Under a ``waste anything but time'' mandate, yeah, you can speed things up a touch. But there are trade-offs: the budget requirements killed off pretty near every other project not convincingly related to the lunar landing missions, and even lunar science operations were reduced to scouting missions for Apollo. The system designed was hugely optimized to very short landing missions, so that really excessively risky gimmicks were required just for the three-day, three-EVA lunar missions. For example, the fuel reserve for the nominal mission for the later flights was technically speaking negative (as certain mission points were reached, fuel required for contingencies was freed up to the ``nominal mission'' budget and so a safety margin was created along the way). That's a clearly insane mission plan justified only by rushing.
And then in trade the Apollo capsule designed was not a satisfying fit for its Earth-orbit missions: it couldn't be launched with full fuel reserves on the Saturn I-B booster, even for the Skylab or Apollo-Soyuz missions where fuel reserve or higher orbits would have practical value. (And again the budget constraints were crippling to both missions: Apollo-Soyuz was unable to use the newer model Service Modules with earth-observing sensors in the new sensor bay, because there was no money for that.)
Also crippling to Apollo's continuing operations and to Shuttle's operations was the rush to build something, without the necessary cycles of design, testing, re-design, re-testing, and so on, until better techniques for everything from the heat shield to the computers could be developed. There's no guarantee that the Orion is going to take advantage of the time to make a better design, but without the time they certainly can't.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-02-14 08:22 am (UTC)Under a ``waste anything but time'' mandate, yeah, you can speed things up a touch. But there are trade-offs: the budget requirements killed off pretty near every other project not convincingly related to the lunar landing missions, and even lunar science operations were reduced to scouting missions for Apollo. The system designed was hugely optimized to very short landing missions, so that really excessively risky gimmicks were required just for the three-day, three-EVA lunar missions. For example, the fuel reserve for the nominal mission for the later flights was technically speaking negative (as certain mission points were reached, fuel required for contingencies was freed up to the ``nominal mission'' budget and so a safety margin was created along the way). That's a clearly insane mission plan justified only by rushing.
And then in trade the Apollo capsule designed was not a satisfying fit for its Earth-orbit missions: it couldn't be launched with full fuel reserves on the Saturn I-B booster, even for the Skylab or Apollo-Soyuz missions where fuel reserve or higher orbits would have practical value. (And again the budget constraints were crippling to both missions: Apollo-Soyuz was unable to use the newer model Service Modules with earth-observing sensors in the new sensor bay, because there was no money for that.)
Also crippling to Apollo's continuing operations and to Shuttle's operations was the rush to build something, without the necessary cycles of design, testing, re-design, re-testing, and so on, until better techniques for everything from the heat shield to the computers could be developed. There's no guarantee that the Orion is going to take advantage of the time to make a better design, but without the time they certainly can't.