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Apollo 11's 35th Anniversary
colonist writes "35 years ago, on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 began to achieve the goal set by the late President Kennedy: '...before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth'. On July 20, Michael Collins orbited the moon in the command module Columbia while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface in the lunar module Eagle. The descent engine was halfway through its final 12-minute burn when a yellow caution light lit up on the display of the lunar module computer. [ARMSTRONG: Program Alarm... It's a 1202. ALDRIN: 1202. (Pause) ARMSTRONG: (To Buzz) What is it? Let's incorporate (the landing radar data). (To Houston) Give us a reading on the 1202 Program Alarm.] Buzz Aldrin's recollection: 'Back in Houston, not to mention on board the Eagle, hearts shot up into throats while we waited to learn what would happen. We had received two of the caution lights when Steve Bales the flight controller responsible for LM computer activity, told us to proceed... We received three or four more warnings but kept on going. When Mike, Neil, and I were presented with Medals of Freedom by President Nixon, Steve also received one. He certainly deserved it, because without him we might not have landed.' Fred Martin describes the incidents, and Peter Adler looks at the design of the system."
Not just to Apollo 11, but to me! :)
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Personally, I prefer The Onion's coverage of the event. Fair and balanced, you might say.
For anyone who has HBO and hasn't seen it, there is a twelve part 'docudrama' on HBO called "From Earth to the Moon". It covers the all the Apollo missions and is absolutely fascinating. It is available now if you have On Demand.
Green LED of Near Death.
And marvel at what was, and think back of what we thought could be, and see what is, I ask simply WHY?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Written by the mission controller throughout the whole thing.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Were they running Slackware in the LEM, or was the crew just a couple of members of the Church of the SubGenius?:
"109:19:48 Armstrong: Okay. Need a little slack? (No answer; Long Pause) You need more slack, Buzz?
109:20:40 Aldrin: No. Hold it just a minute."
Buzz had enough Slack. You be the judge.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Our local cowboy might want to change that link.
and we haven't done much at all comparable since.
That's not to say that NASA hasn't done some great things since or recently (Hubble, Pathfinder, Opportunity and Spirit, Voyager, Pioneer all spring to mind immediately), but there hasn't been a significant excursion into space by mankind since the last Apollo mission.
Well, maybe the ISS counts for something in that regard. *shrug*
my pet machine
There is an interesting Book out now called Lost in Space : The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375 421505/qid=1089999998/sr=8-6/ref=pd_ka_6/002-29955 58-2684827?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 ) which deals with this time in the history as well as the current time. I've been hearing that it is rather good and gives you an understanding of how NASA came to be the great beurocracy it is now ...
My Web Site - www.ocean-liners.com
I heard they had an HP 65 programmable calculator (the original PC (!)with a card reader) on that mission and that they actually had to use it as a backup. Can anyone confirm this?
In wartime... truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. (Churchill)
...the greatest achievement man has done yet - I was 10 at the time, and can still remember looking up to the moon and thinking men were walking about on it
Nick
The Dish.
Man, this is such a troll but I'll bite.
Getting to the moon was an unbelievably complex and difficult thing to do. in retrospect it seems doable since we know it's been done but keep in mind that this was the first time this was all done.
Keeping a system of mechanical, electrical and information systems working together flawlessly is beyond most engineering feats today. If a single thing went wrong back then it could have meant the failure of the mission and loss of crew not to mention international shame. Some of the best minds in the world worked in this so to call them dumb is both ignorant and an insult to their effort.
ok, I'm done venting.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Members of the model/amateur/experimental rocket community are holding a celebration of sorts online. Rocketers are invited to logon to The Rocketry Forum (http://rocketryforum.com) and be onine across the time point Tuesday, July 20, 10:56:15 PM EDT. This is 35 years to the second from Armstrong's "one small step". Many will be in chat, but the main point is to get as many people logged onto the board as possible during that time. Even if you've just a passing interest, drop by and check it out, and help out with the numbers just by being there. Or sign up (free) and hang around.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
These new high tech computers tell us clearly everything we need to know.
35 years ago we put a man on the moon.. Pretty awesome if you ask me.
What kills me is that people exclaim how the iPOD, XBOX or Furby is "revolutionary" or will change how the world does [insert buzzword here].
I wonder how many high school students today even know we put a man on the moon...
(Impressive how I can keep typing while on fire, isn't it? Now where was I? Oh yeah.)
Aaaghhhhh!!!!!!! Help ME!!!!
Kennedey was not a war president. Instead of using the military industrial complex to float the US economy, like many presidents, he used NASA. This gave the people a goal and boosted the nations pride without having to stomp on a smaller nation. If the US spent half of the military budget on NASA our world would look far different. Science and technology have shown their ability to create massive wealth and prosperity. Look at what a tech focus did for the Clinton era. Let's revive the NASA era. Afterall we only have a few billion years left before this rock is engulfed by the sun. Possibly less than one hundred years before our lust with war obliterates our home.
WURD!!
picture of Apollo 11 Command Module today (on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum)
Wheres the mention of the most infamous mistake ever?
"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"
should of been
"One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind"
I like muppets.
...we put a man on the moooooon...
*turns radio off*
I hate that song.
And here's a link to one of the better articles I've read on the AGC...
C om puter.html
http://www.free-definition.com/Apollo-Guidance-
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Interesting that the tin foil brigade hasn't appeared yet to claim that the entire landing was faked.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
You had to join the military
AND You had to get more degrees than a thermometer
2. How many of you think that "Apollo" is only a character on "Battlestar Gallactica"
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
gave Armstrong the bird, and although it was excrutiating they did it as hard as they've ever done it before.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I didn't realize that the subgenuis thing was in reference to something else.
Blaze a trail to the New World
For those of you who are non-American, let me explain: In America, we have become SO polarized that the moment a democrat says something, a republican immediately says "why it's wrong/why he's REALLY doing it for some evil purpose" - and vice versa. I guarentee you, Al Franken has already decided that whatever Bush will do in 2006 (if elected) is already wrong, EVEN BEFORE HEARING IT! Same way that republicans ALWAYS said clinton was wrong (When Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, Republicans said it was only to distract us from Monica). And yes, Rush already agrees with whatever Bush agrees with and hates Hilary Clinton's Senate bills even before they're presented. This goes both ways.
Today, had president X said that we have to unite as a nation and go to Mars by 2016, the other side would immediately say "It's stupid/useless/waste of money/just a distraction from (problem Y)."
Was Kennedy's space-race politically motivated? Yeah. Is it a good thing it happened? From my point of view... definately. Science doesn't know politics. Martian soil doesn't really care about WMDs or Gay Marriage. I hope that the next leader to make such a bold statement is met with some sort of unity, and not bickering. (But it won't).
As Chris Rock said in his latest comedy special about partisan politics: "Anyone who decides on an issue... before hearing the issue... is abolutely f*@&ing crazy!"
When I was eight or nine years old a neighbor gave me a copy of The Invasion of the Moon 1969 by Peter Ryan. I've read it at least a dozen times since then.
It's a paperback, mostly consisting of transcripts of the communications between Mission Control and the Apollo 11 mission, with commentary and explanation interspersed.
Sadly, the book is long out of print, but you can find used copies through the usual sources. I bought one a couple years ago for a friend who read mine and liked it.
I was 8 when they landed on the Moon. I remember having an Apollo 11 poster, a nice commemorative book from the local Gulf Oil gas station, a nice leather-bound book on the history of scape flight, and more space books than I can count. Looking up at the moon and thinking that people were there made a huge impression on me because I have always wanted to visit any visible, yet distant, location. My parents even used my fascination with space to encourage me to do better in school.
It's too bad that we don't have such noble and exciting frontiers these days. I now wonder if increasing energy costs and environment/safety concerns have pushed humanity over the hill into the caution that afflicts the middle-aged.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If the moon landing was real, how come they didn't find these guys?
Not entirely true, but mostly, since the first man to set foot on the Moon was actually one of the very few civilians in the program, as was the last, geologist Jack Schmitt.
Although the article above links to a portion of this site, the full Lunar Surface Journal offers an incredibly detailed look at the Apollo program, including audio, video, and high resolution images from the missions. Be warned, you will spend hours there :).
www.lonseidman.com
Since Tom Hanks was up in space? I must say Tom is a great astronaut and a hero to all of us for his efforts in outterspace.
.... .................
Drifting forward just a little.
That's good.
Contact light.
Shut down.
Okay. Engine stop.
ACA out of detent.
Out of detent. Auto.
Mode control, both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off. 413 is in.
We copy you down eagle.
Engine arm is of. Houston, Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.
Roger Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thank you.
I wasnt born then. Still there is a lump in my throat when I read those words. I wish I am alive when we hear something along these lines when we touch down on the Red Planet..or even farther..
Wish for a moment, we could stop all this crap going around and remember those brave souls who perished in our urge to leap higher and honor their souls by setting higher goals and achieve them.
Rapid Nirvana
NASA employees have been invited to a celebration at the Air & Space museum. I'm trying to get one of our attractive interns to go with me.
:)
Think about it, a night at the Air and Space museum with fellow NASA geeks, an attractive female, and Buzz Aldrin!
This will be the best night of my life!
I have an old Boeing tee shirt I wear that asks that simple question on the front. In the six plus years or so I have been wearing it on a regular basis, I'd say that 95% of people that whole time didn't even know what the significance of the date represented. No kidding. When I'd wear it to work, I'd regularly get, "Wasn't born yet...," or usually just a quizical look in response to the reading the question across my chest.
I clearly remember watching the famous walk on the 20th, but as an 8 year old thoroughly enjoying his summer vacation, I was also really into the whole space thing and got up early to watch the launch and watched all the news updates on TV. 1969 was a really nice summer. =)
A major stop on NASA's space center tour is the moonwalking shrine.The tour leader beams with pride, but I am saddened by NASA's lack of progress in manned space exploration the past 35 years. Its a dusty old museum of past glories.
Of course, if you're reading this, we'll have to eliminate you too.
Probably shouldn't have posted it, then. Rather thoughtless, really. Oh, well.
In the 60s we looked ahead, learned from failure, tried again and landed on the moon.
Now when we fail, we look back, assign blame, postpone, assign blame, and postpone some more.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
All the funding at NASA never went to a nobler effort than getting this man his oral sex.
Happy Anniversary, Mr. Gorsky!
It's a shame we didn't decide to stay there. It's like they thought that going to the moon, yeah big deal. Let's never do that again. But one day we will be back... hopefully trying to take back all the time we wasted by not going anywhere again.
Can be found here
It was sounded because the computer was receiving more instructions than it could handle and it was getting to the point where it would have just stopped executing them, leading to an abort.
Rapid Nirvana
Back then engineers ran the show. They could make things go.
We are the Pakleds. We search for things to make us go. We like things that make us go. Can you make us go?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You can't seriously believe that the moon doesn't exist. You are such a conspiracy theory zealot. That's just over the top.
The moon exists - get over it. We just haven't gone there yet. Here's proof.
That's because the moon landing hoax theory has about as much support as the flat earth theory nowadays. Telescopes can see the landing site, for example. See Unca Cecil's column and this site for more. And of course Buzz has the best nutcase response.
What's "right for the country"?
While it is important to recognize the Liberal Myth of the "Moon", it is even more important to pay attention to the stupendous fabrication of the so called "Earth". The notion that a collection of rocks and water could float willy-nilly through space around a so-called "Sun", somehow holding people onto it's surface, and keeping an atmosphere around it in just enough quantity that we all didn't suffocate is asinine. Those of us who recognize and accept our place here on the Ark find comfort in it's explicit limits.
In addition to the achievement in general, I have to applaud the project management and communication effort. Lots of hardware from different vendors, schedules, specs, etc. I hazard a guess that most companies today fail at this.
old joke
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11 /a11.1201-fm.html
Quoting Fred H. Martin, At the time Deputy director of mission development;
'I remember bumping into one of our M.I.T. engineers, George Silver, who was usually at our office at Cape Kennedy. George had been involved in and witnessed many pre-flight tests. I asked him in frustration if he had ever seen the Apollo Guidance Computer run slowly and under what conditions. To my surprise and rather matter of fact, he said he had. He called it "cycle stealing" and he said it can occur when the I/O system keeps looking for data. He had seen it when the Rendezvous Radar Switch was on (in the AUTO position) and the computer was looking for radar data. He asked "the Switch isn't on, is it?" "Why would it be on for Descent, it's meant for Ascent?" '
Sorry, this is embarassing but I cant seem to figure out how to make the URL's link to articles, and none of the 'allowed HTML' seems to work for that purpose. I would appreciate if someone could explain to me how that works!
My 4 year old daughter keeps telling me that she wants to take me to a picnic on the moon.
Here's to hope.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
Tranquility Base: This is Tranquility Base. The Eagle has Landed. Jesus H. Christ, Houston. We're on the fucking moon. Over.
