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  [Haynes Manual] NASA Lost Missions

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Author Topic:   [Haynes Manual] NASA Lost Missions
Robert Pearlman
Editor

Posts: 47442
From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 03-02-2020 04:40 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Robert Pearlman   Click Here to Email Robert Pearlman     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
NASA Lost Missions Operations Manual: 1965-2030 (Post-Apollo Program)
by David Baker
In the mid-1960s NASA began planning what to do after the goal of President Kennedy had been met and astronauts had landed on the Moon. A comprehensive plan quickly emerged to use left-over Apollo hardware to mount an expanding range of new capabilities – space stations, space bases, Moon-orbiting laboratories and temporary human settlements on the lunar surface.

But NASA wanted more and looked to what it called a "Post-Apollo" era in which new and more exciting possibilities could set in train a series of missions which would have astronauts landing on the surface of Mars by the mid-1980s. The Post-Apollo Program would support development of nuclear rocket engines for powering big rocket stages (Nuclear Shuttles) plying between Earth orbit and Moon orbit and between Earth orbit and Mars, sending human expeditions deep into the solar system.

By the end of the 1960s, as Americans were about to land on the Moon, studies were refined and a plea went out to industry to design 12-man Earth orbiting space stations, 100-man space bases with artificial weightlessness, shuttlecraft plying between the surface of the Earth and low-Earth orbit, Space Tug vehicles kept in space shuttling satellites between low-Earth orbit (where they had been delivered by shuttlecraft) and geostationary orbit where communications and TV satellites reside to do their work. Using elements of this vast space transportation network, the first missions to Mars would occur during the first half of the 1980s, building bases on the surface of the Red Planet to set up the first scientific surveys, with vehicles taking scientists and explorers hundreds of kilometers across the dusty plains.

Back came the detailed design plans for these mighty and ambitious projects, supported by the film industry. which visited NASA facilities, during which Kubrick and Clarke wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" using the plans already been put on blueprints in countless design offices of the US aerospace industry. There were even detailed maps of which area to send out expeditions across the surface of the Moon and the surface of Mars.

By the early 1970s all these dreams were gone and the plans so comprehensively laid out had been relegated to the dusty shelves of history. But some projects lingered on. NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission built and tested prototype nuclear rocket motors which would have powered what was called the Nuclear Shuttle (the rocket stages always kept in space and refueled from tankers brought up in shuttlecraft). But, eventually, all these plans were to be abandoned and all that was left was to build the Space Shuttle, eventually putting together a modular space station at the end of the century.

All the plans, documentation, images and graphics pushing this Post-Apollo plan are in the possession of the author, and this book proposes to publish all these exciting and ambitious projects supported by color artwork, detailed engineering drawings and images of hardware on test, including the nuclear rocket motors. It tells the story of what could have been and what was abandoned but what lives on in the memory and in the preserved archives of those involved in its formulation – including the author.

  • Hardcover: 224 pages
  • Haynes Publishing UK (November 10, 2020)
  • ISBN-10: 1785212117
  • ISBN-13: 978-1785212116

jjknap
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Posts: 285
From: Bourbonnais, IL USA
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 11-22-2021 03:13 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jjknap   Click Here to Email jjknap     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I know David Baker is publishing his Saturn 1b book next spring with a different publisher than Haynes. Any word on this book?

cspg
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Posts: 6279
From: Geneva, Switzerland
Registered: May 2006

posted 11-25-2021 04:48 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for cspg   Click Here to Email cspg     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Here you go.

jjknap
Member

Posts: 285
From: Bourbonnais, IL USA
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 11-25-2021 12:22 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jjknap   Click Here to Email jjknap     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Thanks! Any word on The Lost Missions book?

cspg
Member

Posts: 6279
From: Geneva, Switzerland
Registered: May 2006

posted 11-26-2021 05:10 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for cspg   Click Here to Email cspg     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The Lost Missions book was/is due to be published by the same publisher as for the Saturn I/IB book (Crécy Publishing). There was also a book about the Saturn V, also same author, same publisher. But there's nothing on the publisher's website regarding Lost Missions or Saturn V.

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