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What If the Apollo Program Never Happened?
astroengine writes "In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972. Between then and now, NASA's small space shuttle fleet filled in for space travel, but astronauts could only venture as far a low earth orbit — at an altitude much lower than the early pioneers reached. If there were no Apollo crash program to beat the Soviets to the moon, would we have planned to go to the moon eventually? But this time with a commitment of staying? Or would we never go?"
You wouldn't be reading this.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Without space exploration there isn't much point to our civilization.
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In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
How is that ironic? Establishing a base versus traveling to are two fairly different goals in magnitude with one totally encompassing the other. Aside from that, I don't think it's ironic that 40 years have passed and we need to reevaluate a moon mission. It's seriously still a nontrivial problem today, it's not like riding a bike. In my mind, the fact that they did it forty years ago doesn't take away the danger and knowledge involved with such a feat but instead just proves how badass and ahead of their time those people who worked on the Apollo Program were (yes, yes, Wernher von Braun and Nazi scientists, I'm aware).
And as far as it's being "debated" I challenge you to name one thing that requires government spending that hasn't been debated off and on over the years. Oh, the massive Department of Defense spending, right, for some reason nobody debates that ballooning military industrial complex and that's about it. Wouldn't want to look "weak" going into office now, would we. Speaking of which, I'm all for a shift of some of those funds to space exploration. It took a space race with 'the ruskies' to get us to the moon maybe another 'rah rah USA' race with those other 'commies' will help us establish a presence and research lab?
My work here is dung.
Without the lash of the Communist menace, Congress would not have spend trillions to shoot people into space.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Part of what got our country into gear was JFK's death. JFK was even trying to covertly kill the program by rigging it so Republicans would kill it for lack of favorable earmark kick backs and similar games.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
The Cold War and the sudden and unexpected advances the Soviets made in their remarkable early space program (thanks to the sadly underrated and largely forgotten genius of Sergei Korolev) where the primary motivators that led to Apollo. Without the strong desire of the U.S. to have a major "first" in space over such a military rival, it's very unlikely the U.S. would have ever gone beyond LEO. Unlike LEO, there was relatively little to gain strategically or technologically from a manned moon mission. It was mostly a nationalistic pride thing. Apollo was designed to show that the U.S. was capable of space firsts too, and everything about the mission--from its highly public nature to the planting of the U.S. flag--was meant to highlight that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I know Newt is just making vaporous campaign promises and that there are "trickle down" benefits for ordinary people from the space program, but if you are going to spend big to have new technology why not do something more people can benefit from directly?
- a national network of bullet trains?
- a "space race" for an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car and that can be recharged in under 10 min?
For one thing, we might have practical fusion power by now.
The Apollo program taught a lot of lessons, but one of them was "If you're a government-funded research program, DO NOT SUCCEED." Congress began axing the budget for space exploration about ten minutes after Armstrong's "One small step for a man..." After all, we did the job, beat the Rooskies, hallelujah now we can quit wasting all that money.
I've noticed one thing about fusion: it's *always* "twenty years off" and has been since the early fifties. Tiny little steps, "we need more funding", and "maybe we'll get something in (this year+20). And over the past forty years, a lot of bold proposals for testbeds that, while crude and inefficient, might actually have WORKED so they could be improved, have been shot down. (cf. Bussard's proposal to use heavy, water-cooled high-strength magnets to brute-force a solution.)
See you in 2032, when "We'll have fusion in 2052." will be the rallying cry.
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far. How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending? Face it, we aren't going to the moon or Mars anytime soon. One side of the aisle wants to overspend on the military, the other wants to overspend on social programs. All the debate over taxes and discretionary spending is political theatre. Neither party is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to fix budgetary problems and neither really gives a damn about space exploration.
It isn't ironic, it's sad, that 40 years later, there are people who honestly believe that the moon landings were faked.
The fact that you can see the landing site with a powerful telescope apparently isn't good enough for some people.
