Rene-NASA-Mooned-America

No Business Like Showbiz / Chap. 13 p. 116
could you ever believe NASA when they told you (before the Pad 34 cremation) that an
oxygen fire could be quickly vented to space
Not to be scatological, but that scenario is so much bovine fecal matter. I used to scuba
dive and know that a man breathes a bit less than 72 cubic feet of air an hour in shallow
water. Four-fifths of that is nitrogen which wasn't carried to the Moon. That leaves us with
about 15 cubic feet of exhalation per hour per astro-not. In two hours that would be a grand
total of 60-cubic feet of free air. This is the volume of a box that is 4 feet on each edge, or a
big balloon a little over 3 feet in diameter. Not very much gas to worry about is it
But they had to contend with even less than that because they had lithium hydroxide
canisters which removed the carbon dioxide from the used oxygen so that it could be rebreathed.
The space suits must have released little or nothing in the waste gas department,
else we would have seen the water vapor in the exhausted gas periodically explode out from
the suit into the zero pressure of space. Had that happened in real space, that water would
have flashed into ice crystals as they were ejected, making a splendid showy snow.
Collins tells about such a show. "After breakfast I hook a full urine bag to the overboard
dump and am rewarded with the usual snowstorm of escaping white particles. The
constellation "Urion," as Wally Schirra has dubbed it, is formed by the instantaneous
freezing of the urine stream as it reaches the vacuum of space and breaks into thousands of
individual miniature spheres." 18
And even if they weren't scrubbing the gases on the LEM, the amount of gas we are
talking about here would have passed through a pin hole in two hours. This is another
whopper that Burger King had no part in creating! Here on Earth when we blow up balloons,
they have a quantity of air at about a half a pound positive pressure. What happens when we
let go of the narrow neck PSSSSSSSSS and all the air is gone. In space and on the Moon
they use oxygen at 5.2 pounds positive pressure and they are trying to tell us that
PSSSSSSSSS no longer works. Look how much air a leaf blower moves and its working
pressure is less than a half pound over atmospheric.
We read about how the Apollo 12's Lander almost dropped into the crater that held the
Surveyor III. What was the only thing that prevented disaster "The Right Stuff! The LEM
was maneuvered safely to the far rim of the crater and teeter-tottered almost toppling over
the rim. But our heroes' luck held and it settled down safely. The TV audience watching that
exciting mission was small. The TV coverage was still superlatively lousy, so many people
opted for the Ed Sullivan Show instead.
Before we proceed to the Apollo 13 episode of the space opera, we shall break in order
to introduce the subject of the thermal roll. At the beginning of the Mercury program NASA
found that the heat shields would crack if left too long in the cold of space. So Joe Shea,
NASA's chief administrator, asked a pregnant question. "Shea asked how long it took for the
heat shield to cool down to the point where problems began. The answer was about thirteen
hours. So why did the spacecraft have to to stay in the same attitude for that long Why
couldn't it rotate, so the heat shield would remain nice and warm all the time And that was
the origin of what came to be known as the "barbecue" mode, or passive thermal control
(P.T.C.), in which the space craft rotated once an hour all the way out to the Moon and
back." 19 My question is why didn't they point the shield directly
NASA MOONED AMERICA! / Rene