Apollo astronaut Frank Borman has died
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Apollo 11 was when we first arrived somewhere new, yes, but it was Apollo 8 when we first dared to venture out into the dark. For the first time we surrendered the ability to quickly return to Earth in a matter of minutes or low-single-digit hours.
Collins’ autobiography Carrying the Fire is easily the best of the astronaut memoirs, and is written purely by Collins without a ghostwriter. It wasn’t one of the talents NASA was looking for, but I’m glad they sent an excellent writer to the moon.
Also, I'll add that apparently Charles Lindbergh spoke with Jim Lovell at the 11 launch and also expressed that, in his mind, the most significant leap was also 8, which I have sympathy for. There's something about being on that spacecraft for the first TLI, having nothing but the math to trust, that is deeply exhilerating, incredibly scary, and awe-inspiring.
Thinking about Frank Borman being alive and well and still flying his plane has been a favourite thought for me, and I'm very sad to have to retire it.
"When Shepard was grounded in October 1963, Grissom and Borman became the prime crew of Gemini 3.[41] Grissom invited Borman to his house to talk to him about the mission, and after a long discussion, decided that he could not work with Borman.[34] According to Gene Cernan, "the egos of Grissom and Borman were too big to fit into a single spacecraft".[44] Slayton therefore replaced Borman with John Young.[41]
Slayton still wanted Borman for the two-week flight [...] so Borman was assigned as backup commander of Gemini 4, with Jim Lovell as his co-pilot. [...] Prime and backup crews trained for the mission together, and Borman found the experience as a backup valuable, amounting to a dress rehearsal of their own mission.[49]
This I wish was (still?) acceptable. It's like somewhere along the way we decided that everyone must be able to cooperate effectively and efficiently with everyone, and largely (do our very best to) ignore all the problems that brings.
I've only been at one company where they tried to address this, and actually let us form our own teams. It worked better than expected.
... is not the same as refusing to work with someone in an office doing low-stakes work.
That said, humans cooperate better when they get along, but the lines are in totally different places and the degree to which character differences matter in those two settings is radically different too.
Assembling a team, I would take care to pick people who get along, just to lower day-to-day friction. But if two people can't leave some of their emotional baggage at the door to write some code ... well, they need help frankly.
The office isn't and shouldn't be a high enough stress environment that character flaws are involuntarily amplified, therefore different rules of thumb apply.
Be an adult.
Funny. That was the EXACT advice / instruction we got from management when I was in such a team. It had already been going on for years when I went there, to the point where half of the team (the ones not involved in the clashes) rotated out on a yearly basis.
For me, Borman and his crewmates never quite got the kudos they deserved.
A true loss.
It’s worse than that. Indiana named a horrible stretch of perpetually under construction interstate after him.
Launch date November 16, 2022, 06:47:44 UTC (1:47 am EST)
"Artemis 1 was outlined by NASA as Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) in 2012, at which point it was set to launch in 2017"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_2
"Launch date During preliminary reviews in 2011, the launch date was placed somewhere between 2019 and 2021, but afterwards the launch date was delayed to 2023 on an SLS launch vehicle.[25][26] Although, as of March 2023, the mission is pegged for a November 2024 launch,[1] the need to recycle and refurbish components from Orion that flew on Artemis 1 may push this back to later in 2024 or the first quarter of 2025"
I'm getting older just reading it
Today just development of the SLS has been going for as long as the 11 years of Apollo program. We have exactly one uncrewed test launch to show for it, with another not planned for 24 months later (next November) and a landing looking like 2028 at the earliest and no reason to think it won't be delayed.
Looks like about 7 years until the expected number of moon walkers drops below 1.0.
2025-2026 if everything goes to plan at NASA
The Chinese also announced that they will be attempting to build a lunar base with Russia, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, South Africa, UAE, and Belarus by 2035.
I'm curious what JAXA, ESA, and ISRO are going to try with regards to human space flight. I know JAXA and ISRO work very closely with each other, but seem to be much more probe and rocket driven for financial reasons.
there's a reason that there are launch sites in French Guiana and Florida.
It’s far from population centers, though (1), so it would require building/growing a city for personnel to live. It also appears to be swampy (not a show stopper, as Florida shows, but not ideal, either), and it has monsoons, so the weather may be a showstopper.
I also would be worried about political stability of the country.
(1) Apple Maps shows Tucupita as about the only thing near that coast. It’s about 100km away and, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucupita has a population of less than 100,000.
