[ad_1]
On a bright Florida morning, a thin ice cylinder the size of a grain silo is suspended at a height of 10 meters above the ground. The frost began to form in the middle of the bright night when the Cape Kennedy technicians began filling the large tank at the top of the first stage of the Saturn V rocket with liquid oxygen, more than one million liters (260,000 gallons), at a temperature of minus 183 ° C (nearly 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero). The tank wall and the rocket skin were identical, so that the water vapor of the Atlantic humid atmosphere had immediately begun to freeze to extremely cold metal.
When oxygen was pumped, some of it boiled; The vents at the top of the tank let the steam out so that the pressure inside does not become too high. At 9:30, the vents were closed. Helium was pumped into the small space at the top of the tank. The pressure started to rise.
Below the oxygen tank was a slightly smaller tank filled with highly refined kerosene. Below, arranged like the dots on the five sides of a die, were the F-1 engines on which the success of the entire Moon project was based: extraordinarily designed, artfully crafted, ridiculously powerful.
Adapted from The moon: a story for the future, by Oliver Morton. Buy on Amazon.
L & # 39; economist
Two minutes after sealing the vents, a valve at the bottom of the upper tank opened and oxygen began to flow into the F-1's. It took two different routes. Part of it went to gas generators connected to turbines operating pumps. In the generators, it was mixed with kerosene and turned on. There was too much kerosene so that the oxygen flow not yet full could consume everything; the hot exhaust gases that the generators delivered to the turbines were dirty and black with partially burned fuel. That did not stop him from turning them around and giving life to the pumps.
The rest of the oxygen has entered the actual combustion chambers. There, he encountered the kerosene-rich exhaust gases coming out of the turbines, and the mixture was burned again. Black smoke started to flow from the bottom of the F-1 nozzles. The rocket started to shake. The pumps increased the flow of fuel and oxygen in the fires below.
A carefully choreographed dance of temperature and energy was in progress. The turbopumps used energy from the burned fuel in the generators to feed more and more fuel into the combustion chambers, but they sent a spiral detour through tubes wrapped around the engine nozzles. This cooled the nozzles, which otherwise would not have been able to withstand the heat to which they were subjected. He also warmed the fuel, which therefore burned even better when he finally reached the combustion chamber. The fuel also served as a lubricant for many moving engine parts, and the soot produced earlier allowed the nozzle's lower section to better protect itself from the heat of the flame that was developing there.
The pumps turned louder; the dance has accelerated. Five seconds after ignition, the fuel valves were fully open and, after about one second, the engines reached maximum thrust. The central engine reached its maximum power first, then the four outboard engines. The fuel mixture was now richer in oxygen, burning cleaner and less polluted, more powerful. One or two seconds after the last engine was started, the rocket was held on the ground by powerful pliers. Then he was released.
All rockets weighed a total of nearly 3,000 tonnes (about 3,300 tonnes). They carried their burden and started to get up. The five arms of the tower that stabilized and fed the rocket came back. The ice shell that hung on the super-cold metal fell into broken leaves in hell underneath.
The fires on which it was lifted were not fire jumping or licking or playing, fire or boiler fire. It was the concentrated fire of the metallurgist's torch, which was given life to a ladder to cut or weld worlds. The temperature in the chambers was above 3000 ° C (over 5000 ° F). The pressure was above 60 atmospheres. And yet the pumps, whose turbines ran 90 times per second, were powerful enough to inject more and more oxygen and fuel into hell. The flames fell on the fireplaces below, at a speed six times that of the sound. For five minutes, the five F-1s generated nearly 60 gigawatts of power. This is equivalent to the typical production of all the British power plants together.
It took ten seconds for the rocket to clean the tower. It took another ten seconds for the roar of his engines, louder than anything humans could have done before, to reach the VIP stands almost four miles away. Sixty ambassadors, half of Congress and about a quarter of American governors, watch with wonder, shaken by "a sound that becomes your body," as artist Robert Rauschenberg has said.
The roar lasted less than three minutes. But by the time the F-1s were silent, the rocket was moving at nearly 5,000 km / hour and nearly 400 km from Cape Kennedy. Apollo 11 was heading for the moon.
The ability to Building a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V was not only essential to Apollo's success; it was the idea on which the whole project was built. In 1961, when Kennedy hired his country to a landing on the moon, the Soviet Union was well ahead in the race for space. he had launched the first satellite and the first person into orbit. But the rockets she used to do, like those in America at the time, were essentially intercontinental ballistic missiles inflated to the surface. Although they were adapted to spaceflight better and faster than the Americans, they were not up to the task of getting to the moon. This would require a rocket designed to lift much larger objects than single capsules or nuclear warheads. If the challenge chosen as a measure of the superpower's courage required a whole new generation of rockets, the Soviet advantage would be minimized. Both superpowers would be competing from a stopped start.
The rocket engine on which America was betting was the mighty F-1. The question was how much to use. At one point, there was talk of a rocket called Nova that allegedly had eight of the beasts in its first leg and may have launched a spacecraft heavy enough to land on the moon and then return. The smaller Saturn V required a more subtle mission architecture. One possibility was to launch a Mooncraft capable of landing on the moon, returning to pieces and putting those pieces into orbit. The other had to have two different spacecraft, one to land on the moon and another to come back that would travel together. This reduced the amount of mass that had to descend to the moon and, above all, the amount that had to be brought back.
It is this architecture of lunar-in-orbit rendezvous that has prevailed. Its advantage was that each mission could be accomplished with a single launch of Saturn V. Its disadvantage was that it did not establish procedures or infrastructure for assembling objects in orbit. Before Apollo became a scramble rush, those who organized what they saw as the "conquest of space" imagined that the first step would be a space station to which a craft Space would be assembled to travel further. Apollo's orbital rendezvous version did not require such a thing. But that would have put in place the kind of procedures and infrastructure that could have created one. But with a rendezvous in lunar orbit, every Apollo mission would be a simple shot. Once they are finished, it would be in terms of material – even, to a certain extent, in terms of expertise – as if it had never happened.
Nobody worried about that at that time. They were doing something almost impossible – they were not worried about setting up the suite. Once they showed what they could do, they would do more. Of course they would do it. Why would not they? They would still jump on Mars. They would build space stations after reaching the moon rather than before – and cities in craters and new rockets powered by nuclear reactors and all of which the nascent space age would clearly need. Of course, they would not just go to the moon, look around, take note of the beauty of the earth, pick up rocks, go home and put everything away. It would be madness
The control module, a conical capsule for three people, was the principle of returning the architecture to lunar orbit. It was larger and more sophisticated than the previous space capsules and its heat shield was much more efficient, as the Moon's fallout on the atmosphere did so much faster than the fallout from a low Earth orbit. But it was still basically a capsule. The landing bit on the moon was the lunar module for two people (the LM, pronounced "lem"). it would take two of the three crewmen to surface and back up. It was more complicated than the direct climb because it required two maneuvers in orbit.
Kennedy sold Apollo "Serving to measure and organize the best of America's skills." The measure provided was immense. In 1967, he employed approximately 400,000 people through thousands of commercial and government entities. This accounted for 4% of government spending (and it was during the war). This pushed the best minds of the American aerospace to the extreme and required new ways of thinking and working across the continent – all over the world, when we considered the infrastructure telecommunication needed to track the trajectory of the spacecraft.
But it was so intimate. Lunar orbit rendezvous consisted in part of making the spacecraft that actually went on the Moon, the LM, as light as possible. In the initial specifications, it was to weigh only ten tonnes (11 tonnes). During development, he gained weight, despite the relentless attempts to stop and reverse the process. But it remained quite tiny. And thanks to the need to carry fuel, oxidant, life support, batteries, computers and more, the LM was significantly smaller both inside and out. The two astronauts had 4.7m3 (approximately 165 cubic feet) of volume under pressure between them. That's about double the volume of one of London's red phone booths.
Tiny. In addition, a world. Or, at least, a small piece of a pinched everything. The LM gave the astronauts food and water; he maintained their stable temperature; he protected them from meteorites. His guidance computer traced their future. Once the LM was separated from the control module, it had only Mother Earth left, except for radio voices: a two-man microcosmic planet.
A tiny world. But a fully operational spaceship too – engines, guidance, communications, batch. And one like none before. All the rest of Apollo had, to a certain extent, been tried on a smaller scale. Rockets had been fired with kerosene (in the first phase) and liquid hydrogen (in the second). There had been space capsules with heat shields for the return. But there was never anything like the LM, something designed to descend from space and land under its own power rather than under a parachute. Land with his eyes and his commander in a place where nothing had landed before.
And, although designed to land, also designed to always be in space. Previous spacecraft had had to transport their crews through the turbulent atmosphere and bring them back through the fire. The only duty of the LM in the atmosphere was to keep a very small pure oxygen compound contained in very thin aluminum walls (they flexed as the air pressure inside them changed). ). The LM does not need to be simplified and when the first driver of the LM, Rusty Schweickart, defuses the Apollo 9 LM of the Spider, control module, the Gumdrop control module, he is fully aware that the first vessel space to be built without a heat shield. . Stop again or die.
