Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

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KA9Q said:
The total LM load during that time still averaged about 300 watts. Do you really not think that could include a blower?
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The jerry-rigged apparatus is being driven by the suit-circuit blower.

An Apollo space suit has two inlet holes and two outlet holes. Oxygen is blown into the suit through the inlet holes. Unused O2 and exhaled CO2 is driven out of the outlet holes by the inlet pressure supplied by the blower fan. Thus the combination of suit and conditioning equipment creates a closed gas loop with a nominal static pressure of 3.5-5 psig.

While in the spacecraft, the astronaut may connect his space suit to the LM's suit circuit, which provides fresh oxygen to the suit inlet to replenish oxygen lost to respiration, scrubs CO2 from the gas stream by means of the LM cabin-air LiOH canister, eliminate odor by means of an activated charcoal filter canister, remove excess water, and heat or cool the gas as necessary. The astronaut's PLSS backpack provides these functions when he is outside the vehicle.

The suit-circuit blower had a gas handling capacity of around 25-30 cfm at 5-6 psi, with a small nominal pressure rise at blower discharge. The blower fan need only overcome the flow resistance in the suit circuit, not the static suit pressure.

The LM's cabin-air circuit employs the same conditioning equipment, but the plumbing is contained within the ECS cabin assembly. The crew has little or no access to it. Hence when the last LM LiOH canister became saturated, the suit circuit was pressed into service. With the hoses disconnected, the suit circuit behaves just like a smaller version of the cabin circuit. You can feel gas being forced out of the discharge hole (which would be connected by a hose to the suit inlet) and sucked into the LM's intake hole (connected ordinarily by hose to the suit discharge).

The crew connected their improvised LiOH adapter to the end of a hose plugged to the suit-circuit discharge, thus ensuring that all gas drawn in through the uncovered LM ECS suit intake would have to pass through the LiOH canister and from there into the cabin.

Patrick1000, please tell us what you think the electrical requirements are, in terms of exact wattage figures and voltages, for that suit-circuit blower. Also please look up or derive the LM's total battery capacity in the standard units for such things, and show us by means of a properly computed numerical comparison whether the LM's battery would have been sufficient.

I've already done this in private correspondence with SUSPilot, so we'll see whether you can do what the real engineers have already done. Hint: I already know the answer to your question whether the environmental system's electrical load could have been met by the LM's available power supply. You asserted that the numbers would work out in your favor, supporting your claim that the LM could not have powered the fans for long enough. Now it's time to see whether you will put your money where you mouth is.
 
JayUtah said:
The LM's cabin-air circuit employs the same conditioning equipment, but the plumbing is contained within the ECS cabin assembly. The crew has little or no access to it. Hence when the last LM LiOH canister became saturated, the suit circuit was pressed into service. With the hoses disconnected, the suit circuit behaves just like a smaller version of the cabin circuit.
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Just to clarify, the LM cabin and suit circuits were actually one and the same.

The conditioned O2 flowed first to a suit isolation valve for each astronaut. Each valve directed the gas either through the astronaut's suit or around it (i.e., bypassing and isolating it).

The gas next went to a cabin gas diverter valve, which similarly routed the gas either through the cabin via vents or directly to the ECS (Environmental Control System) return path. You'd pick this second position before depressurizing the cabin.

The return gas, warmed mainly by body heat and carrying exhaled CO2 and H2O, first flowed through one of two LiOH canisters. The LiOH removes the CO2, but the reaction adds more heat and H2O to the gas stream.

One of two suit fans (somewhat misnamed since they also pump air through the cabin) then pumps the gas through a heat exchanger carrying cool glycol coolant. A backup water sublimator is provided if the glycol loop fails. This condenses moisture that is removed with (one of two) water separators and routed to a holding tank.

Extra O2 is added through a pressure regulator to replenish metabolic consumption and cabin leakage, and finally the gas flows through a second heat exchanger carrying warm glycol with waste heat from the batteries and electronics. This allows the crew to reheat the reconditioned O2 to a comfortable temperature.

Aside from control, monitoring and alarm circuitry, the ECS only needs power for its oxygen fans and glycol coolant pumps. It's a single-gas system under low pressure so less fan power is required than for ordinary air. Cooling is by water evaporation to space, much like a "swamp cooler" on earth. While that expends water, there's no power-hungry compressor as in a conventional closed-cycle air conditioner. Feedwater is delivered to the sublimator with compressed N2 so no pump is required, nor is any power required to maintain cabin pressure since (unlike the cryogenic tanks in the Service Module) the LM stores O2 in tanks at ambient temperature and high pressure.

The Apollo 13 LiOH workaround was really quite simple and elegant. The astronauts enclosed one side of the square CSM cartridge and connected it to one of the suit gas return hoses. By opening that suit gas valve and closing the cabin return vent, the ECS drew cabin gas back in through the LiOH cartridge and the suit return hose, supplanting the ECS's own LiOH cartridge that was ordinarily the first stop for the return gas anyway. The suit supply hoses also came in handy for directing fresh O2 up into the Command Module whose own environmental control system had been shut down.