-- Stephen
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Seriously, the moon and Mars are a waste of time and money. Near earth orbit, in constrast, has a lot of potential for power generation, enhanced telecommunications, earth observation and eventually, permanent, self-sustaining living environments. As "cool" as it would be to get to Mars or the moon (again), there's just no compelling reason to do so that's not served better by near earth orbital stations and satellites.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
What's the economic incentive for private industry to build/support a moon base? Without government funding, what's the return on investment? More moon rocks? Mining what minerals? A good view of the ocean? Seriously. Companies don't really invest in altruistic endeavors without a profit motive.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No, the only reason the US sent *people* to the Moon was because the Russians had already beaten them to the punch regarding both farside orbit and robotic softlanding. Manned landing was the only milestone left.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
There would be no Tang!
Oh, the humanity! *sob*
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Just like a politician to bring up a massive government boondoggle which might have some scientific benefits, but which provides no possibility of a payoff in practical terms.
I propose a different science/engineering race with China:
The first to build and get patents on associated technology for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. China announced a year or two back that they had begun.
LFTR most likely would provide a trillion dollar+ payoff to whoever gets there first and can deploy it both domestically and sell exports to other countries within the lifespan of the patents.
Or how about the closely related WAMSR - the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.
Those look both doable, almost certainly cheaper than a moonbase (though possibly still somewhat expensive), and would have enormous benefits for mankind.
But, no doubt Republicans would decry a program to rapidly get the LFTR or WAMSR up and running as a socialist, big-government program. . . but somehow, a freaking moonbase isn't. Oh, I know why - because there's no actual money to be made on a moonbase, so the private sector doesn't care about it and thus doesn't need "protection" from government programs.
'Waste anything but time'.
These are truly magical words to a bureaucracy.
When they were uttered, NASA became an enormously powerful agency, with a massive budget, and the resulting craft was guaranteed to be ridiculously expensive, and optimised entirely wrongly for an ongoing space program.
NASA then set the precedent for the 'right way' to do space - which proceeded on, helped by space being seen not as a place to do things in, but a convenient way to feed aerospace companies welfare.
For example, NASAs last attempt to 'reduce the cost of space launch' (x33/venturestar) had not one, not two, but three completely untried technologies on it.
SpaceX - by doing it in a much leaner manner, have developed a rocket and engines for a tiny fraction of the budget of what NASAs estimation tools say it'd cost them.
And you know that it'd have overrun in reality.
If you look at a typical NASA procurement requirement, you do not see 'Must deliver cargo of mass M to position P with speed S'.
You see a long list of requirements that are only incidental, but so happen to require expertise only available from the two or three 'usual suspects', meaning only they can make credible bids.
The lack of funding, and the clear utility of satellites may well have lead to much cheaper rockets being developed a lot sooner.
Every telescope made after 1971 has required federally mandated "Moon goggles" that are inserted just before the telescope is completed. It's plain as day, except visible at night.
Because compared to those two, a moon base is easy to achieve, for different reasons
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills"
- John F Kennedy
and we know a moon base can be achieved with current technology
and the Japanese don't have bullet trains?
It's clearly impossible for an optical telescope on the Earth to resolve any of the Apollo hardware on the Moon, since the best systems, using adaptive optics in the near-infrared, can resolve details of maybe 0.02 arcsec. A lunar lander of width 5 meters, at a distance of 382,000 km, subtends an angle of 0.003 arcsec. The Hubble Space Telescope isn't appreciably closer the Moon, and its best resolution is about 0.03 arcsec in the near-UV. Not good enough. In fact, out by a decimal place.
About the best you're ever going to get without walking up to the hardware itself is such as you'll find in NASA image AS15-9377[P]. This shows a resolution of something like 15m/pixel - not enough to make out the hardware or its orientation, but enough to describe a low shadow thrown by the lander stage. And *that* was taken from low lunar orbit (Apollo 15 CSM).
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Seriously, anyone complaining that fusion research doesn't get any funding hasn't seen the budget for ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Last I checked it was around 15 Billion dollars. That also isn't the only fusion research going on - there's the National Ignition Facility for one, and I think a couple others too.