HOUSTON: Roger, Tranquility, we copy you. We cannot believe you are walking on the fucking moon. Repeat: Cannot Fucking believe it. Over.
Tranquility: It was a smooth touchdown. The moon, for Christ's sake, the moon. Over.
HOUSTON: Roger that. Roger that. You're clear for T1, walking on the moon.
Tranquility: We copy. Walking on moon. Jesus. Over.
Soon thereafter:
HOUSTON: Tranquility?
Tranquility: Holy (pause) living (long pause) fuck. (Long pause) Fuck!
HOUSTON: Tranquility, do you copy?
Tranquility: Are you fucking believing this? Over.
HOUSTON: We read you. Over.
Tranquility: I abso-fucking-lutely am standing on the surface of the fucking moon. I am talking to you from the god-damned fucking moon. Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket.
HOUSTON: Holy Shit.
Eh, the whole story is better, so go read it. Those are just a couple exerpts. Someone tell me why we could do it 35 years ago, but it would take 8 years to do it today? To those who would say it holds no value: screw you. It made the whole country (and large parts of the world) dream for a couple decades. Hell, for a few the dream has yet to die. There are value benefits you can't describe in a spreadsheet sometimes.
There was no valid scientific reason for sending men to the moon either. Everything they did could've been done cheaper and more safely with probes.
What the ISS *is* good for (if they'd ever fund it to allow it to be) would be a good launch point for probes and satellites. Assuming you can get the shuttle program back on-line, you'd just lift up the parts you need, assemble at the station and launch from there. Surely that has to be cheaper than building a one-shot custom use heavy lift rocket to get a satellite into orbit.
... and gate level ICs. Reminds me of the projects I worked in the early 80's.
Dude, please, don't talk like Jar-Jar.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
I have been reading Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct (borrowed from my father-in-law) and yesterday I came to a conclusion. I must mention that I have some very deeply held political ideology: I am a strong anarcho-libertarian. I believe all taxation ought to be repealed, the purpose of government ought to be limited to defense of rights against aggression, important government projects like space exploration ought to be handled through voluntary donation and/or private enterprise, and government ought to relinquish its monopoly and allow competing governments to be set up within the same geographic region.
HOWEVER
Reading Mars Direct yesterday I suddenly found myself just amazingly mad. Yes, space exploration ought to be handled by private enterprise ... but the reforms needed to bring about the ideal libertarian society I believe would handle this are decades off and will probably not occur in my lifetime. Meanwhile, the government is still taking our money ... and what are we getting for it? Mankind has not set foot on the moon in my lifetime, and even if he did I'm not sure what it would accomplish. But Mars has been sitting there, waiting. How many billions of dollars have been spent on the space program since man landed on the moon in 1969, and why have those billions of dollars not gotten us to Mars?
If they are going to take my money away to support space exploration, something I would have voluntarily given my contributions for, they ought to at least produce what they promise to deliver. But we're sitting on earth, noone is in transit to Mars, and noone is there to look at these emissions of ammonia and methane to see if it's rocks or life.
And the saddest thing of all is ... for a mere 20 billion dollars, someone could be sitting there right now to answer our questions for us. That's awful.
So yesterday I threw a lot of my principles out the window. Yes, I don't believe space exploration should be handled by governments instead of private industry ... but for crying out loud, it ought to be handled, somehow! And we shouldn't have to wait until my grandchildren have grandchildren to see it. It can be done, now for $20 billion. It ought to start TODAY. George Bush (I like him; I know many of you do not) should be on the news, announcing that we have a plan to take us to Mars in less than 10 years for 20 billion dollars, and it starts today. Congress ought to be passing the paperwork as we speak. This is more important than just about any other political issue. This is about the future of the human race. Are we going to stagnate, or are we going to explore the new frontier?
And you know what? That $20 billion is trivial. Governments spend that all the time. That's less than 1% of the national debt. And after all the trouble we went to to get a balanced budget, we're currently running a deficit again. Look, if we can pay off $3 trillion (that was the national debt when I was about 15; I don't know what it is, now) at some unidentified future date, we can pay off another $20 billion at some unidentified future date. Quit whining, borrow the money, and do it! The plans are sitting on your desk.
