Irritated about the Apollo Program

[sparkyal]

I think it would be impossible to build the Apollo program without the knowledge of flight. If you disagree, great. I do not think you would have the necessay information to make the calculations without the knowledge of flight. how do you know how the density of the air changes without actually having some measurements? this is critical when you start to think about coming back. Also, what is the impact of supersonic flight on a ridget body? It is signifigant. Without actually breaking the sounbd barrier you would not have this information. Yes, I suppose you could continue to throw rockets into the air and hopefully stumble upon why they keep crashing, but like I said, I think this is not truly possible.

Plus, even if you do jhave these rockets that can fly thousands of miles, wouldn't you wonder why you couldn't fly 100 feet down the street?

sparky

[pdc_heavy]

Wouldn't the discovery of physics answer a lot of questions about flight, without actually having to fly?

[Yosho]

Originally posted by sparkyal
I think it would be impossible to build the Apollo program without the knowledge of flight. If you disagree, great. I do not think you would have the necessay information to make the calculations without the knowledge of flight. how do you know how the density of the air changes without actually having some measurements? this is critical when you start to think about coming back. Also, what is the impact of supersonic flight on a ridget body? It is signifigant. Without actually breaking the sounbd barrier you would not have this information. Yes, I suppose you could continue to throw rockets into the air and hopefully stumble upon why they keep crashing, but like I said, I think this is not truly possible.

Actually, people found out the changes of the air density of the upper atmosphere mostly using balloons, which were around long, long before heavier then air flight, and using unmanned rockets. Absoltuly no reason you'd need an airplane for that.

About the impact of supersonic flight on a riged body; well, you could test that with rockets just as easily as we did with jet planes, right? Either way you've got to break the sound barrier, and I would think that it would be easier to design a rocket shaped object that could do this then something that relies on wings; much less air resistance in a rocket.

Plus, even if you do jhave these rockets that can fly thousands of miles, wouldn't you wonder why you couldn't fly 100 feet down the street?

sparky

(shrug) Just because you have rockets, dosn't necesaraly means you'll figure out that if you if make a wing and shape it just so and move it at a certain speed, it'll cause enough lift to bring an airplaine into the air. It's a very different problem, really.

[Virdrago]

We've had cars break the sound barrier. Now if we would have thought of doing that without the knowledge of flight, that's a different question. We may have. Moving that sound barrier knowledge to jets (or getting it from jets) may or may not have needed flight... hypothetically.