31–40 of 51 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just imagine how much good that could be accomplished if the time spent simply on meaningless snark about photo-sharing apps was instead productively deployed.
Just imagine how much good that could be accomplished if the time spent simply on meaningless comment on meaningless snark about photo-sharing apps was instead productively deployed.
I'd love to learn more about the Emergency Egress System described on pg192. It seems to me the chances of reaching the rubber vestibule or the coil-spring-cushioned blast room are fairly slim.
I can't remember why, but I've had the 1968 version of this flight manual on my hard drive for a while. My version is much higher quality. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8iAUeIURaT8ZS1PbTlMTjlCams...
It is absolutely crazy to think about how NASA got to the moon in freakin' 1969. Ten years ago, we didn't have FB, YouTube, widespread WiFi, flatscreen TVs, smartphones, LTE... That we landed a spaceship on the moon 4.5 times longer ago (45 years) when the state of the art was a photocopy machine is truly mindblowing.
And there were people alive at the time who remembered the airplane being invented. Today, we can tell astounding stories to our snapchatting kids of the time when men walked on the moon.
That pilot had started his career on biplanes and ended it (in a crash, unfortunately) flying F-4 Phantom Jets (Commonly called Third generation Jets).
In my mind these eras of flight have been so ... seperated that I could not really imagine one man flying basically such a wide range of technology (and of course, he saw the moon landings).
It is absolutely crazy to think about how NASA got to the moon in freakin' 1969. Ten years ago, we didn't have FB, YouTube, widespread WiFi, flatscreen TVs, smartphones, LTE... That we landed a spaceship on the moon 4.5 times longer ago (45 years) when the state of the art was a photocopy machine is truly mindblowing.
And there were people alive at the time who remembered the airplane being invented. Today, we can tell astounding stories to our snapchatting kids of the time when men walked on the moon.
My Dad told me that his first airplane ride was as a kid when a barnstormer put on a show at his town in Utah. The pilot/showman took him up in his Jenny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_JN-4
The kicker is that Dad told me this when he, Mom, and I were at flight level 350 about halfway to Hawaii for their 61st wedding anniversary, flying in a Boeing 757.
From an iffy ragwing biplane to a routine miracle world-spanning machine in his lifetime. Wonder if I'll get to see the equivalent of 757 service to Mars before I shuffle off...
I can't remember why, but I've had the 1968 version of this flight manual on my hard drive for a while. My version is much higher quality. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8iAUeIURaT8ZS1PbTlMTjlCams...
This is excellent. I would love to have a bound version of this to sit on my desk as a conversation piece.
(regarding the flight computers)
The powered flight major loop contains guidance and navigation calculations,
timekeeping, and all repetitive functions which do not occur on an interrupt
basis.
The minor loop contains the platform gimbal angle and accelerometer sampling
routines and control system computations. Since the minor loop is involved
with vehicle control, minor loop computations are executed at the rate of 25
times per second during the powered phase of flight. However, in earth
orbit, a rate of only ten executions per second is required for satisfactory
vehicle control.
The execution time for any given major loop, complete with minor loop
computations and interrupts, is not fixed.
The high bay area which is located in the northern section of the building,
is approximately 525 feet high, 518 feet wide, and 442 feet long. It
contains four checkout bays, each capable of accommodating a fully
assembled, Saturn V space vehicle.
Each pair of opposite checkout bays is served by a 250-ton bridge crane with
a hook height of 462 feet.It is absolutely crazy to think about how NASA got to the moon in freakin' 1969. Ten years ago, we didn't have FB, YouTube, widespread WiFi, flatscreen TVs, smartphones, LTE... That we landed a spaceship on the moon 4.5 times longer ago (45 years) when the state of the art was a photocopy machine is truly mindblowing.
Consider in 1969--much less going back to when many of the design decisions were made. (And by "no" here, I mean no in anything approaching mainstream.) No electronic calculators, just barely color television, mostly rotary dial telephones. Moore's Law had only recently been coined. No PCs of course. No Internet in any meaningful sense.
But color TV had been widely available for about a decade. In fact, I watched the 1969 moon landings on my parents 1961 color Zenith. (They had rotary phone well into the 80s, however.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider in 1969--much less going back to when many of the design decisions were made. (And by "no" here, I mean no in anything approaching mainstream.) No electronic calculators, just barely color television, mostly rotary dial telephones. Moore's Law had only recently been coined. No PCs of course. No Internet in any meaningful sense.
All of what you say is true, however it's not as bad as you might think. Once upon a time were these magical devices called "mainframes" [1], and in the 1960s they were quite powerful (for that era). Most engineering work was done in FORTRAN, and it ran very efficiently on the hardware. There were (usually) no CPU cycle sucking GUIs to slow down the computers. As a high school student in the early 1970s I was privile…