Friday, October 15, 2004
Quote of the Day - Spaceflight and Inner Tubes
"There’s two ways we could have got to the moon. The way everybody assumed it would be done in the ‘40s and ‘50s was the piece-by-piece approach. Develop a vehicle something like the VentureStar, an SSTO, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Start putting hardware and people into orbit. Build a space station. It could be huge by now if we’d started in 1958. Then build your moonship in orbit. Make it a ship like the Lunar Excursion Module, in that it will never land on Earth, but not like the Lunar Excursion Module in that you don’t throw it away after you’ve used it once. It returns to Earth’s orbit, refuels, and goes right back to the moon with more people. More people, because right there, right from the very first flight, we would have been on the moon to stay. Put up some shelters on the first landing, stay there a week or so. Your moonships start regular trips back and forth. In a couple years you’ve got a decent colony, a few hundred people. By about 1990 you’re sending people to Mars, by 2000 you’ve got ships on the way to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.
“That’s the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958.”
Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.
“But there was another way to get to the moon. You’ve heard of ‘fast, cheap and dirty?’ Call this the von Braun plan, fast, very expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there on December thirty-first, 1969.
“Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it’s his biggest ship. Come to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World… but his third ship can’t land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic… and at the Straits of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his shoulders.”
- John Varley, Red Thunder
“That’s the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958.”
Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.
“But there was another way to get to the moon. You’ve heard of ‘fast, cheap and dirty?’ Call this the von Braun plan, fast, very expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there on December thirty-first, 1969.
“Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it’s his biggest ship. Come to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World… but his third ship can’t land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic… and at the Straits of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his shoulders.”
- John Varley, Red Thunder
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