The LM embodies a new, offbeat modernism – a form that follows works uncompromisingly, unbalanced and implausible as it makes it look. The bottom half, to be fair, was pretty simple.
It was a platform with an engine and legs – three in the first models, then five, and then four. Its two fuel tanks and two oxidizer tanks are arranged octagonally and flat, symmetrically about its central axis. His job was to deprive the LM of the speed it would orbit the moon, which would allow it to drop to the surface and reduce it to land on the designated site. Once on the moon, it was nothing more than a platform and a storage space with a very large scale that descended on one leg.
It is at the top of the scale that the function has become complex and that the form has become strange. The ascension phase began as a sphere, then was reduced and enlarged. The result had a stocky face like a satanic engine of Thomas the Tank: flattened nose, square orbits with deeply sunken triangular eyes, round mouth and screaming. A gas tank suspended left precariously, in the manner of a goiter. Faceted as origami, antennae pointed in different directions, much of it was wrapped in a gold sheet to deal with thermal problems, further obscuring its hard-to-follow lines. There was just a concession to the foursquare order; at each corner there were four rocket nozzles to direct, one up, one down, one forward or backward, one toward the side; Axes x, y and z, as strictly Cartesian as the required on-board computer.
Inside, no seats. Just give them room, side by side, to look at the strange recessed down-sloped windows, a throttle and a joystick in front of each. A skylight on the commander – the rank has its privileges – as well as a small telescope. The hatch that led to the moon was knee-high between them, inside this angry mouth. No airlock When they leave the LM, everything is depressurized. Above the hatch, the DSKY – the guiding computer display and keyboard (numbers only – no qwerty). Above, three other control panels. Spread around the rest of the walls, a dozen additional control panels. One, very rare, bears the title ORDEAL: Orbital Flow Indicator, Earth and Lunar.
They stand in a well. At the waist level, the cabin opens behind them in an elevated alcove. At the top is the second hatch, the one that will let them return to the control module once they have recovered their orbit.
When they stand in the pit, their helmets are in the alcove; when any of them needs to move, he puts his helmet in the well. The personal life support systems that make their space suits stand-alone – turn these suits into a leg-powered spaceship – are:
tidy on the side. The same is true of the atmospheric revitalization section, which controls the environment, replenishes them and gives the impression that a madman has searched paint drums, plumbing valves, small fans size and vases for which there is no name in a pipe frame and then applied an all the assembly in all directions. Cram the flows and cycles necessary for life in the smallest possible volume and they have neither elegance nor visual logic.
In the middle of the alcove is a stocky cylinder, similar to the continental tire trunk located at the back of an Oldsmobile from before the war, though less wide. That's the engine. In all the previous spaceships, the engine was elsewhere – attached to the Mercury capsule heat shield, in its own separate chamber on the Apollo service module of Geminis, Vostoks and Soyuzes. In the LM, it is in the middle of the crew space, fed by tube with fuel and an oxidant that is both toxic and explosive. It is said that an LM gas tank, imprudently tapped with a ballpoint pen during outdoor testing, had resulted in the sinking of this pen into a fence post, as well 39, a little imprudent typing finger.
During development, the fuel and oxidizer lines will not stop fleeing. When Grumman sends the first presumed LM ready to fly to Cape Kennedy, he is rejected as being unfit for the launch pad and even less for space: "Junk. Garbage. "In trying to solve the problems, the third LM arrives so late in Cape Town that he does not have enough time left to prepare for his planned flight *. What was to be a routine vacuum test for the fifth LM has catastrophic consequences. windows explodes.
* This is why Apollo 8, originally intended to be a mission in Earth orbit using both the control module and the control module, has become a mission composed only of control modules that:
Rusty Schweickart and James McDivitt were the first to fly the LM on Apollo 9, a half-moon cruise in Earth orbit.
Windows are crucial. There is a well-told story that the first design of the Mercury capsules had no windows: the engineers did not need the astronauts to be able to see, because they only worked in reality. Landing on the moon, however, is not something that can be left to Ground Control – among other things, it takes radio waves more than a second to get there and the time it takes must come back.
As Jack Myers, a life scientist at the University of Texas, once said: "The human enters the space, not as a passenger, but as a passenger. as the essential element of the instrumentation needed for a particular mission. "Let the mission commander and LM pilot, who can both land the ship, see what they're doing. also connect to the computer, which converts throttle and throttle adjustments into numerical instructions for engines and thrusters, born to embody the fascination of science fiction for spaceflight in the context of a world transformed by the arrival of super-weapons of scientific fiction, Apollo has brought a new depth to a third of the concerns of the genre: new manifestations of intelligence and control in a world of thought machines. l computer shaped the world astronauts.