What-if scenarios such as this one are pointless. What if the American revolution hadn't happened? What if the Romans had had an industrial evolution? What if Hitler had won the war? What if 911 never happened? What if a hacker had a girlfriend?
All of these questions are only useful in an entertainment sort out way (that's the only polite way I could phrase this). They aren't really answerable in any way that is useful in analyzing things as they currently are and where they appear to be going. Sometimes fun to think about of course.
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far.
The idea of a more permanent return to the moon is something Newt has talked about for decades, and also pushed forward a bill or two on.
Newt has been really "into" space for a long, long time. I agree the timing of talking about this is pandering but fundamentally Newt really is interested in furthering space exploration.
How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending?
Here is where your ignorance shows. You didn't even finish reading the SUMMARY much less the actual story!
Newt wants to take some small portion of the NASA budget to issue X-Prize style prizes that move private industry forward in the goal of a lunar space colony.
When put the way he actually means, does it sound so crazy? The tax payers pay very little, private industry takes all the risk. It would accelerate the already growing private space industry but with a very beneficial focus beyond just "going to space".
Regardless of who actually becomes president this is a very good idea to support private space travel and to reduce government spending in space at the same time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Space would have become a USAF business in the US. The USAF had the Dyna-Soar program (small manned craft, launched on a rocket, lands on wings), which was cancelled in favor of Apollo. The USAF also had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was a lot like Skylab, but earlier. The USAF would probably have sizable manned space stations by now, equipped with missile defenses.
The Gusmobile (the six-seat Gemini) might have flown. With both the Gusmobile and Dyna-Soar, the US would have had a solid low-orbit manned capability.
More robotic landers would have been sent to the Moon. The USSR sent several large ones, which explored more of the Moon than the astronauts did. But landing and retrieving humans from the moon probably would have been skipped. Face it, the place is rather dull.
Recoverable boosters probably would have been developed. (A parachute system almost went into the Saturn V.) At some point, a large shuttle might have been built. Probably more like Buran than the US shuttle. Although Buran looks like the US shuttle, it has no launch engines; it's purely a payload at launch. Buran was much less fragile than the US shuttle; the USSR once flew one to Farnborough for an air show. Also, it was realized after a few US shuttle launches that a titanium-based design could stand the heat load, which would have eliminated the ceramic tile headache. A more robust shuttle with mostly reusable boosters could achieve a respectable launch rate.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/09/apollo_17/
Go nuts.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The first & second south pole expeditions arrived exactly 100 years ago. But the third one was in 1956. The technology and motivations had improved by then.
It's not a question of optical quality, it's a question of physics. You can not get an angular resolution better than sin [Theta]=1.220(lambda/D), where D is the primary diameter, Theta is the angular resolution, lambda is the wavelength used and 1.220 is the first zero of the Bessel function: this is used to resolve distance between two points. If the distance is less than sin[Theta] then the two points cannot be resolved (separated).
For a spy satellite to be able to read newspaper headlines over your shoulder, even in LEO, would require a primary several km in diameter and it would require that far UV is not absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
That was an alternate universe. In this universe, we don't meet the Vulcans, and we never progress as a species to interstellar travel.
I need to figure out how to invent an interdimensional travel device like on "Sliders", so I can move to the alternate universe where humanity didn't turn into a bunch of losers like this one.
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!)
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 .. 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.
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.
* - I take no credit nor blame for this post.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
On the night before the launch of Apollo 11, Wernher von Baun made this comment about the future
“If it had been our intention merely to go to the moon, bring back a handful of rocks and soil, and forget the entire enterprise, then we would certainly have been history’s biggest fools.”
- Wernher von Braun
and yet, that’s exactly what we did
The UK still likes to think of itself as a powerful country but it has a debt crisis that is worse then the Greek are facing while their spending is far higher and with a "need/want" to defend pieces of land on the other side of the globe. Yes, the Falkland conflict is back and the UK just had to sell of half its fleet but don't worry, they shall never be slaves or something.