NASA could be scrapped and we'd free up $15.5 billion for this project. But actually if we spread the plan out over ten years, it's only $2 billion. Half of NASA's plans are silly float humans in LEO plans that are doing nothing, anyway. (Many of these are designed to research irrelevant Mars mission scenarios, like long term effects to zero-g. Mars Direct provides for spinning the transit vehicle (duh!) to provide gravity. What a waste!) Drop a few of those, free up the money, and do it. Better yet, forget NASA altogether. Let NASA go ahead with their work (yes, much of it is excellent; I'm just in rant mode; the rovers are great, the probes are great, but the places we are sending humans stink). Meanwhile, we could just increase
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
On the subject of getting us out of Low Earth Orbit again, one month ago NASA organized a workshop to brainstorm and refine ideas for cash prizes, as part of the Centennial Challenges Program. I was on their web site, and noticed that a Post-Workshop Report is now available. There's quite a bit of good information there regarding possible prizes.
Here's a list of possible prize goals which were examined in detail (from TOC):
- Precision Lander
- Astronaut Glove
- Mobile Power Breakthrough
- Micro Reentry Vehicle
- Robot Triathlon
- Lunar Processing Demo
- Quantum Computer
- Lunar Landing
- Telerobotic Race
- General Aviation
- 3-Dimensional Detector
- Autonomous Earth Analog Sample Return
- Long-Duration Cryogenic Propellant Storage Tank
- Perpetual (30-Day) UAV
- Aircraft Engine
- Deployable Telescopes
- Aerocapture
- Autonomous UAV Cargo Hauler
- Human Radiation Shielding
- Solar Sail Race
- Rover Survivor
- Planetary Surface Power Transmission
- Extreme Environment Computer
- Mars Com/Nav Micromission
- Autonomous Drill
- Nanotube Tether
- In-Situ Life Detector
- Asteroid Mission
- Miniature Robotic Flyer
- Human Space Flight - Orbiter Technology
- Human Space Flight - Suborbital Flight
- Human Space Flight - PVT APOLLO 8
- Education
- Suborbital Flights for Scientific Payloads
those highschool kids are in
you know a billion chinese are taught the moon landings were a fraud
and if you look at some of the evidence the people who claim teh moon landing was a hoax provide some of it is interesting at least...
personally teh most compelling evidence is the fact that the astronauts themselves won't talk publically about it and went from being party animals to recluses before/after the mission
i'm sure the assholes with teh tinfoil comments will start but not having an open mind to the possibilities that exist makes you dangerously narrowminded.
frankly even if they didn't go the boost in tech theyg ot developing shit to go was worth the money and the effort, and personally i'd like to see the same kinds of efforts expended on something like a mars colony, which people have plausible modular plans that would have bases there within 5-10 yeras starting right now instead of 20+ or whatever GWB's bullshit speech du jour said
Back in those days they could (literally) kick the computers and they would come back on and amazingly, start to work right!
I still recall the Apollo 10 launch when they got hit by that massive lightning bolt that KOed their telemetery power and guidance. The EECON controller, John Aaron had a split-second decision to make when he saw the CM's telemetery go ratty. His call to flight, "Switch SDS to AUX" had 10's crew scrambling to figure out where the switch was at: "dammit, were is that switch at?" They finally found the switch and the data started to stream back to Houston, showing that the guidance system was nominal and the vehicle was on track.
Poor Ole Pete Conrad was giggling all the way into orbit after that...
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
...it's outstanding. "Failure is not an Option" is it's name and I heartily recommend it. I agree with another poster that he wears his pro USA heart on his sleeve at times, but why the hell not, those guys have a lot to be proud of (I'm not American, to be clear).
/sarcasm
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
Actually it's a lot more expensive to do it that way. Each shuttle launch was what $500 million? One shot satellites are the way to go. Launching to an orbiting point to launch to another orbit just doesn't make sense.
The reasons to go to the moon were largely political but the long term goal is to expand the reach of earth life and to make us a multi-planet species. No amount of robots will ever do that.
Blaze a trail to the New World
I have the proof which has never been seen on Slashdot before, its here
- Landing
- Post Landing Activities
- EVA Preparations
- One Small Step
- Mobility and Photography
- EASEP Deployment and Close-out
- Trying to Rest
- The Return to Orbit
These transcripts also have RealAudio (blergh, but better than nothing I guess
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
We looked at the 4 inch thick book of astronaut procedures and there it was -- they were supposed to put [the Rendezvous Radar Switch] on (in the AUTO position) prior to Descent. The computer had been looking for radar data. ...
Glenn Lunney, the Flight Director, calmly told the astronauts to "please put the Rendezvous Radar Switch in the Manual position".