For example: engraved on the inside and outside of the glass is a kind of reticle. By holding his head so that the engravings on both sides of the glass are aligned, the commander knows that he is looking exactly where the computer thinks he is looking. It is important.
The computer can only respond to its human if this "essential part of the instrumentation" is accurately aligned. Ground computers also help in the design of windows. But this is the exception, not the rule; Computer-aided design software does not yet make it possible to manage the entire work remotely.
All the complexities of the LM are drawn by hand, and many are also hand built. Aluminum is so fine that it can not be stamped; it must be manufactured. But computers are crucial, not only within the LM, but in the process of its creation. It organizes. It measures. A software called PERT is used to program the development program at Grumman, and most other Apollo programs too, establishing new programs every day, seeing that what needs to be done has not been done, which is must be done elsewhere the next thing to do is to gather an army of workers according to the planning procedures defined by its programmers.
Computers are the manifestation of the future that makes the future possible. They also make it visible, synthesizing experiences for which there is no previous experience. Flight simulators have existed since the early 1930s, when an enterprising young man named Edwin Link realized that the pneumatic systems used by his family in the church organ trade could adjust The attitude of a pseudocockpit as he was in flight. Very widespread during the Second World War, this technology reaches its peak with the Apollo simulators. Nothing has been simulated in advance as remote as the Apollo missions: there are thousands of simulator training hours. In the LM simulators, the computers coordinate the throttle and joystick instructions with the movement of tiny fiber optic cameras on plaster models of the lunar surface that would have made James Nasmyth deeply envious, thus showing the
Pilot the relevant parts of the Moon to learn to control his new strange ship in all conditions.
The need for such a simulation pushes computers into new virtual realms. Flight hardware needs to be recreated in ground-based software so that the simulators respond exactly as the craft will actually do. Virtual machines that only exist as lines of code execution programs designed for real machines, just as real machines would do – or at least hoped for. Nobody has yet made pure logic machines. As the program progresses, part of the pilot experience also becomes purely virtual. The LEM Spaceflight visual simulator, created by General Electric in 1964, responds to pilot commands by simply moving pixels on a screen. In doing so, he creates the first virtual landscape: no cartoons, no plaster models, just zeros and ones. At first, it is purely geometric; with time, he develops reliefs and shadows. The technique begins to be used to explore different types of places, other types of trips. What would become cyberspace one day, and then the way all images are created, begins as a new way to show the moon to those who are about to walk on it.
The prospect of an unprecedented physical experience creates a virtual new one.
In these new abstraction directions, however, intimacy remains – nowhere more than in the costume. According to the preconceived ideas, the combination would be hardened, with articulated arms, which would make a man look like a robot. This is not it. It is made of soft fabrics sewn together by women working with Singer sewing machines similar to those found in half of America's homes, not working for a subcontractor of defense but for the International Latex Corporation, maker of bras and Playtex belts.
The space suit shrinks the world, the world has been removed three times. From Florida hot air to the control module; from the control module to the LM; of the LM in the suit. Hidden tightly every time, and at the end of all this breathing world is just in a bowl around the head and a backpack. The suits are better suited to the garment than any garment, sewn with precision defined with aerospace accuracy, no point should be more than a 1/64 of an inch – two fifths of a millimeter – from the defined line of the seam. The 21 layers are not all sewn; 16 of them, the latex and the mylar, the dacron and the kapton, are glued together, no creasing is allowed, the upper layer is almost indivernably larger than the lower one, because what is on the outside must always be bigger than what is inside. Underwear is webbed with tubes filled with water to cool the skin; in the bright sun without outside air flow to evacuate the heat, there is always a risk of overheating. But the heat can be provided, too, if needed. Another tube brings water to the mouth; another grabbed the cock to drain it. This tube is optionally available in three sizes: wide, extra-large and extra-wide; During the first round, in small, medium and large companies, some astronauts were poorly equipped.
As shown, the costumes, made by women, are for men. The astronauts were test pilots and the test pilots were men. Women could pass the same tests – and did it when they were applied privately and not by NASA – but they were neither test pilots nor fighter pilots, but astronauts.
Some have questioned that. Not a lot, though, and not very high. When Kennedy said "a man on the moon", it was not a shortcut for a human of one or the other sex. Such things were what men did.
In addition to being men, astronauts were white as well as space suits *. It was not quite such a case. The White House knew that a black astronaut could be a big win, at home and abroad; NASA has therefore taken the lead in this direction, ensuring that there is a black candidate in the next class of Air Force pilots. Politicians did not insist, however, that he had not been selected for astronaut training. The first African-American astronaut did not fly until 1983, the same year as the first female US astronaut, who took over space in the shuttle 20 years and two days after taking off from Valentina Tereshkova in Vostok 6.
