Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Challenger tragedy
Message-ID: <1988Jul31.010331.13798@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1001@scicom.alphacdc.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 88 01:03:31 GMT

In article <1001@scicom.alphacdc.com> wats@scicom.alphacdc.com (Bruce Watson) writes:
>Now that we are about to launch the shuttle after a nearly 3 year del`ay,
>I was prompted to find out the length of the Apollo fire delay.  It was
>almost 2 years...

18 months is not normally considered "almost two years".  (Note that you
do not want to measure from the fire to Apollo 7, because the fire was
during a test run somewhat before the actual scheduled launch date.)
18 months is the official NASA figure.

>... I am wondering if the engineers involved in payload
>planning allowed for such delays to schedule for Apollo and the impact
>to the experiments...

The Apollo schedule was still a bit too nebulous for such specific plans.
One can make a good case that the actual first lunar landing would not
have occurred much earlier without the fire:  too many other things were
not ready, and had a chance to catch up.  As it was, the LM was not
ready for Apollo 8, so the original Apollo 8 mission slipped to Apollo 9,
and a new plan for Apollo 8 was put together on the spur of the moment.
(The original plans had not envisioned circumlunar operations without the
LM, but it looked like a useful (and exciting) mission that could be
flown despite the LM delays.)
-- 
MSDOS is not dead, it just     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
smells that way.               | uunet!mnetor!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu