From: cmadams@hiwaay.net (Chris Adams)

Once upon a time, Captain Infinity   said:
>Once Upon A Time,
>Chris Adams wrote:
>>Harrison Schmitt (the last man, and only pure scientist, to
>>walk on the Moon) will be here in a couple of weeks for a dinner to
>>celebrate the 40th anniversary of the last manned Moon landing.
>
>Nitpick:  Schmitt was the last man to step onto the Moon.  Eugene Cernan was
>the last man to walk on the moon.  (Schmitt exited the Apollo 17 lander last
>upon landing, and entered it first when they were leaving.)

The way I meant it was "of the 12 men to walk on the Moon, the other 11
did it before him".  Yes, one of the 11 _also_ did it after him. :)

In any case, it is depressing that in a couple of weeks, it will have
been 40 YEARS since anybody went there.  We had local news stories
yesterday and today about NASA tearing down the engine test stand used
for the F-1 engine (the engine used in the first stage of the Saturn V
moon rocket).  It hadn't been used since before Apollo 11 flew, and it
cost them money for maintenance, but it was still sad for it to go.

The test stand used for the whole first stage of the Saturn V (aka the
S1C) is still here, although IIRC it has been around 10 years since it
was last used.  I went up the stand a couple of times, and saw a few
SSME test firings, but that was just a single 435,000 lbf thrust engine,
not five 1.5 million lbf thrust engines.

There's a local company (Dynetics, partnering with Rocketdyne) that is
proposing using an upgraded version of the F-1 engine for a later
generation of SLS booster stage.  They think they can get a modern
version up to 1.8 million lbf!

-- 
Chris Adams 
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.


--- Internet Rex 2.31
 * Origin: Deep Thought (1:2320/101)