* As part of an artistic practice that questions the notions of fantasy, modernity and what it should be African, Yinka Shonibare has made various sculptures in space suit from colorful batik fabrics, widely associated with West Africa. A black British security officer from London's Tate Modern, who spent a lot of time with these rooms, one day told my wife that he knew they were empty – but he felt a strong urge to do so. Try to open their dark glass visors to see if there were any. was a face like his interior.
Coming out of the trapdoor angrily and descending from the ladder, the cycles of their lives weaving around them, the men of the LM penetrate the Moon. In a way, they never reach it. Cocooned, drained and layered, they are swathed in the world from which they came and returned. They do not feel the lunar temperature – they have theirs. They do not breathe the moon, do not piss on it and do not really touch it; les gantelets sont des merveilles de dextérité, compte tenu de leur épaisseur, mais ils ne peuvent pas transmettre le tactile. Ils ne peuvent entendre que eux-mêmes et la voix des autres, très loin.
Mais pendant quelques heures ou quelques jours, selon la mission, ils l’habitent. Ils se déplacent en va-et-vient, sautent au-dessus et sentent le léger choc d'atterrissage aux genoux alors que leurs muscles absorbent l'élan de leur corps.
Ils sentent que le temps passe dessus. Bien que le soleil se déplace à peine dans le ciel, leurs cœurs battent, leurs réserves s'épuisent. Ils le regardent leur répondre; ils voient sa surface percée pendant qu'ils creusent leurs tranchées, et ce qu'ils voient correspond à ce que ressentent leurs muscles. Ils voient ses contours adoucis, sa surface couverte de trous, ses distances difficiles à évaluer et ses horizons proches de la façon dont vous voyez les endroits où vous pouvez aller ou non pendant votre visite à proximité, non pas comme vous voyez des choses à posséder, ni comme vous voyez des représentations, ou des illusions, ou les points de vue des autres.
Il ne les voit pas. Et ils ne se voient pas, du moins pas leurs visages. La couleur dorée des protections faciales des casques ne signifie pas qu’elle puisse sortir de la combinaison. En se regardant, ils ne voient dans les plaques frontales que des images de la Lune, tout comme nous le faisons dans les images qu'ils se prennent et qu'ils rapportent. Ils voient ce que Moonwatchers a toujours vu: des réflexions. Ils se voient.
Ils ne font l'expérience de la Lune dans la chair qu'après avoir récupéré le LM. Ils apportent sa poussière et salissent avec eux sur leurs costumes. Ils le sentent dans l'air quand le volume minuscule du LM se repressurise et que les casques se détachent – ça sent la poudre à canon ou les cendres aspergées d'eau. Des sensations électriques nettes provenant de réactions qui ne pourraient jamais se produire dans le vide extérieur catalysé dans l’air intérieur.
La fine Moonstuff qui recouvre l'intérieur est de la terre. C'est la pollution, dans le sens où l'anthropologue Mary Douglas a défini le mot: matière hors de propos. Matière du monde inconnu dans un nouveau monde.
Dans le LM, avant qu'il ne parte dans la poussière, Buzz Aldrin communie avec du pain et du vin consacrés sur une autre planète. «Je suis la vigne», dit-il, «vous êtes les branches. Quiconque demeure en moi produira beaucoup de fruits. En dehors de moi, tu ne peux rien faire. ”Ce n’est pas le seul sacrement lunaire. Dans son livre «The Planets» (2005), Dava Sobel se souvient avoir entendu dire que son amie Carolyn, qui se faisait présenter un grain de poussière de lune par un petit ami spécialiste des sciences de la planète, l'avait mangé impulsivement.
Les astronautes d’Apollo l’ingèrent sans le vouloir. Dans leur LM sali par la poussière, de minuscules particules se déplacent dans les alvéoles de leurs poumons et à travers les microvillosités de leurs intestins dans leur sang, leurs tissus et leurs cellules. Ils ramènent la Lune à la maison. Ils rentrent chez eux changés.
Adapted from La lune: une histoire pour l'avenir, par Oliver Morton, publié en juin 2019 par Economist Books en association avec PublicAffairs, une division du groupe Hachette Book.
Lorsque vous achetez quelque chose en utilisant les liens de vente au détail de nos récits, nous pouvons gagner une petite commission d’affiliation. En savoir plus sur comment cela fonctionne.
More great cable stories
[ad_2]
Source link