Posted on 04/15/2016 5:23:58 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Barbara Short was my aunt. She and the crew of “gunners’ at Ames Research Center did much to make the.moon missions possible. They did so much of it with 20 inch slide rules and pencil and paper
Thank you for sharing your stories as well.
Well, cool!
Dude NASA and the astronauts said they got cold. Why would they lie? It's just a good a story if they got too hot...in fact a better story because then there would have been the danger of them dying from heat stroke or dehydration.
I think the bottom line is that they designed the craft in such a way that it wouldn't get hot enough or cold enough to kill them in 3 days or less in case they lost power. Just a guess but it makes sense.
You’re a hoot.
Glad I don’t have to deal with you on a daily basis though.
Wow.
Every bit of your post has left me speechless.
Radiation is enormously effective at getting rid of heat.
Ever notice how cool it gets outside when there are no clouds? And how fast it can happen?
Infrared radiation.
Heat loss by radiation greater than heat gain from external radiating sources. So, the temperature dropped. It’s been a long time since I did any calculations with Stefan-Boltzmann, so I’m not going to do it now. But that’s the starting point.
I don't know why they would lie. "They" are the government - I probably literally couldn't imagine all the reasons why they would lie. Bottom line is that "they" don't want "us" thinking the astronauts need to keep cool in space. "They" want us to think space is cold. Why? I have no idea why. It's totally bizarre, and I just find it irritating that such a fundamental issue would be lied about when there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Like you, I figure the spacecraft could probably radiate away enough heat for three days to keep them alive - after all, they lived. So why not just admit that? Why not make a movie where they just sweat? The whole thing is stupid.
Yeah, and convection. The atmosphere is eight miles thick. It tends to have an effect on heat loss that is just a tad different than the vacuum of space, even without clouds.
Actually, the starting point is the existence of the heat-pump cooling ECS system, which wouldn't exist if NASA hadn't previously determined that more heat was being generated than could be radiated safely on its own. But thanks for playing.
Thank you for sharing, too. High five to the rocket engineers.
“They did so much of it with 20 inch slide rules and pencil and paper.” True. It is humbling to realize how your aunt and my father were prepared by college to draft plans for courageous pilots to fly beyond the sound barrier. Amazing stories from Los Angeles.
Likewise.
Let me preface this with a bit of background. My career is over 25 years of designing and analyzing active and passive thermal control systems for both manned and unmanned spacecraft.
The NASA report is accurate. Both the capsule and the orbiter were designed to maintain temperature through active and passive methods.
It is not too difficult to passively maintain a spacecraft at temperatures of 38 F for a few hundred watts of heat from 3 astronauts. Also, the mass of the craft is such that it would take a while for it to warm up or cool down.
I could go into more detail, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
“Actually, the starting point is the existence of the heat-pump cooling ECS system, which wouldn’t exist if NASA hadn’t previously determined that more heat was being generated than could be radiated safely on its own.”
The command module and lunar module guidance computers consumed 140W of power total (that would throw off an amount of heat similar to 1 1/2 astronauts).
Also, the computers were made entirely of 3 input NOR gates. There is *probably* a relatively specific temperature range where the computer would operate safely. These gates were wired together by wire wrap and packaged in epoxy. Overall, it ran at 43KHz which isn’t exactly “slow” for 1960s RTL logic gates.
I am pretty sure they were quite worried about consistent electrical propagation delays and the like after reading a bit more about the guidance computer. If the computer were to get too hot, the guidance system could become unstable.
That could explain the need for such a relatively *aggressive* refrigeration system ... the computer *might* have required a rather strict ambient temperature range to function properly and engineers were fairly worried about the accumulation of heat with three astronauts and two computers. Better to be safe than sorry.
Well, then, since I’m wrong, the only solutions must be that a) NASA lied about the temperature, or 2) the whole flight was faked, and by amateurs at that. You should look into it.
It was a very different set of students in those days. My aunt went to UC Berkley and many of her class mates were the guys who came home after the war and used their GI Bill to go to school
She was a Mech E major. Never her occurred to her to cry about discrimination. All she ever did was work hard.
To me the most amazing thing was how humble she and her fellow engineers were. They ere just doing their jobs nothing special about them ( their view not mine)
Why should I bother when you can just do some "calculations with Stefan-Boltzmann" and get back to us on it?
"The trip was marked by discomfort beyond the lack of food and water. Sleep was almost impossible because of the cold. When the electrical systems were turned off, the spacecraft lost an important source of heat. The temperature dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit and condensation formed on all the walls. "
I’ve seen on other threads where you think the moon landings were faked. Bizarre.
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