The UK believed for a long time that the country side need not be ruined by efficient farms, the real food production could be shifted offshore and manufacturing followed soon after. The country that started the industrial revolution (according to the brits and who is going to doubt them) is now an industrial reject. Does it really matter if a sailing nation has its port cranes and ships made in China? No, surely not, all those workers can find different jobs, in service industries... any day now... jobs are bound to arrive in Manchester and Liverpool to replace those dirty smelly jobs with nice burger flipping and insurance sellling jobs... just give it a decade or two more, they already been waiting for half a century so a bit more can't hurt.
The economy is like a jenga puzzle with a time delay build in, so you start pulling blocks and think, wow I can remove whole sections and the tower doesn't fall over so it must be okay... and then the time delay kicks in and BOOM, it all comes crumbling down.
Take the Apple/Foxconn boycott discussion below, some posters actually excuse Apple for doing this because there are no factories left in the west that can do this kind of production... they might be right... so they are defending outsourcing as the right thing to do because outsourcing ripped production capacity that once existed from the west... godwin be damned but the nazi's put jews in ghetto's and then used the fact that jews lived in ghetto's as justification for the holocaust.
To far? The same story ALSO had people supporting Apple by saying that American workers no longer had the skills for that type of work... so you remove the jobs and then claim that since no Americans are doing those jobs, they can't do them anymore... NICE!
The UK still invents stuff but if someone then wants to produce it, China is the place to go and what is produced in China is copied in China. The top talent certainly still exists but the support base is gone. It can still be found in isolated places, that metal shop that can produce any spare part just from looking at the broken parts. That painter who can restore a 500 year old house... I seen them work. They are old men, old men working alone because nobody young takes it up anymore. But these are the kind of people that once could have produced the first steam engines, or build rocket engines from scratch. The Space Shuttle had plenty of production line work, just with workers who through the years became really good at their individual tasks. Now they are gone. Some retired, some finding other work but their skills are lost and no new kids are replacing the old farts, learning on the job.
The problem is that the economy is to fragile and small changes take to long to show their effect to leave it to the market. Or for that matter to politicians who can only see to the next election. There is a reason high speed trains were neither a commerical NOR a political project but rather the work of civil engineers. Goverment workers who could see beyond the next quarter and the next election and look for the long term benefits.
Leave it up to business or the politicians and you get Amtrak and British Rail... both disasters. A businessman asks"does it make a profit next yet" and public rail is about how it benefits the entire country (make the workforce more mobile, relieve congestion on the roads) not pure profit margins. The politician asks "if we delay maintence now, can I offer a tax cut to my voters" and that happens then for 2 decades until people start dying.
Move the factory and you can not longer produce locally, the workers will loose the skills and kids will seek
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm not a historian, physicist, or engineer so I'm going off of my layman's interpretations. But, we kind of had parallel "space" efforts with our rocket planes like the X-51 that lost out to rockets. Had we not gone with massive, wasteful brute force rockets and gradually transitioned into space with reusable rockets and aerospace planes, maybe we'd have grown our space program more organically from high altitude flights, to LEO, to the moon?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Are you joking? Iron makes up nearly 15% of the moon's crust, with local concentrations varying. The same goes for aluminum. The plurality of the atoms in regolith are silicon which is even MORE useful for making solar power satellites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Surface_geology (see the table on the right).
As for the gravity well. Remember the saturn V? That was required to get men *to* the moon. Remember the small box at the bottom of the lunar lander? That was the rocket required to get men *back from* the moon -- with room to spare for a light truck, no less. The gravity well on the moon is much, much, much much smaller than that on earth. The technology used in linear motors on rollercoasters is more or less perfect for launching satellites from the moon, using the same type of solar panels you would be exporting as your power source.
Wasn't that more or less how the US went to the moon the first time?
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Most of our military spending is really about government contracts for private companies. A kind of stimulus package, except that to justify it we have to keep having wars and exaggerating threats. Not only is space is a much more worthy subject for funding, and if we tolerated even 0.01% of the losses we do for the military we could get people on Mars in a decade.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC