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30 Years Since Last Man on the Moon
Honeydipper Dan writes "December 14 marks the 30th anniversary of the last man on the Moon . I haven't noticed any hoopla about this. Perhaps this event raises the subtext of why we haven't been back a little more than the first Moon landing's 30th anniversary did over 3 years ago. The Apollo 17 mission was a great success, however, and deserves to be remembered. It marked the first (and last) time a geologist was on the surface of the Moon. Meanwhile, NASA is commemorating the Wright brothers' flight of December 17, 1903, getting ready for next year's Centennial of Flight."
Apollo 17 represents one of the largest missed chances in American scientific history. What would have been the "science" missions in the Apollo series (18-20) were scrapped because the American TV public didn't want to tune in anymore.
Ugh. It burns me up every time I think about it.
Well, the Space Shuttle is one of the main reasons. It can't go to the Moon, and NASA billed it as the ultimate wonder ship, the future of space travel. So, they can't really go back to capsules. Nothing as heavy and general-purpose as the Space Shuttle can make it to the moon in a reasonable amount of time without costing an arm and a leg. Maybe if we had something like a NERVA engine, but we don't.
we celebrate 40th anniversary of first dog in space.
The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of real NASA achievement. Even the great advancements of the late 90's were just carry-overs from the CCCP vs NASA era. Until China or the EU becomes a real "threat" in the era of space exploration, we won't see any more moon landings.
I'm not really up with the history, but wasn't your good friend and mine Richard Nixon largely responsible for cutting the program, amongst the other acts of bastardry committed in his name?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This is only a big deal if the government has pulled the wool over your eyes and made you believe that the moon landing wasn't a bunch of barbie dolls dressed up in tinfoil, in front of a painted moon backdrop, with a guy from NASA making rocket noises into a microphone!
Now to spread the message to the rest of the world before the black hel!@#!@$()@!*$()W*DAWDWAOIFHWAOIFJWEDOIKAW
NO CARRIER
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I'm not sure about the last man on the moon, but Neil Armstrong was a US Navy pilot according to this NASA bio page.
The last mission was a treaty mission with the martians. I know, I know, martians on the moon? Really it was the best neutral ground to perform negotiations. We simply gave up a few insignificant earthly possessions. This included but not limited to: cow and other livestock mutilations, rights to human extraction and experimentation, and artistic grants with respect to indentures in agricultural area's. With the latter in mind we had no idea it would get so out of hand.... something about an open sourced method they spoke about.
In return for all of these great gifts the aliens gave us excellent insight into the mysterious and powerful microprocessor. While it has taken all of this time just to fully understand and develop from those early examples.
However, it seems to be time to renew the contracts being as the aliens added the Moores Law clause. Damned tricky devils.
Don't worry though, with our next encounter, we are a great deal more advanced now with regards to patent and contract law.
The scorn of the universe really is the lawyer!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I'd like to think that the "last man on the moon" is an event that won't happen for a few more tens of thousands of years. 30th anniv. of the most recent trip to the moon, I'd accept.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
I don't see how we (as citizens of all nations) will go to the moon again. Right now, the focus of the world is on war. Nobody wants to bring up expensive projects up: just look at the ISS, and how people are saying that it is a monstrous waste of money, for America, Russia, and everyone else who is involved. Going to the moon will not bring anything to America. As the saying goes, "been there, done that". It is no longer about a "race" with the Russians, there is nothing to prove.
The only people who might want to prove something, are nations like Japan, China, India and perhaps the ESA. They haven't been to the moon, and they want to prove to the world that they are at a sufficiently advanced technological level that they can do it. Plus they have the bright minds to think of a brilliant and probably cost effective plan.
As for America, I think that our generation (children of the boomers) is lost. We emerged from the greed-filled, "me-only" days of the late 20th century, but our attitudes have not changed. We still like our SUVs, our fast food, but at the same time we like to have our government "lean and cost-efficient". Perhaps our children will awake with a new sense of wonder and will realize the dream of returning to the moon, and perhaps of going beyond to Mars, etc.
Veni, vidi, vici.
He had left the Navy however, and was a civilian test pilot (with NACA/NASA) at the time he joined the astronaut program.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?
Do we really need any more manned missions to the moon? What research can we do with live people that we can't do with cheaper, lighter remote probes? The only real purpose of sending men to the moon was an ego boost for the US during the cold war. Further manned missions to the moon would be an expensive and completely unnecessary venture, unless we finally get around to colonizing the moon. But then, what would be the point of that? Just for fun? Maybe build a huge observatory there that won't be obstructed by an atmosphere?
