of my favorite parts of this whole thing

Wow! It is either an intentional sarcasm or Mr.Buzz is a 'know-it-all' like it was portrayed in the First Man movie.

Year of publication of this paper: 1963, as a result of work done in the Gemmy-nee program.

Apollo 7 (first crewed Apollo mission): 1968

Apollo 11 landing on the moon: 1969

I would suggest that Buzz was being quite sincere in this statement, with some hint of confidence that he actually would participate in the Apollo missions. The Gemini and Apollo programs were expected to be dangerous. There was no guarantee that people who participated in Gemini would even be alive for the Moon missions, much less physically capable of participating, much less the best people for the job.

My bad, since he joined NASA in 1963; I assumed he wrote it while trainin.

From reading a bunch of biographies from that time, I do get the feeling that buzz was a bit of a loud mouth asshole, but I don’t see Why you think that makes the dedication sarcastic? He wrote this well before he joined nasa

Off-topic, but if you were like me and confused why clicking the PDF link on that page downloaded the PDF instead of opening it in the browser, the problem is the "Content-Disposition: attachment" header which tells the browser to do this. As a result, I now have this add-on which gives users the option to ignore that header by file type: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-in-brows...

Who stole page 69?

My old boss who had some spooky jobs in the past (NSA, CIA) gave me a copy of a public paper from a researcher at one of those places. I noticed a page was missing from the body of the text. We were supposed to read parts of this paper to understand how to implement something but it felt like my boss was surprised I had noticed, as if he didn’t expect us to read fully. When I asked about the missing page he gave me a knowing smile and said “it’s not available” and contorted his mouth into an exaggerated mouth-clamped-shut position, all the time holding my eye for several seconds and smiling this very final “that’s all folks” look. I think sometime pages just go missing. And we may never know why.

They are testing a new machine learning algorithm to see if it can infer that page from the other pages.

Anyone got access to the original? Or an older print reproduction? I’ve seen enough poor quality old document scans in the nasa archives to chalk it up to mistakes, but without knowing what was on the page it’s hard to be sure.

Someone immature

I would be very disappointed if it was anything other than an undergrad prank. I hope someone has it framed in a frat house.

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