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Apollo 12 at 35
neutron_p writes "Thirty-five years ago this week, the sedentary, fine-grained powder began to rise, billow and race off toward the horizon. Soon after - at 1:54:35 a.m. EST on Nov. 19, 1969 - the lunar module Intrepid landed, bringing two more humans to the surface of another world. Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad and lunar module pilot Alan Bean would be on the Moon for more than 31 hours, with crewmate Dick Gordon orbiting above in the command module Yankee Clipper."
But you can't prove it!
I hate wasting K on redundant slashisms, but there it is.
sigs, as if you care.
Its amazing that those guys had 256k of memory (I think, maybe that was the space shuttle), and they managed to write the flight control programs without any bugs. Programmers today have trouble with 256 megs of memory
"brxref
...to be stuck in the command module, so close to the Moon yet to never set foot on it?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I think that the benefits of actual space exploration are extremely limited. But there are many positive externalities. Tang, goretex, materials advancement, programming advancement (fill me in on more, those are off the top of my head). I personally like F1, but see no great societal value in the actual racing. Many benefits have come however from the tech development required to make the cars go fast.
"brxref
Just think, this Apollo 12 in all its glory had less computing power than a Furby.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I think the fact that something that has only happened a few times in the history of mankind is not considered "news worthy" IS the news.
This is exactly the attitude that ruined the moon program if you ask me.
I think the editor that posted this news story was trying to make this point.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
"Thirty-five years ago this week, the sedentary, fine-grained powder began to rise, billow and race off toward the horizon."
I always thought that cocaine had been around for more than 35 years.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
Top Five reasons why the space program should be among our top priorities as a nation:
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness. No one likes stagnation. I can think of nothing more repulsive than the idea that in 200 years we could still be Earth-bound.
This is depressing. It used to be we had both _technological_ AND _social_ progress. For the last ~30 years, the social progress has flattened out and we are now going backwards, turning into a paranoid fascist consumer/security state with a bunch of robber-barons at the helm. Their slash-and-burn profiteering has now caused the U.S. to lose it's manufacturing and technological lead, so we are also stalled in technological progress also. Their criminal mismanagement is blamed on outsourcing and globalization, instead of bad trade policy and stupidity. Our country is now dumbed-down and medicated on a steady diet of poor public education, glorification of stupidity, media whores, and mind-numbing propaganda. The recent thievery of the national election is a new low point in our descent. RIP American Democracy, we hardly knew ye.
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
From abc.net.au:
NASA explains it a little better, noting that the 74KB is actually 37KW, using 16-bit words:
Hardware
The guidance computer is a general-purpose digital machine with a basic word length, in parallel operations, of 15 bits with an added bit for parity checks. The instruction code includes subroutines for double and triple operations. Memory cycle time is 11.7 microseconds with a single addition time of 23.4 microseconds. The 'core rope', used for the fixed memory, has a capacity of about 36,864 words with an erasable memory (of ferrite core planes) of 2,048 words. The processor is formed from integrated circuits (ICs). The total computer weight is 29.5 kg. The fixed memory contains programmes, routines, constants, star and landmark co-ordinates and other pertinent data. The erasable memory acts as an intermediate store for results of computations, auxiliary programme information, and variable data supplied by the G&N and other systems of the spacecraft.
sigs, as if you care.
This was the space program with NASA in peak form. Perhaps it wasn't their finest moment (maybe either 11 or 13 was), but the breadth and ambition is utterly above NASA today. This was only the second landing, yet NASA aimed for that 31 hour stay on the surface.
They were confident that their communications around the world would keep the uplink with the astronauts as Earth rotated, confident that the first landing wasn't a lucky fluke, and willing to commit to keeping the crew there long enough to do a little real science. If the focus on 11 was largely on the medical situation of the crew, by 12 we were increasingly confident that people could survive on the Moon long enough to do something useful, and the focus began to shift to building a permanent presence there and answering some of the more interesting questions of the Planetologists.
The near disasterous shortage of fuel and over-abundance of rocky ground in the final seconds of Apollo 11's landing could have made NASA rely more on cautious approaches and more intensive micro-management, but instead it led to an increased recognition of the role of the astronauts on site in making the final decisions. That in turn gave us six successes and one gloriously redeemed failure.
Who is John Cabal?