Repeal the DMCA!
Surprisingly, since Apollo 17 left 30 years ago there were not only no further manned missions, but also almost no further robotic missions. The Moon became a "been there done that" world, when in fact there are still a huge number of mysteries about it.
Apollo could only scratch the surface: they had to be very careful about safe landing spots which favored the relatively rare Mare regions, they couldn't dig more than a couple of meters into the surface, they didn't go anywhere near the poles or the far side, which have quite different terrain and likely mineral deposits, etc. Despite some evidence of volcanic activity only Apollo 14 landed in one of the regions of volcanic interest, and the crew there were the least geologically educated of the lot so the samples taken were not terribly useful. etc. etc.
We have more high-resolution pictures of Mars than we do of the Moon - the only really high-res shots (1 meter or better) were from the Apollo command modules as they circled, and those cover just narrow strips of the Moon's surface.
Missions since Apollo amounted to a handful of Russian Luna missions through 1974, then a long gap, a Japanese experimental flight (HITEN) in the 1980's, and Clementine and Lunar Prospector in the 1990's. Clementine was run by the Dept. of Defense, not NASA, and Lunar Prospector was Alan Binder's baby at Lockheed Martin, done on the cheap for $60 million. That's basically the total NASA spending on the Moon since Apollo - less than 2% of the cost of the Mars missions that have failed!
NASA's negelect of the Moon seems to be continuing, but scheduled for next year we have at least 1 government (ESA's SMART-1) and 1 private (TransOrbital's TrailBlazer
) mission on track. The Japanese space agency also plans a Lunar-A mission that may launch next year. So things are starting to look up!
And for those interested in a exploration and development of the Moon, why not join the Moon Society!
Energy: time to change the picture.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only civilian to walk on the moon was Harrison Schmidt, geologist on Apollo 17, but not the last to step off the surface.
Later elected to the Senate
This space available.
that was some good LSD.
But we can't spend that same $200 BILLION to open up space. You want to distract folks from the shitty assed economy? Spend that money on a space program. "We'll colonise the Moon!"
Pumping that much green into a space program and supporting programs (like EDUCATION) can fuel a renaissance in science and buck up the economy, realise orbital microwave power stations, and will spawn countless spin-off technologies.
Isn't that something to get patriotic about? Something to unify the country about? Something that will make our neighbors look upon us as friends rather than some dillhole bully that's going to whack them and steal their stuff?
That's probably also how we should explore Mars: keep a control crew in orbit and only land mobile robots, controlled via telepresence from orbit.
-ISS shutdown in progress.
-Shuttle ages, replacement is where?
-budget goes to zero as perpetual war "against terrorism" kicks off and nation becomes more "secure"
-Centinial of flight!
Welcome back National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics! The future is much where you left it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"...that's no moon"
- Meanwhile, NASA is commemorating the Wright brothers' flight of December 17, 1903, getting ready for next year's Centennial of Flight."
Ha! Do you really believe in this stuff? If you look at the photos of the Wright Brothers' flight, you can see that they've obviously been faked with Adobe Photoshop. The shadows point in the wrong direction, and there are numerous other inconsistencies.Find free books.
There are a lot of scientific reasons to go back to the Moon - first a lot of questions about the Moon itself, and the early history of the solar system that can be learned from lunar cratering. Of most interest in this is the South Pole - Aitken basin, which is mostly on the far side; the south polar regions of this very deep basin have craters that may hold water ice and other cometary debris. But the basin material is itself of some geological interest, and a sample-return mission to this area was listed as one of the highest priorities in planetary science in the recent NRC decadal survey.
:-) Retirement to the Moon's low gravity might become a major draw as well.
Second, for science, is the potential of the Moon as a platform for observation of the rest of the universe. A lunar telescope has the same lack-of-atmosphere advantages of Hubble, but could be constructed much larger than is possible for a free-space telescope (with current technology) with use of in-situ materials. This is particularly important for infrared and ultraviolet/x-ray astronomy, for which much of the spectrum is almost completely attenuated in the Earth's atmosphere and space is the only real option. It makes a lot of sense to base the next generation of space telescopes on the Moon, though I have not seen much movement in this direction, other than some early-stage proposals.
Space solar power is considered by many to be the only long-term solution to Earth's energy needs that meets both global energy and environmental requirements over the next 50 years. Making use of lunar materials, possibly even generating the power on the Moon, is the only realistic option for building these things on the scale needed. If this globe could ever manage to get its act together and move beyond carbon-based fuels to invest in the future, the Moon has a major role to play.
Finally, space tourism has been in the news, and private companies are starting to look at orbiting hotels and lunar excursions - for those who can pay of course. With the right price, demand can be expected to be huge
So the Moon has a bright future - if we could just pay it a bit of attention with all the other distractions the world has to offer these days!
Energy: time to change the picture.
I've said it before here, and I'll say it again now: I think it's a disgrace that we've not been back to the Moon in 30 years.
I find it really annoying to read about these chicken-shit science experiments they conduct on the Shuttle or ISS about things like plant reproduction in zero gravity. Whoop-dee-do. If we had made a concerted effort to build and maintain a moon base over the past 30 years, I bet we'd have learned way more than we have so far.
The moon is there. It's an island in the sky. It's a natural satellite of our planet. It's begging to be populated.
I will be very excited the day I see another man step foot on the moon. I hope I live that long.
We're not safe. We'll never be "safe".
You cannot prevent another 9/11 type attack. You cannot make America "safe" no matter how many jackbooted thugs you put on the street, no matter how many unconstitutional patriotic-sounding acts you pass, no matter how many citizens you spy on, and no matter how many informants you recruit.
9/11 is a direct result of American foreign policy. The United States funded, armed, and trained the asswipes that planned that attack.
The best way to ensure that something like 9/11 never happens again is to (drum-roll) turn American foreign policy on its ear. Stop invading other countries, stop overthrowing other countries governments, stop murdering their leaders, stop stealing their natural resources.
I'm all for rooting out the ones responsible for 9/11 and seeing them receive a fair trial and just punishment, whether they lurk in a cushy Washington D.C. office or in a dank Afghani cave.
It is clear to me that moon exploration was abandoned not for political or scientific reasons, but because the critical resource sought--cheese--was found only in very small and unfonduable nuggets.
The 1953 development of Cheez-Whiz sparked an explosion in industrial demand for malleable cheese. Due to the perceived economic cheesemine in orbit, the space program was accelerated, principally by the ironically un-cheesy JFK.
By 1973, malleable cheese was reaching its zenith. Fondue pots outsold crockpots for the first--and last--time in US history.
Unfortunately, even with a trained geologist aboard and a specially-designed slightly cheesy vehicle at their disposal, the Apollo 17 mission was unable to find any sufficiently malleable cheese to justify future missions.
In a moderately successful effort to recoup their immense investment in cheese research, NASA leaked a derivative food-preparation technology to the market, leading to that year's introduction of the Cuisinart.
Subsequent experiments in using the Cuisinart to process traditional cheese have proven relatively disappointing.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
The landings on the moon was a technological aberration that only occured at great expense in money, manpower and time. For example, if Queen victoria had thrown enough resources at Charles Babbage, they might have created a computer as powerful as the first electric computer. this would have been a technological achievement at the time as landing a man on the moon. Even if babbage and whatever people were on his team had succeeded, the technological underpinnings for a practical computer were not in place yet. Eniac may have been built in the 30s or late 20's instead due to the leaps from the project, but it wouldnt have started the revolution itself. The same can be said for the apollo program. Many technologies were advanced due to the program, fuel cells, computers, powder based drink mixes, but the ability to travel to other planets wasnt one of them. Also keep in mind that these things take time. The Americas werent colonized in 1493, or 1494 or 1524. The first real colonies came in the late 1500's and colonization began in earnest in the early 1600s, over 100 years after it was proven that america could be accessed reliably from europe by sea. Space is at least as hostile an environment to us now as the sea was to sailors in the 15th century. We will get into space, but i t will take time, and we will go there for the same reason europeans came to america: to get rich. Just as soon as they figure out how.
so there's no materials there to build things out of (like radiation shielding, for which the more mass, the better, basically...)
:-)
The reason for dropping in on the Moon is because the Moon has an enormous mass of material that is in a much shallower gravity well than Earth's (and twice as shallow as Mars' as well). The only reason for using lunar resources is to provide the materials needed for long-term habitation of deep space. That means mining, and industrial activity, on the Moon. It'll happen, count on it!
And join the Moon Society if you want to be a part of it
Energy: time to change the picture.
Being a baffled Foreigner to American Humor and Customs, I won't presume to know for absolutely certain if the previous poster was very serious or not when suggesting that the gubmink dun pulled a fast one on the world for 30 years with the old Art Bell chestnut, THE MOON HOAX.
o rg/
If you listen to these people, Human Space Travel is impossible on account of astronauts getting microwaved in the Very Deadly Van Allen Belts.