So the users (astronauts) were doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Those guys had a well of trust a mile deep and nerves of steel. Their lives were in the hands of people on the planet below. Any wrongly executed instruction could have been life-threatening. Space was no place for people who could not follow orders.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Although he claimed that he wasn't bitter about being left in the command module, Michael Collins spent his time alone by replacing Neil Armstrong's Tang with Metamucil and reversing the direction on the toilet hose.
During their training, the Apollo 11 astronauts were taught to identify over 1200 varieties of cheese, "just in case..."
Buzz Aldrin's capsule record of 72 zero-G somersaults before puking has never been broker.
Mission Control was commanded to whisper while Buzz Aldrin was hitting a golf ball.
The following conversation occurred during one of the lunar rover expiditions, but was quickly hushed up:
Buzz Aldrin stated that his biggest regret was that he 3-putted Mare Imbrium.
"I'm gonna be a famous hero. Just like Neil Armstrong and those other brave guys no one ever heard of."
Yeah, they're expensive. But if you "multi-task" the shuttles so that they're doing combination duties of sending up supplies, crewmen rotation, etc... Stuff that would've had to have been done anyway... you can (in theory) knock down some of the fixed cost by sending up satellite components as well.
I'm all for expanding the reach of earth life, but to play devil's advocate here... What's the point of sending out human "contamination" to the rest of the cosmos?
You wish.
;)
The ISS is actually pretty crummy, as-is, for a launch point outside of Earth orbit. American boosters lose performance hitting it, and the high inclanation means that it's a poor parking orbit for launching to anything in the solar system.
The thing about humans is they are great in a pinch in ways that computers can't match. Mike "Balls of steel" Melvill, pilot of SpaceShip One, was able to reboot the computer and hand-fly it on one flight, and then deal with a guidance problem on the record-breaking flight. Well, that, and they can be manufactured with unskilled labor and readily available materials.
See, the real problem is that they should have tabled the space station for 5-10 years after the Challenger blew up, to give them time to develop something with a better cost per pound to orbit than the shuttle has. Most of the problems of space travel would be far easier if not for the simple economics that it costs thousands of dollars per pound to get to orbit.
Gentoo Sucks
Alane would probably give an Isp of about 300-310 sec in an actual rocket. While that's very good for a solid, and is competitive with LOX/Kerosene, it's nowhere near Lox/LH2 which is typically about 450 sec for a good engine such as the SSME or newer RL-10s.
Takes some time to grok it :)
There was no valid scientific reason for sending men to the moon either. Everything they did could've been done cheaper and more safely with probes.
A probe would not have landed safely with the radar/computer problems on Apollo 11. A probe not have been able to set SCE to AUX to recover from the lightning strike on Apollo 12. Apollo 13 would never have made it home without the astronauts on board. Apollo 14 would not have landed had it not been for the Astronaut that punched in the new program instructions to ignore the faulty Abort switch.
A probe would not have seen a unique rock formation and decided on its own to investigate. Credit Geologist/Astronaut Harrison "Jack" Schmitt (Apollo 17) with that one!
Granted, the Astronauts don't see the infrared/ultraviolet bands of the spectrum as well as a probe can. Rather than focusing solely on manned or unmadded exploration, the logical path is a combination of both.
He's the worst kind of troll that exists. Not only is he trolling, but he stole that troll from someone else.
I was in third grade when this happened. We did no class work that day, we all sat in our chairs transfixed by the television brought into the classroom that day for the sole purpose of watchine every single minute of the live coverage of the landing. I still get goosebumps thinking about it....
if electricity is created by electrons, is morality created by morons?
When I was born no living person had walked on the moon.
Now a very few living people have walked on the moon.
By the time I die we will once more live in a world where no living person has walked on the moon.
Doom. Quake. Unreal Tournament. All games where you play the role of a hero against insurmountable odds. All deliciously showy and fun as hell. But... Could you step into the shoes of an actual hero and land Apollo 11?
Download Eagle Lander 3D and find out. From their home page:
I don't know about anyone else, but this simple simulation has somewhat skewed my view of FPS games. I have passable 5k1llz in QuakeWorld and UT, but they are absolutely useless trying to land a LEM. Patience and attention to detail are the key here, not twitch-and-fire. (You couldn't "twitch" a LEM, anyway.) I've played Eagle Lander a bit, and I'm no damn good at it.
