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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.
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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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.
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 $60 million. That's basically the total NASA spending on the Moon since Apollo - less than 2% of the cost of the Mars missions that have failed!
NASA's negelect of the Moon seems to be continuing, but scheduled for next year we have at least 1 government (ESA's SMART-1) and 1 private (TransOrbital's TrailBlazer
) mission on track. The Japanese space agency also plans a Lunar-A mission that may launch next year. So things are starting to look up!
And for those interested in a exploration and development of the Moon, why not join the Moon Society!
Energy: time to change the picture.
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No, wasn't it Senator William Proxmire with his hugely influential Golden Fleece Awards? Proxmire made a name for himself exposing the government's waste of taxpayer's dollars. The sixties and early seventies were a time of major societal upheaval and strong anti-technological sentiments, sending men to the moon rather than feeding the poor appeared to many as frivolous. Instead they did neither. Some of the decisions weren't too bright. NASA should have claimed the moon really was made of cheese.
The only civilian to walk on the moon was Harrison Schmidt, geologist on Apollo 17, but not the last to step off the surface.
Later elected to the Senate
This space available.
That's probably also how we should explore Mars: keep a control crew in orbit and only land mobile robots, controlled via telepresence from orbit.
-ISS shutdown in progress.
-Shuttle ages, replacement is where?
-budget goes to zero as perpetual war "against terrorism" kicks off and nation becomes more "secure"
-Centinial of flight!
Welcome back National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics! The future is much where you left it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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.
The American government can spend upwards of $200 BILLION dollars to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, install a government to do its bidding, and pillage the country for its natural resources. But we can't spend that same $200 BILLION to open up space.
This is a false dichotomy often used against a government's involvement in war. Unfortunately government spending is not an either-or proposition - if we decided not to go to war with Iraq, it doesn't automatically mean that we have $200 billion to spend on education or the space race.
The U.S. government, for instance, allocates a certain amount of yearly resources to defense spending, regardless of the current political climate. During war or wannabe-war years, that spending increases, and is often deficit spending to address a perceived need. The government usually isn't willing to deficit spend on education or technology, unless absolutely necessary.
Furthermore, you neglected to mention that the United States citizens themselves, not our elected officials, usually vote down spending for social issues (regardless of party affiliation, I might add). So even if it were an either-or dichotomy, we'd still have ourselves to blame.
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.
Jack Schmitt is on of the good guys. I first met him in Washinton, DC in February 1980. I stopped off to see if anything could be done about the pitiful state of military pay, I had just left the Navy. Since Jack was a rookie Senator from New Mexico, (my home state at the time) and was on the Armed services comitee. I went to his office. Bottom line, no appointment, an honest 40 min. of face time. An 11.5 % pay raise in October, and he got a campaign worker for 82. We lost, which really sucks. Jack was not only the lone scientist to walk on the moon but the only civilian. Never in the military at all. I've seen him twice in the last 20 years and he is still a friendly and interesting man. One of the good guys for sure.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
... 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)
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.