Leading Apollo Spaceship Designer Dies At Age 95

[capmaster]

He never made it to being a celebrity, so I found out just by accident that he passed away recently. Though widely unknown, John C. Houbolt's name is intrinsically tied to mankind's successful landing on the moon:

 

http://www.nasa.gov/content/john-c-houbolt-unsung-hero-of-the-apollo-program-dies-at-age-95/#.U1QSyFV_tGA

[jdgm]

Thanks for this one Cap. I have a few books and have read his name before but hadn't realised....Apollo was an amazing achievement, we will never see anything quite like that again.

[Dennis G]

Thanks for that Cap. As someone who "grew up" in that era, it's nice to know that there was some substance behind the flash, if you get my drift. RIP Mr. Houbolt, not only did you have the smarts to know what to do, but the balls to be sure it happened. Hat's off to you

[rocketman]

Yeah he was great. I got to know another great one from that era who recently passed away. His name is Richard Battin. He designed the Apollo navigation system and also invented the gravity assist (swingby) concept. Without his idea we would not be able to go to other planets. Buzz Aldrin was one of his students. We did a symposium in honor of Battin years ago and Buzz came to it. I got to spend quite a bit of time with him. He's got an arrogance like you won't believe but he loved Battin and had nothing but humble things to say about him. Battin himself was a quiet but brilliant guy. His book is the most widely used book in astrodynamics.

 

My technical great-grandfather (my Ph.D.'s advisor, advisor's advisor) actually coined the term "astrodynamics." Battin gave him credit for it in his book. Here is his book:

 

 

Chapter 1 is on Hypergeometric Functions and Ellipic Integrals. That math isn't used until you really get into the weeds of the material though. I asked Battin probably the same question everyone asked him "Why did you put those subjects in Chapter 1?" to which he said "Nobody would probably read about them if I didn't!" Nice strategy and a great book.

 

Here is the symposium proceedings. I have a paper in there. I loved his keynote paper where he talks about the core rope memory system.

[capmaster]

Please apologize, I never heard of Richard Battin before. I remember how I admired the astronauts when I was a boy of ten. Many years later I learned from watching a TV show by German Professor Harald Lesch that they didn't exceed the escape velocity but went with applying an elliptic orbit with the apogee beyond the moon instead, and later performed a course correction to achieve a moon orbit. A fairly clever way with respect to fuel economy I think.