Think about that for a second. I've wrecked a LEM several times in this game/simulator. Hey, no big deal, right? Just restart the game. Now, think about Neil Armstrong, sitting there in the middle of what's essentially the ultimate desert, a half million miles from home, being watched by a billion people, flying this tiny little metal can, trying to kiss the surface of the moon. Granted, he had years of training in simulators and mockups, but this is the real deal, and he absolutely cannot fuck this up! No retries, no $0.25 for three more lives. One shot. Success or absolute failure.
Now, keep that frame of reference in mind when you grab the controls of Eagle Lander 3D, and see if it doesn't even slightly mess with your sense of gravity about what you're doing (pun not intended).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
For those of you who know a good deal about photography, you might want to look at some things with the NASA pictures even on NASA.gov:
A. Lighting, they had no light source other than the sun, take a look at the shadows
B. Burned in crosses, how are they behind objects?
C. Taking pictures into the light, the foreground should be dark.
D. No crater, not a single spec of dust on the Eagle, very pretty gold foil
E. I'm not sure about this one, but if the sun is behind you, would it create a halo around your shadow? Seems the light should be more ambient looking to me
F. Also noticed some of the crosses are missing in some of the pictures, very peculiar on white objects, the cross should be prominent.
If anyone has any proof that any of this actually happened on the moon, I'd love to hear it, since the pictures certainly didn't come from it.
...article and anniversary with the NASA (and ansariX-prise) challenges in the article above. Make it something like 10 billion or some big number for the first permanent moon base. Put a donation check off on the income tax instead of the presidential election checkoff, fund the prize that way. Let's get the show on the road, enough's enough with the fooling around. We are humans, we explore, that's what we do, so let's do it!
Here's a clue, I was pushing moontruth.com because I find the video to be extremly funny. The wording of my post was meant to stay in line with its parent. It's tacky perhaps, but I wasn't trying to troll.
A zillion years ago, I played the moon lander on a GPS 40 which was a PDP 11/40 with a vecor graphics processor and the thing was controlled by a light pen. Not really as sophisticated as this game, but heck it ran on a 16-bit machine with about 32KB of RAM and a clock of about a Megahertz.
See my journal, I write things there
35 years ago, we put flags on the moon.
Now we spend our efforts dealing with folks with moons on their flags.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
This was not the first time to the moon. At least one previous mission visited the moon, traveling around the moon and returning.
This was a textbook case of fine engineering. It was not a case of a bunch of people deciding to go to the moon and doing it in one shot.
All the milestones were carefully designed and exercised, and passed, long before the actual landing.
Think about it--one of the finest moments in science and engineering was accomplished by rational, stepwise milestone-based logic.
NOT HACKING. Not in one single try.
Think about it.
Space travel is like any other kind of travel: It is all about going somewhere. The ISS goes nowhere. The money would have been much better spent building infrastructure to make LEO operations as cheap and reliable as possible.
ISS is a multi-billion waste of time. The only thing we've "learned", putting it charitably, is that people will need to exercise a lot during long duration zero-G flights. Of course, we already knew that, thanks to Mir.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
All these comments, and nobody has yet to mention Mr. Gronsky.
You don't know the difference between the homonyms "should've" and "should of" even though "should of" is not sensical, and recognized as a common mistake of English speakers.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
President Kennedy: '...before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth'.
And look at the sad sack that sits in Kennedy's office today. Too depressing.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
shurely... you mean Apollo 12?
When I read the description of the error in the article, I had to wonder if proto-H4x0rs were involved. Here's the description:
When I saw this, I immediately thought "buffer overrun. Damn script kiddies!"
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
So they really went to Moon? I thought that was a hoax by NASA.
The deficit is today and the mars mission will take decades. The bill will come due in 15 to 20 years and not today. We got a while to fix the deficit before it an Mars butts heads.
Yeah, we went to the moon. We had a decent space program. And it was underfunded because most of US budget went to cold-war and war in Vietnam.
We had several missions and then we pulled out. And our space program has not been the same since. When we dropped our moon program, we proved that we didnt go there for science or "just because its there". We went to beat the Ruskies and that was it. If the russians had mounted a serious moon program, you can bet your winning lottery ticket that things would have been different.
But when russians didnt follow us, we lost all desire to finish the program. We just gave up!