Had it not been possible to use the CSM's LiOH cartridges, or if the batteries could not have powered even the suit fans, the crew still could have been kept alive for some time by using the LM's O2 supplies in a once-through mode much like that of the OPS (the emergency O2 supply during EVA). You open a small vent (e.g., the urine dump valve) to slowly bleed the cabin and let the pressure regulators add O2 as needed to keep the cabin pressure constant.

Aquarius actually had a good supply of oxygen since it had been budgeted for several EVAs and cabin depress-repress cycles, and the OPS supplies could have been used as well. I haven't done the calculations to see how long this could have lasted, though.
 
KA9Q said:
Just to clarify, the LM cabin and suit circuits were actually one and the same.
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Agreed; didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

It may be more helpful to think of the conditioning equipment as a "chain" of machines, each of which does one specific thing to the stream of gas. Each link in the chain can be bypassed if necessary, and each link has a backup that can be valved in using controls in the LM cabin. At the intake head of the chain there is a manifold that accepts "dirty" gas from any or all of a number of sources, and at the discharge tail of the chain there is another manifold supplying "clean" gas to any number of destinations. Each can be individually valved in or out, and the entire circulation loop can be closed (i.e., the discharge manifold routed solely to the intake manifold in order to isolate everything from the conditioning loop).

The LiOH canister sits in a housing in the middle of this chunk of plumbing, most of which is inaccessible the crew behind the ECS panels. The crew has control over the valves, but not access to the plumbing behind it. The LiOH canister is replaceable, so one end of the housing is accessible to the crew to allow for changing out the canister. But the canister itself is shaped in a way that achieves a seal within the housing, so you can't leave the canister out.

The round canisters for the LM are the same canisters used in the spacesuit PLSS, so don't fault the Grumman and Hamilton-Standard designers too much for their supposed interoperability. (Ed Harris as Kranz: "Tell me this isn't a government operation.") The problem is that the spare PLSS/LM LiOH cartridges, which would have greatly extended the LM ECS operational lifetime, were out in the MESA and inaccessible without a spacewalk.

As is well known, the square canisters won't fit the LM ECS housing. The different designs are not too different from filters even the layman will be familiar with. The aim is to pass air through a filter substrate impregnated with LiOH, and the efficiency with which this can be accomplished depends on the surface area presented to the total gas flow.

Some automotive air filters are arranged as a ring, where air is drawn from the center of the ring, causing air to flow inward through the perimeter of the ring. The larger the ring diameter, and the taller the ring, the more filter area is available to the airflow and the less resistance there is to airflow. Of course this filter requires being seated in a cylindrical housing that restricts incoming airflow to the area around the outside perimeter of the filter, and working airflow to the center volume of the ring. This is the design most closely approximating how the LiOH canistor worked in the PLSS and the LM.

In contrast, some filters work simply by passing through an assembly that simply sits inside the fluid path and covers its entire cross section, such as the common furnace filter. The return air has little choice but to be sucked through the filter. The high-efficiency filters have a corrugated filter surface that packs as much filter surface area as possible into the cross-sectional dimensions. This is closest to how the the CM LiOH canister worked.

As you can see, it's not just a matter of adapting the shape; the gas flow path in each case was radically different in order to accommodate other design constraints in the system. So the engineering problem was where in the gas flow path to place the LiOH canister. Putting the CM canister where it was supposed to sit in the LM gas flow path just wouldn't work -- too large, wrong shape, wrong flow path, and no way to achieve a good enough seal.

Realizing that the CO2 scrub step could effectively sit anywhere in the gas flow path (i.e., it didn't depend greatly on being the Nth step, or coming before or after certain other steps), the engineers realized that the suit hoses were, in effect, one part of a linear pass-through filter assembly, thus solving the problem of the right-angle change of direction in the LM canister housing. Thus the spent canisters could simply be left in place to retain the seal.
 
This Is Getting To Be Like Shooting Astronauts in a Barrel...

According to NASA documents the Three Amigos in Apollo 13 ran their imaginary ship on 12 amps per hour, that is it, and that is a FACT. TWELVE AMPS. The claim, the bogus NASA claim is a fact, not the "reality" of being in cislunar space running about on 12 amps per hour. That my friends is FAKE, most decidedly NOT A FACT.


Anyhoo, can't scrub the "air" with so little juice, 12 amps, ain't gonna' do it.

Done busted these fools yet again, this time BIG BIG BIG BIG TIME.....
 
Patrick1000 said:
Check this out; 1200 watts or 10 amps to run a 10 cup coffee pot. It would take more juice than that to push that FAKE air through that FAKE scrubber.....
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A coffee pot was not a component of the LM ECS, so no one wanted you to tell us what its power requirements are.

Why don't you look up the actual electrical specifications for the relevant LM ECS fan motor(s) and post them here? Let's see if your 12-amp claim holds up.

By the way, 12 amps is the power rating of your average household vacuum cleaner, including my 16-gallon, 6.5 peak horsepower Shop-Vac that sucks up wood chunks, nails, and loose change through a 2¼-inch hose. Are you really suggesting that it takes that much power to move air through a LiOH canister?
 
