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tahanson43206

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Registered: 2018-04-27

Posts: 19,408

Re: China vs. U.S. race to the Moon.

For RGClark....

GW Johnson will be away for a few days on a trip...

He sent this suggestion for you and any other NewMars members who might be curious about the space race and related military competition during the Cold War....

I did see something from Bob Clark wanting some references for the things that happened in aerospace during those times.  About the best suggestion I have is old back issues of Aviation Week magazine.  Although it had another name in the 50's and 60's.

Hopefully we have a NewMars member with the time and the energy to see what might be available online from that publication.

Update: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_ … Technology

This Wikipedia article appears to contains some glimpses of the history of the magazine since 1916.

The article contains brief mention of significant events (or non-events) during the Cold War.

(th)

RGClark

Member

From: Philadelphia, PA

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 765

Website

Re: China vs. U.S. race to the Moon.

Thanks for the refs.

  Bob Clark

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Old Space rule of acquisition (with a nod to Star Trek - the Next Generation):

      “Anything worth doing is worth doing for a billion dollars.”

GW Johnson

Member

From: McGregor, Texas USA

Registered: 2011-12-04

Posts: 5,801

Website

Re: China vs. U.S. race to the Moon.

Bob:

If you look up old issues of Aviation Week from the 50's and 60's,  whatever the magazine's name was back then,  bear in mind that this was a sort of industry trade journal.  You sort of have to read between the lines to figure out what was really going on.  This sort of "reporting" was as much about chest-puffing and advertising as it was actually reporting facts.  It's all mixed together in trade journals like that.

But you can see in the early 1960's illustrations what the Apollo plan was up until about 1965:  two Saturn 5 launches per mission to the moon,  with one a tanker to refill the other in LEO.  The entire Apollo capsule and a huge service module were to be landed direct upon the moon. After about 1965 that shifted to cluster we actually used,  which had the separate lander,  and one launch per mission. Somewhere about 1964-1965 there was even a notion to send a man one-way to the moon in a Gemini capsule (fortunately that went nowhere).

If you look at issues from the late 1950's,  there were occasional illustrations showing the one-way-to-Russia troop transport that was the original paper design for the Saturn-5. There's a lot of aviation and space concept proposals illustrated in that magazine that never came to fruition as proposed.  Things almost always turn out quite different than the original proposals.

GW

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GW Johnson
McGregor,  Texas

"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew,  especially one dead from a bad management decision"