Another interesting note about the Lander Flight computer is the fact that it was WIRE-WRAPPED !!! .. I don't know about the rest of you but of all the embedded systems i've worked on that were built this way i would Never trust such critical piece if flight hardware to a fabrication method that is known for reliablity issues.
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
"Who knows what he might have done had he not been assassinated, but that he sponsored a coup in Vietnam is certainly a good sign of what his intentions were."
While Kennedy was alive, it was VIETNAM'S war, not ours. Kennedy's refusal to support the CIA sponsored Cuban attempt at a civil war in Cuba (the CIA predicted massive uprisings which never took place, then demanded US troop support in place of the predicted uprisings) indicates he would also not have sent massive numbers of troops to Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnson believed the Military establishment or some part of it or supporters of it had killed Kennedy because of this AND THEREFORE let the military do everything it wanted (mostly) in Vietnam. Rather than be assassinated or continue a pointless war, he REFUSED TO RUN for a second term.
KENNEDY ARGUABLY DIED BECAUSE HE WAS NOT A WAR PRESIDENT.
CIA tried to get us into a Cuban war, did get us into a Vietnam war and now we are told that their "mistakes" got us into an Iraq war. Just whose side is the CIA on? (can you say war-merchants? or maybe the military industrial complex Ike warned us about?)
The excitement of the the space program. I don't recall much of the Mercury flights, (I was 4 when Shepard flew). But I do remember Gemini, the first space walks and rendevous between manned craft. Then Apollo, wow, that Saturn 5 lifting off. It was all a great memory, but after Apollo 11, the news backed off. It spiked again with the problems on 13, but after that there was little coverage of the following flights. When the media got bored prople lost interest. No interest = no funding.
My father in law worked for Boeing on the lunar lander. He misses thase days too.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I'm pretty sure they tested the hell out of them.
"The Mean Time to Failure (MTBF) of the machine in a space environment was calculated at 50,000 hours -- almost 6 years, and it never failed in flight operations."
That's been pretty much covered. It was an entirely political race between the USA and Russia during the Cold War. It was all abour bragging rites and draining the others economy. We (the US) won that one. Old news...
Well, I'll call bullshit on that. In it's current orbit the ISS is useless as a launch platform. The ISS's orbit is a compromise between the original NASA idea and the Soviet's launch capacity. As it stands, the ISS is basically an expensive LEO Bowflex.
Uhm, so basically use the most expensive method to move them...
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
I am just barely old enough (39) to remember watching the 1969 moon landing on TV. I also had the privilege on having Buzz Aldrin as an instructor for a Space Studies class at the University of North Dakota in the mid-80s.
"I'm not a cool person in real life, but I play one on the Internet". Galley
The big thing to worry about is priority inversion, a deadlock that requires at least 3 priority levels. Level 1 asks Level 3 to do something. It turns out that Level 3 needs Level 2 to do something, but Level 2 is lower priority than Level 1 and stays blocked.
The problem is that when Level 1 is blocking on something from Level 3, Level 1 has put itself on the level of Level 3 and should give priority to Level 2. The usual (i.e. Linux, MS-Windows) solution is instead of trying to trace a graph of such circular dependency, you have a system timer that gives temporary priority boost to blocked processes that have been sitting there for quite some time -- I don't care how low your priority, if you have been sitting there long enough you get a turn.
In the right (wrong) circumstances, those kind of systems can gum up and then stuff gets updated in fits and starts -- they run really clunky but at least they run.
I am to assume that the guys were so sure about the LM software because no lower-priority task had any dependency on any higher-priority task, that if no lower-priority task ever got serviced that the higher-priority tasks could always be completed?
This is an interesting article on the Apollo Guidance Computer - with details of the internal architecture of the CPU, and its Assembly language.
Interestingly, it seems early desicions about the address/op code size gave the designers x86 type headaches when they later wanted more address space & op codes/registers..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Stop invading countries and we'll be there in no time! ;p
I can't find the links now, but in the past I've read several articles which mention the mechanics of an Earth-Moon shot. Those article mention that, due to the orbit of the moon and the rotation of the Earth, 1969 was one of the optimal years for carrying the most payload to the moon with the least amount of fuel, and (IIRC) this optimal timeframe is on roughly a 30-year cycle.
Whether or not the Apollo program engineers knew this at the time, I do not know. And, somehow I doubt that Kennedy knew it when he made his famous challenge (although I allow that it could be possible that someone at NASA knew it and word reached Kennedy).
Oh yeah, I guess I am.