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Henry Spencer
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NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.
- Henry Spencer
#Capable
#Down
#Finding
#Never
#People
My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research.
- Henry Spencer
#Easy
#Look
#Money
#Project
#Research
Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots.
- Henry Spencer
#Better
#Exploration
#Important
#Robots
#Simply
#Space
Speaking of photography, while the Apollo 8 crew shot hundreds of photos, there was one that got everybody's attention: a blue-and-white Earth rising over a gray moonscape.
- Henry Spencer
#Attention
#Crew
#Earth
#Rising
#Shot
In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.
- Henry Spencer
#Better
#Group
#Medical
#Through
#Well
Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time.
- Henry Spencer
#First Time
#First
#Test
#Testing
#Time
One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test.
- Henry Spencer
#Before
#Start
#Test
#Things
#Trying
Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.
- Henry Spencer
#Chance
#Escape
#Sometimes
#System
#Test
SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing.
- Henry Spencer
#Bad Luck
#Bad
#First
#Luck
#Three
Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection.
- Henry Spencer
#Always
#Back
#Expensive
#Rocket
#Wrong
Testing a parachute drop of a heavy object is not simple.
- Henry Spencer
#Drop
#Heavy
#Parachute
#Simple
#Testing
Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets.
- Henry Spencer
#About
#Beginnings
#First
#Least
#Rockets
Trying to build a spaceship by making an aeroplane fly faster and higher is like trying to build an aeroplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed.
- Henry Spencer
#Effort
#Fly
#Right
#Trying
#Way
The original specifications for Apollo navigation called for the ability to fly a complete mission, including a lunar landing, with no help from Earth - none, not even voice communications.
- Henry Spencer
#Ability
#Earth
#Fly
#Mission
#Voice
The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion.
- Henry Spencer
#Death
#Dream
#End
#Illusion
#Just
In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this.
- Henry Spencer
#Impossible
#Long
#Progress
#Sometimes
Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along.
- Henry Spencer
#Air
#People
#Sometimes
#Space
#Why
Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.
- Henry Spencer
#More
#Rockets
#Serious
#Solid
#Space
The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.
- Henry Spencer
#Escape
#Space
#Tower
#Up
#Will
Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time.
- Henry Spencer
#Back
#First Time
#Perfect
#Space
#Time
Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap.
- Henry Spencer
#Cheap
#Earth
#Hard
#Moon
#Space
Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try.
- Henry Spencer
#Avoid
#Failure
#Progress
#Setbacks
#Try
#Way
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