Patrick1000 said:
Check this out; 1200 watts or 10 amps to run a 10 cup coffee pot. It would take more juice than that to push that FAKE air through that FAKE scrubber.....


http://www.donrowe.com/inverters/usage_chart.html
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Coffee pot, Apollo... Hmmm, where have I heard that reference before? Is nothing original with you?

BTW, you blew the math, big time. They had enough juice - try again.

Also, where's the PTFE data, the answers to the questions about process photography/videography that were posed to you, whether or not you will debate in person, and if this all came about because you couldn't reconcile some answers you got on various fora regarding the visibility of stars in cislunar space?
 
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PetersCreek said:
Somehow, I think that even if the images resolved individual footprints, Patrick would only claim that the automation equipment of his fantasy wore astronaut boots to further complete the ruse.
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In order to make their story more plausible, NASA sent up a butt-kicking machine.
 
Patrick1000 said:
According to NASA documents the Three Amigos in Apollo 13 ran their imaginary ship on 12 amps per hour, that is it, and that is a FACT. TWELVE AMPS. The claim, the bogus NASA claim is a fact, not the "reality" of being in cislunar space running about on 12 amps per hour. That my friends is FAKE, most decidedly NOT A FACT.


Anyhoo, can't scrub the "air" with so little juice, 12 amps, ain't gonna' do it.

Done busted these fools yet again, this time BIG BIG BIG BIG TIME.....
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We reject your utterly ignorant and childish proclamation. Show us some real calculations that prove it's impossible.
 
Patrick1000 said:
Anyhoo, can't scrub the "air" with so little juice, 12 amps, ain't gonna' do it.
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Begging the question -- argument rejected.

Exactly how many amps does it take to "scrub the air," and how did you compute it?

Patrick1000 said:
Check this out; 1200 watts or 10 amps to run a 10 cup coffee pot.
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And if the LM ECS were a coffee pot, that would mean something.

It would take more juice than that to push that FAKE air through that FAKE scrubber..
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Begging the question -- argument rejected.

Come on, Patrick. You've elected to play engineer again. You're squarely in my domain right now, and you're faking it. Badly.
 
PetersCreek said:
Somehow, I think that even if the images resolved individual footprints, Patrick would only claim that the automation equipment of his fantasy wore astronaut boots to further complete the ruse.
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Looks to me like that picture is not too far from resolving individual footprints. It certainly show the astronauts' tracks.

Yeah, I can imagine Patrick's automatons bouncing around to the crater and back. :rolleyes:
 
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PetersCreek said:
By the way, 12 amps is the power rating of your average household vacuum cleaner, including my 16-gallon, 6.5 peak horsepower Shop-Vac that sucks up wood chunks, nails, and loose change through a 2¼-inch hose.
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A 6 hp suction motor will typically draw 10-12 amps, but also produces standard-atmosphere airflow rates of up to 200 cfm, which is about an order of magnitude more than is required to exchange the cabin air of an LM-sized spacecraft at a biologically sustainable rate.

There is no appreciable resistance to the flow. The LiOH canister impedes airflow about the same as a car air filter does. All you're doing is moving air through it at 20-30 cfm, a fairly leisurely rate.

Patrick got it in his head from his very first post on the subject that the LM ECS was a power hog. He hasn't substantiated that belief in the least. He hoped the published figures would bear out his knee-jerk assumption. What do you expect from someone who didn't even know the LM had its own air-handling system until he was told?
 
PetersCreek said:
A coffee pot was not a component of the LM ECS, so no one wanted you to tell us what its power requirements are.

Why don't you look up the actual electrical specifications for the relevant LM ECS fan motor(s) and post them here? Let's see if your 12-amp claim holds up.

By the way, 12 amps is the power rating of your average household vacuum cleaner, including my 16-gallon, 6.5 peak horsepower Shop-Vac that sucks up wood chunks, nails, and loose change through a 2¼-inch hose. Are you really suggesting that it takes that much power to move air through a LiOH canister?
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Like anyone would want a hose with that much velocity - either suction or return - about one inch from their torso. In a sealed suit, no less - any imbalance'd suck your eardrums out. :rolleyes:
 
Correction

Patrick1000 said:
According to NASA documents the Three Amigos in Apollo 13 ran their imaginary ship on 12 amps per hour, that is it, and that is a FACT. TWELVE AMPS. The claim, the bogus NASA claim is a fact, not the "reality" of being in cislunar space running about on 12 amps per hour. That my friends is FAKE, most decidedly NOT A FACT.


Anyhoo, can't scrub the "air" with so little juice, 12 amps, ain't gonna' do it.

Done busted these fools yet again, this time BIG BIG BIG BIG TIME.....
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Should read 12 amps equivalent to roughly 1500 watts, assuming 120 volt system.

Not sure yet what they were running yet.

At any rate, assuming 1500 wats for now pending further investigation, my claim/contention is that they could not run the scrubber and the other essential systems(radio, blah blah blah) on 1500 watts.
 
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