Edited by Gaspode:
Edited for moderated thread.
My point is that 2 ships cannot link if they are 600-900 feet apart.
Yes. That's why one ship will simply fly 600 feet over to the other one. Duh.
The astronauts said no out of plane adjustments were made period.
Yes. That's because a terminal error of 600 feet would be considered a direct hit.
No longer a point in dispute.
For you to declare victory after repeating your colossal blunder from months ago merits one of these:
Check NASA's own documents.
I assure you I've read NASA's documents on lunar orbit rendezvous and the LM control systems many, many times. Clearly you have not, because they describe a model of orbital operations that bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything you've stated or alluded to here.
"if two 1969 vintage ships were out of plane in this regard, 600 to 900 feet, could they link up? Would it be possible?" I'll explore that.
Please do "explore" that. You pretty much just lost
any credibility that you might have had that you know anything about how space works.
If they were out of plane 50 feet, it is infinitely too far. If off by 10 feet, it is a miss of infinite inaccuracy.
Wow. Just ... wow.
If the docking attempt is a 10 foot miss, that is as bad as a 10,000 foot miss.
Actually we prefer a 10,000 foot "miss." You want the last nautical mile or two after TPI to be terminal maneuvering and braking, not an orbital coast that may result in inadvertent contact. Anything within about 2 nautical miles at is considered a direct hit.
And as others have noted, you seem to persist in the error of thinking that rendezvous and docking was a one-shot deal determined entirely by initial conditions. That's as absolutely wrong as it can possibly be, and if you had really read NASA's documents you would know this.
NASA expected significant dispersions from the lunar orbit insertion maneuver. That's why the rendezvous process was formulated stepwise, and why that's still the way we conduct orbital rendezvous today.
Further, the rendezvous process provides for several terminal rendezvous and docking attempts. It's not, nor ever was, a one-shot deal. Your concept of orbital rendezvous as a do-or-die one-time engine burn, lobbing the LM on a trajectory that has to intersect the CSM exactly the first time, is about as comically far off the mark as it can be.
And you know this. You've had the process explained to you in depth, and admitted at the time that it answered your dilemma. Why you choose to revisit it now is disappointing, but frankly expected.
We know this because the Eagle's top was out of plane some.
The "top?" What part of an orbit is that? Are you actually assuming that an orbit's apoapsis and its anti-nodes are the same thing? Please take class or something!
Think of it like taking a class pass/fail Loss Leader. Pass/fail is like successful rendezvous/miss. There is no middle ground.
No, orbital rendezvous is exactly
not like a pass-fail test. It is exactly the opposite. It is a multi-step processes that allows accumulated errors and dispersions to be detected and corrected in an adaptively converging solution, with little or no time pressure involved.
While you claim to know "some engineering," you continually demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of some of its core principles, the one in this case being the idea of a
tolerance. On an unadjusted grading scale, both a score of 92% and one of 100% qualify as an A letter-grade. 92 percent is "good enough." The guy who gets 92% gets the same outcome as the guy who gets 100%, but the former has more time to drink beer and chase girls.
Terminal phase insertion has a nominal distance of 2 miles, plus an RCS tolerance of many more miles. That is, a "hit" is to reach altitude within two miles of your docking target. Several miles out at the antinode is annoying but manageable. Alignment begins to occur at 600 feet, which is considered equivalent to a final approach.
If your TPI burn parks you at 2 miles out, you got an A. If it parks you 11 miles out, guess what -- you still got an A. That's the idea of a tolerance, and until you wrap your mind around it you won't be convincing any engineers that you know anything about their profession.
We can all look into whether or not a 600 foot correction is feasible...
You do that. While you're at it, you can also investigate whether a brush is useful for applying paint, and whether there's some way to prevent air from rushing out of a balloon neck once it has been inflated.
but WHETHER ONE COULD OR COULD NOT CORRECT FOR 600 FEET, OR AS LITTLE AS 60, IS IRRELEVANT HERE.
No it isn't irrelevant. It's the question Loss Leader asked you to study and answer. Almost every spacecraft has a delta-v capacity. If you're arguing that the Apollo spacecraft can't have docked for such a great error, you are responsible for quantifying the error and showing the corresponding limit that is exceeded.
Real world machines have a tolerance to accommodate varying performance. The Apollo spacecraft was no exception.
The explicit out-of-plane correction maneuver was planned in case the plane error grew to be several degrees or more. For fractions of a degree, it's handled during ascent guidance simply by yawing into the correct plane. But when the error becomes too great, a separate maneuver is done at apoapsis. It's done there because a plane-correction maneuver is a pure delta-v maneuver, and the spacecraft's velocity is slowest at that point. Ironically it's more fuel-efficient to wait and correct the plane errors later, another counterintuitive aspect of space flight.
THE ASTRONAUTS LIED AND SAID NO ADJUSTMENT WAS NECESSARY, NONE WAS CARRIED OUT.
That's right. None was necessary and none was carried out. You're the only one who seems to think one was necessary, but only because you don't know the first thing about orbital mechanics or spacecraft dynamics, and so you're making up a bunch of properties and requirements that, in your naive understanding, might seem to be true, but which simply are not.
You're acting literally like a "surgeon" who has never studied anatomy and never seen the inside of an organism.