I think it's awesome to see previously neglected nations beginning to be able to take part in major space programs. They also come with unique benefits. Like somebody else mentioned, for one thing Venezuela is in a dream scenario for launches. Eastern exposure to the ocean and substantially closer to the equator than e.g. Florida. This means ships taking off from there are able to more optimally sort of 'sling shot' off of Earth's rotation - the Earth rotates Eastward, and fastest at the equator. Same reason that in Andy Weir's Artemis novel, Kenya ended up being a world leader in space. And there's no logical reason this wouldn't happen. Countries can be developed, but they can't be moved.
> Any achievement they did make was... stolen from somebody else. Yet now their successes in space, industry, science, and technology are completely taken for granted.
Many nations "bootstrap" internal industry with organized mass IP theft. The US extensively (and quite intentionally) stole from Britain's industrial IP, for instance.
At the end of WWII, not only the Soviet Union has moved piece by piece many industrial factories from Germany to Russia, but also USA and GB have "stolen" massive amounts of IP from the occupied Germany.
One of the most notorious cases in how the American industry of making magnetic tape recorders (e.g. Ampex) and of making magnetic tapes for them has been founded based on the samples brought back from Germany.
The case of the liquid-fueled rockets directly connected to this Apollo story needs no further mention.
Whenever they could get away with it, no country has refrained from copying foreign better technology.
While there in no doubt that China must have done this frequently in the past, in recent years there are little chances for them to benefit from this, because now in many domains their products are much more innovative than anything made in USA, and also in research publications they have many that are also more innovative.
I do not believe that sabotaging the Chinese companies that were on the brink to take most of the market share from US companies like Qualcomm and Micron has been the right strategy for counteracting the Chinese threat.
This is just a temporary setback for them and there is the risk that they could emerge from it stronger, no longer fearing any US blackmail.
This should have been either saved for a more critical moment, when it could have a greater effect, or the so-called "sanctions" should have been real sanctions, and not just anti-competitive measures, i.e. they should have been tied to some political demands made to China, e.g. to recognize Taiwan as an independent country, or to give up their claims to extend their maritime borders.
Not just the Soviet Union. The USA also moved factories piece by piece.[0]
The reverse example occurred during inter-war period, when US companies extensively outsourced to (cheap labor in) Germany. The US companies who exported their factories all made huge profit on paper, which promptly evaporated the moment war broke out. A lesson for the modern age, perhaps?
They've made a lot of progress but still lag behind in these fundamental areas, for example bulk, precise fabrication of exotic materials for more complex items (jet engines). There is an enormous gap between having the specifics of the design and implementing it effectively when it comes to advanced fabs. There is a bit of 'arcane magic' to it unfortunately.
>I do not believe that sabotaging the Chinese companies that were on the brink to take most of the market share from US companies like Qualcomm and Micron has been the right strategy for counteracting the Chinese threat.
I knew a lawyer in DC who was part of a defense team for a US aerospace company accused of assisting China with their missile and space program. Among the things he learned were: 1) China is working pretty hard on improving its technology without necessarily relying on tech transfers (although they still at the time required certain Western machining tools), 2) sincerely concerned US members of Congress have no understanding of the technologies involved so they messed it all up and 3) there are many who are not so sincere and are just grandstanding and most importantly 4) it's never going to be a matter of stopping China's progress, just a matter of saying a couple of years ahead of them (ie. does it matter if they have 7nm chips when we have been using them for a decade already?)
Ever heard of Poland? It moved quite a lot.
Highlighting international cooperation with Japan, UK, Germany, France, etc is a massive PR coup
Edit: they signed the Artemis Accords, not part of the Artemis Program
If we are lucky it will be before 2030.
I'd say that if everything goes perfectly from this point onwards, 2026 might see the uncrewed test of the system and maybe a crewed landing by 2028.
Similarly with Blue Origin's HLS, maybe New Glenn finally flies in 2024, but they too have so many steps to prove out first. JAXA and ISRO IIRC have seats on a future Artemis crewed mission, which would probably be how they get their first boots on the Moon. ISRO would probably be too busy with its LEO station at that point to make a crewed lunar lander, but JAXA and ISRO would most likely contribute with base components or related (rovers, orbital infrastructure).
The Chinese plans for a lunar base by 2035 are essentially imaginary in terms of partnerships, particularly since of them, China is the only one with any worthwhile space program (the Russian program being in steep decline and would be lucky to even pull off a proper ISS replacement by 2035 let alone a worthwhile contribution to a lunar base).
Idk.
The Russian program seems to be weaker at operationalizing in 2023 but still has a lot of IP from the USSR era.
