Henry Spencer
Quotes by Henry Spencer
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In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.
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Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots.
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Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.
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An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft.
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The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.
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In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly.
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Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane.
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On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system.
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Trying to build a spaceship by making an aeroplane fly faster and higher is like trying to build an aeroplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed.
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Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.
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Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer.
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The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered.
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