Further, the lunar laser ranging reflectors placed on the lunar surface by astronauts on the six manned landings are fictious (albeit used every day by astronomers (no doubt "in on it") gauging the Earth-Moon distance), and the returned moon rocks from the same missions, studied in universities and research institutions all over the world (Including former adversaries China and the Soviet Union and East Bloc countries during the cold war) - are fake.
You getting the picture? According to the Art Bell people with tinfoil hats, all those research institutions, observatories and science labs worldwide are "In On It", and have for thirty years been faithfully colluding with the United States gubmink, to flawlessly stage and engineer this grand deception. Not to mention that the hundreds of thousands of people who built the Apollo project and the giant moon vehicles in the 1960s are all no doubt gubermink stooges.
Please visit this site for a solid debunking of all such speculation:
http://www.clavius.org/
More good stuff to unclutter minds:
http://www.badastronomy.com/
http://www.randi.
http://www.nasastooge.fsnet.co.uk/
Regds.
You got it wrong!
Not only have the Americans bee nto the moon, but they also made us believe that the Apollo program was cancelled to make us feel it was worthless to go there. That way they can continue the construction of their military space station* on the dark side of the moon.
*Why did you think NASA cuts budget for ISS? They don't want to spend too much money to help a toy project that may compete with their military space base but they couldn't refuse to participate, so they went in and tried to sabotage the project from inside, making it look like the incompetence that they have been faking since the 70's**. They even bribed the Russian space agency, now that they also are capitalist pigs, so that people wouldn't put all the blame on them.
**Why do you think that so many Mars missions failed in the last few decades? It's because they wanted to get ultra secret gear there and if people believe that what they sent there was destroyed it won't be suspicious like if they had sent something without a cover story and every astronomer would have asked what it was.
Note: It's supposed to be funny but it's 5.20 AM, I didn't sleep yet and I'm French, so if it isn't funny I got some excuses, so give me a break, okay?
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
and the American Geophysical Union! Eugene Schumaker, comet finder extraordinaire and major player in the Apollo missions, spent his life with USGS.
:-)
Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets is a major journal on the study of the composition and geological history of the Moon and planets in our solar system.
So geology hasn't been restricted to study of the earth for quite a long time now
Energy: time to change the picture.
... to these kinds of short-sighted actions. He was going after NASA, trimming a 100K here and a 100K there, while other programs were blowing millions of dollars.
It also didn't help that the space program didn't directly benefit dairy farmers. (Proxmire was a senator for Wisconsin, IIRC.) Anything not directly giving money to dairy subsidies got attacked or otherwise "investigated" by Proxmire.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The lack of gravity in the ISS is not a bug: it's a feature!
You can "reproduce" gravity by spinning the spaceship: while it would be more confortable for humans, one of the goal of being up there is to lear what happen to people and material in 0G environement..
Beside on the moon there is gravity, just 1/6 of Earth's gravity, so the effect on the bone/muscle should be much lower.
we blew the moon up 30yrs ago accidentally. what's up there now is just a large plastic model we put there so nobody would find out.
I have to disagree. The Space Shuttle is a politically compromised vehicle with no place to go. It has failed to live up to its promise of reliable, cheap and frequent access to orbit. The capability to build and sustain a permanent human presence in Earth orbit should have come in the context of creating infrastructure to support missions to explore and exploit the Moon, Mars and the rest of the Solar System. Lacking the vision and the courage to actually commit to going someplace , we have instead conjured up the ISS, an expensive dead-end that appears to be little more than a more polished version of Mir.
While scientific research is a major and obvious component of space exploration, it is not and should not be the major motivation. Space exploration and exploitation should be driven by familiar human drives of wealth, power, greed, curiosity, freedom, etc., that have always sustained human expansion.
The greatest contribution the scientific and engineering community could make to space exploration right now is the development of propulsion technology that provides at least an order of magnitude increase in lift and speed capability. We aren't going anywhere as long as we're dependent on wimpy chemical rockets.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I was there for the launch of Apollo 17. Four of us piled into a Pinto (I remember that vividly - I was the smallest of the group, and had to sit in the middle of the back seat!) and drove down from upstate South Carolina to see it go up.
Apollo 17 was the first (and I believe only) night launch of a Saturn V - it went up just after midnight Florida time. There have been many Shuttle night launches, but that's not the same - the Shuttle has roughly the same thrust as the first stage of a Saturn V, but weighs much less, so by comparison it jumps off the pad.
When Apollo 17 fired up, it was like an instant sunrise, and it stayed that way while the rocket slowly clambered up the tower. It must have confused wildlife for fifty miles around.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.