China is making massive strides but doesn't seem to have as deep IP experience yet.
Imo I wouldn't oversell the Chinese and undersell the Russians.
> JAXA and ISRO would most likely contribute with base components or related
That tracks, and fits with their specialities.
Also, I didn't realize JAXA, ESA, and ISRO are part of Artemis. NASA needs to have a better PR team. The Chinese Lunar Base is getting so much PR despite being much more behind Artemis
Edit: they signed the Artemis accords, they are not part of the similarly named Artemis Program
JAXA, ESA are considered partners on the Artemis program (at least based on Wikipedia, there does not seem to be an explicit list of partners on NASA's site), they're training astronauts to eventually be sent to the Moon in a similar arrangement as with the ISS. JAXA and ESA (along with the Canadian Space Agency) are also contributing various key components for the Gateway space station. Plus, the ESA is an important player with the Orion capsule which Congress-critters seem committed to forcing to be the center of the program regardless of technical and financial sense.
As for ISRO, I think I mixed things up a little. I think I had heard talk about the potential for an arrangement to fly a vyomanaut to the ISS on Dragon, assumed that it was about the agreement having been made and then mixed it up with Artemis. Turns out none of that was real, there does not appear to be any talk of sending an vyomanaut to the ISS.
Artemis Program - Land on the moon and make a habitation station
Artemis Accords - A global legal agreement on Space Exploraration and Research.
The naming is confusing (and I think partially done on purpose)
Can't be in very bad shape.
I only know this because he worked at my company. And I only found that out the day after he died. A little sad I never got to meet him.
"There's no question that it was a coffin, and I'd have flown it gladly."
Amazing when "the office" might kill you.
Read "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut",[1] from someone who quit the program because the part about becoming a fighter jock was too dangerous. Four US astronauts died in jet aircraft accidents in the 1960s.[2]
[1] https://archive.org/details/makingofexastron0000unse/page/16...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
Maybe it was like season 1 of a TV show where you gotta give it a few shots.
The book "A Man on the Moon" was quite well written though, and some day I may read "failure is not an option".
Might try to find some time to spike a GPT or something and see what happens.
Adding that to my will:
- under zero circumstances will you publish any posthumous docs/writings/obituaries to Meta, Facebook, or anything bearing Zuckerberg’s name
- all to be made available publicly, any fees associated to be paid out of estate
Obituaries are more for the living to help with the grieving process. When my grandparents passed, I think my parents and extended family wrote something and submitted that to the local newspaper.
In a way, it’s always been like that. I guess.
* Two of its three astronauts became CEOs of Fortune 500 companies: Borman at Eastern Airlines, and William Anders at General Dynamics. (The third, Jim Lovell, stayed with NASA and survived the Apollo 13 explosion.)
* Borman (command pilot) and Lovell (pilot) had flown together on Gemini. Borman again commanded Apollo 8, despite Lovell having more experience in space as he had flown again on Gemini as commander.
I’m going to be pissed if I don’t get to see somebody walk on the Moon again before I die.
Apollo
The "A" could symbolize a rocket, the both "o" would stand for earth and moon (also in the official logo), the "ll" could represent break lines, symbolizing the vast distance between the two bodies and "p" could mean impulse (like the symbol in physics) or propulsion which brings the rocket from one place to the other.
is anything that good ever going to happen again? often these days i think not.
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon he considered the job done. He thought they had beaten the Russians to the moon and why would anybody want to go back?
He was devoted to his wife, who suffered from addictions due to the frazzled life of her husband's career.
A general problem with all such claims is establishing that without the space program, the technologies would never have been invented.
It's a decently long list, though not all of them from Apollo obviously.
Another problem is the transition from "NASA was involved with this technology somehow" to "NASA is entirely responsible for this technology".
Behind all this is the presumption that technological advancement is limited by the availability of inventions rather than the availability of markets.
There are a few that are completely space dependant however, like GPS, orbital weather monitoring, communications, satelite imagery, knowledge about other planets, etc. the kind of thing that has space travel as a prerequisite. Before GNSS and satelite maps navigation was pretty much hell, detecting tropical cyclones early and evacuating has certainly saved a lot of lives.
Of course if NASA hadn't done these, then ESA or Roscosmos or whoever would've, but in terms of argument I think we're talking about space agencies in general.
This is one of the biggest advantages of spending lots of money on ambitious projects. It has the potential to creates a market where none currently exists, because the market doesn't realize there is potential. Also, there are situations where the barriers to entry are so high, and the potential risk so great, that no private investment would likely have ever done it.