>all I have ever cared (heck, even known) to be remotely important was Apollo 11 and Apollo 13.
yap, the first one, and the one which failed. probably the only missions most people can think of, cos they were the more spectacular missions.
but the real missions were the later ones. like 16 & 17 with over 70h time on the lunar surface. they grew much more confident with what they can and cant do on the moon in the later missions.
flight summary of manned apollo missions
apollo lunar surface journals
for those who where not around here's some links to the AGC, DSKY and more:
*Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)
*slash article with source code listing
*Simulation of Apollo Guidance Computer
*DSKY
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Space exploration is cool. I support it. Please allow me to be a devil's advocate:
It seems to me that first world countries are having trouble keeping people procreating. The more advanced the society, the more rights the women, the better things the women have to do than sit at home and rear a half dozen to a dozen kids. Countries like Canada only grow because of immigration. Is it Taiwan that is trying to encourage procreation with subsidies?
NASA is, by every account, a grossly large organization with bureaucracy the likes of which no other entity in the world can hope to measure up to. They're too bureaucratic to save the Challenger. Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries (A mach 10 aircraft has little real world application today) and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?
Most of the world ending scenarios seem to have other, potentially more beneficial solutions. Sure, leaving the world to go to the moon or someplace else may be a good way to spread the risk. It would be quite some time to set up the infrastructure to support a self sustaining populace that would not suffer from inbreeding. We may get to the point where this is possible, but NASA is not heading down a path to enable this. If there's a scenario that leads to a (nuclear or CO2) winter, why aren't we making subterrainian cities 10+ feet underground? I would expect one could even justify this by pointing out that such a city would be a prototype for an offworld city. Not that it should necessarily be a self contained monstrosity / joke, but something that starts to set up the infrastructure and maybe includes some geothermal carnot generators (what better way to take advantage of the perpetual winter outside than to make self-sustaining power by harnessing the power of the earth?
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
The dark ages were brought about because innovation stagnated. Everyone ran out of ideas and got so concerned with today that they stopped worrying about tomorrow. These days, we're perhaps on the brink of a newly perceived stagnation. We're masters of the air (airplanes), sea (gigantic boats and submarines) and land (earth destroying cranes, cars, trucks, trains, etc.). Microelectronics are banging against the Laws of Physics, with only nanotechnology seemingly a solution. In our daily lives, few people can think of a way to continue to innovate that makes a difference. Heck, most people don't want to upgrade their life centers (TVs) because the upgrades (HDTV) are too expensive despite how much better they are. Life changing innovation, the kinds of which impact "human happiness" are those leaps and bounds we've been hitting in the past century or two. You can't predict them, an
I love the bit where the writer describes the recommendation by the software engineer to ignore the reported errors as "a gutsy call". There's these guys, in a tiny little spacecraft, about to land on the moon, with most of the world watching, and the prestige of the USA and indeed democracy and capitalism at stake. The computer's screaming error messages. If you call for an abort, the moon effort is a flop (at least temporarily). If you call proceed and the thing craters, you're going to be the guy whose screwup killed two American heroes. "Gutsy"...more like balls of titanium!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
IIRC, there were two unique things to Apollo 12. First, they landed amazingly close to an unmanned Surveyer probe that landed a couple of years before. They did this in part to test precision-guided landing techniques for later missions and to bring back samples of the old probe to see how it weathered on the moon.
They actually found viable bacteria spores on parts of the returned probe that lasted the entire flight from Earth and survived for two or so years on the Moon. They learned they had to improve the sterilization process for later probes to Mars and beyond to reduce the risk of contamination from the smallest Earthlings.
Another notable is that they accidently ruined the only TV camera they had by pointing it too long at a reflection of the sun off of a peice of equipment. It used new compact color technology and was fragile. Thus, there were no live TV pictures.
They perhaps should have brought along a lighter black-and-white one as a backup. However, weight was a premium, especially in the earlier missions. In fact, Apollo 11 (the first landing) almost skipped having a TV camera altogether because of load constraints. But mission planners were talked into carrying one.
Table-ized A.I.
You missed a few.
6. The more money invested in space exploration, the less money that goes to war.
7. Space exploration is one of the few things that many countries are working on together. This helps bring peace.
8. If all good scientists worked for NASA, or a privately funded space program, then there'd be no scientists researching weapons.
9. Australia started off as a penal colony. Perhaps this would be a good use for Mars
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Most things in the astronaut corps came through experience. You were backup crew on a mission and 3 missions later you were usally prime crew, for example. Being the command module pilot put you in good stead to be the mission commander on a later flight. Jim Lovell was CM pilot on Apollo 8 and commander on Apollo 13 (Frank Borman was commander of Apollo 8 and probably would have been commander of Apollo 11 if he'd not quit being an astronaut). Dave Scott was CM pilot of Apollo 9 and commander of Apollo 15. John Young was CM pilot of Apollo 10 and commander of Apollo 16.
As for the others, Apollo 7's crew was blacklisted because of their "grumpiness" in flight, Mike Collins quit being an astronaut after Apollo 11, Dick Gordon did the same after Apollo 12 and so did Jack Swigert after Apollo 13 (can't say I blame him). Stu Roosa was Apollo 14's CM pilot but his shot at commanding Apollo 17 was overtaken by Gene Cernan who had been LM pilot on Apollo 10. Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled and that was that.
Graham
If you're technologically advanced enough to be reading this, it is also likely that you are not having enough children.
(insert jokes here)
"Today about half the world lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility. ... East Asia ... Russia ... Europe ... Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, and Lebanon ... Canada, Australia, and New Zealand ... United States is just barely below replacement with about 2.0 births per woman. All four of these nations still have growing populations due to high rates of immigration."
Back in September, NASA selected 11 companies to conduct preliminary concept studies for human lunar exploration and the development of the NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle. Many of these are your typical aerospace dinosaurs, but a notable exception is t/Space, a new company which includes people like Burt Rutan (of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), Elon Musk (of SpaceX), Red Whittaker (of the Red Team, which constructed an autonomous vehicle which competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge), and several of the new companies in the budding private space industry.
According to their page: Our core mission requirement is to enable prompt, affordable, safe and sustainable lunar exploration and development by the largest possible number of Americans, both in person and via telepresence.
Under our approach, government incentives focus exclusively on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government incentives will be matched to specific top-level needs, but the "invisible hand" of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support. With this competitive industrial base, two major processes become possible:
* Market forces will continually launch new products that replace established goods and services (the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter [Austrian economist 1883-1950] identified as the key element of capitalism). Poorly performing systems will be killed off quickly via competition rather than via burdensome NASA reviews or Congressional intervention.
* Capability gap analyses will be performed by dozens and ultimately hundreds of companies on a continuous basis. As happens now in all competitive industries, the successful companies will be those who listen closely to their customers and accurately predict their future needs - in other words, capability gap analysis by multiple independent profit-seekers.
Commercial firms will create and own infrastructure that offers services that overlap in many cases. The overlaps found in a competitive private space economy will provide the resiliency now lacking in single-string solutions such as the Space Shuttle and Space Station, for which there are no ready alternatives. While functional overlaps are viewed as inefficiencies in centrally-planned systems, in a market-based system they drive costs lower (by reducing monopoly power and spurring innovation) and accelerate schedules (by eliminating single-point bottlenecks among suppliers and spurring competition).
If I understand correctly, tSpace's plan is to design an overall space architecture, and have companies compete for different components, whether they be launch vehicles, space station life support modules, or lunar landers. Many of these components will also be available commercially, keeping the price down and the reliability high. I suspect it's going to be difficult to keep from being eaten alive by the huge aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.), but I have a hope that they'll somehow end up getting the contract and end up completely reforming our approach to space.
I highly recommend reading through their presentation. The things they discuss are quite insightful, and they have some incredible ideas. Here's a few of their points:
Safety results from design choices, not oversight
* Attempting to produce safety by inspection, quality control,
Apollo 12 lunar surface journal.
Actually, they have all of them and some are pretty good reads.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
In 1979 we still worked with those old FCUs (Flight-certified CPUs.) They all had 4k ram, and were 4-bit bit-slice. We looked UP to the Commodore64 and even the TI-99-4(A). We begged to use the 8085-A2 like the mil guys. And that was already obsolete. But the space environment dictated what was usable: if it had not been tested proven, forget using it on board a spacecraft. Ok, we learned/knew this. Apollo used transistor logic because what was already available was not yet proven killable (within accepted parameters) by space radiation. NOTHING else could be used until after LDEF came down, and that was delayed by Challenger by 4 years. It's all about radiation. In space, we need wide circuit paths to make up for cosmic bombardment, until we all go to photons, and prove it unkillable. I'd bet a dime that's what Putin is suggesting his new rocket/orbit-vehicle uses as control circuit, and is much-less-killable. Think nuclear exclusion principle.
Apollo 12 was unforunately sandwiched between two much more famous missions: 11 and 13. I will never remember the names of those on 12, but names like Armstrong, Aldrin, and Hanks I will never forget.