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Here you can buy the actual titanium fuel tank from the Apollo 18 mission ........... on ebay   :)

Hmmm... could one fill it up, say, with beer?

On a lighter note: Decades after NASA's Apollo missions, people are having some laughs over transcripts of astronauts' humorous conversations aboard the spacecraft. For all their technological sophistication, the Apollo command module had a relatively primitive system for managing human waste.

Excellent comments from the Apollo original source code:)

Another entry by the Planetary Society for the Apollo 11 50th anniversary, this time a podcast series on its political background.

Filename: BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc

Maybe Pacome can come up with some nice idea on testing GR with the reflectors on the Moon?

See, open source works :)

fantastic images!!! the footsteps of Apollo 14 are incredible!!

How much did Apollo cost?

loss of a real hero who never accepted being one ...

For those who can't wait to be on Mars... ;-) - Oh and for those who want to see some REALLY cool panorama's: the moon @ http://www.panoramas.dk/moon/apollo-17.html

1) it has to actively work and produce a result that's what you intended 2) the design must be robust. 3) it should be efficient 4) it should minimize unintended consequences. "But we have to establish a formal, mathematically precise mechanism to measure complexity and adaptability . . . [where] adaptability means the system elements have sufficient margin, and can serve multiple purposes." "We need to break the paradigm of long cycles from design to product" some interesting questions....

what is the outcome of the CDF study ? I think actually that optimisation is not at all the key point. As it is stressed in this news, it is robustness (points 2 and 4). This is something we should think about ...

SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS, SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS!!! :-D

Personally I think this is great.

Well, the constellation program was a waste of money in its current form, overrun by delays and insufficient budget. We would have had Apollo 2.0 sixty years later, for what? At least now they are talking about going to asteroids, martian moons and stuff like that.

I agree that Constellation was a mistake. It is though a pity that now human Mars missions would certainly happen even later than initially hoped.

ARCA is the romanian google X prize competitor.

I like the 4 stage system. But how did they solve the plume issue ?

The plume issue is not that difficult. I think they used something similar on Apollo LES. The problem is stabilizing the entire system, which is extremely difficult. The entire system will most likely plummet down after the solar balloon phase (which is the only phase they tested before). At least they are not using government money :).

put in perspective .... we could also have a large scale SPS for this ...