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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Turns 45
An anonymous reader writes On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong would say later he thought the crew had a 90% chance of getting home from the moon, and only a 50% chance of landing safely. The scope of NASA's Apollo program seems staggering today. President Kennedy announced his moon goal just four years into the Space Age, but the United States had not even launched a human into orbit yet. Amazingly, just eight years later, Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the moon.
our family drove down to Florida, hauling our new 17' trailer, partly to see the launch and partly to visit Grandmother. up at 4 am to drive down Cocoa and park on the side of the road. when that Saturn came up over the rise, the noise was monstrous, quiet as a churchmouse until that first lick of yellow-orange showed.
a stunning achievement. from that effort came chips, medical telemetry, Lord only knows what.
our driver of innovation today? cat pictures and dashcam video of accidents.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This is one of those events where you remember where you were when "The Eagle has Landed" and "One Small Step..." For me, it was a gas station in Jackson Center, PA for the landing (we were driving home from our summer place.)
Like a lot of geeky little kids, I saw the grainy black&white television with my family, and was *amazed*. The National Gegraphic that came out with the wonderful moon maps and photos was a treasure of my childhood. So were the years of National Geographic and Analog on the family bookshelves. It was only 30 years later that I realized just how *deeply* Dad delved into the leading technologies of his time. I didn't get to see him much, because he was supporting almost a dozen immigrants. But all the boys, and some of the girls, learned machine shop basics in the basic with him.
That moon landing has inspired generations of Americans to reach out and do *amazing* things. And in the midst of the Cold War, to make it one "giant step for mankind" instead of a claim for our own nation. Combined with the 'Outer Space Treaty' to prevent militarization of outer space, it makes me proud as hell that we've visited there.
And we are going *back*, dammit. SpaceX, *go, Go, GO*!!!!!!
The United States has abandoned its manned space exploration capabilities, relying on another semi-derelict cold-war era launch setup, provided by a country it's on the brink of war with (Russia), preferring to funnel almost unlimited funds to anti-terrorism and Orwellian surveillance programs instead...
I'm was born during the cold war. Tensions between the US and the USSR weren't ideal by any means, but at least when I was a kid, we looked forward to a bright future of scientific achievements and space exploration. Now all I look forward to is reaching retirement age with some money on the side that's still worth something despite the inflation, hoping that WW3 and the religious crazies don't overwhelm the world before I kick the bucket.
Sad, sad world...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
As Jim Lovell put it:
There seems to be this perception that space travel is this incredible thing. It is awesome for sure, but it is fully within our grasp to do with as we please. One of my favourite arguments against the conspiracy theorists goes: if NASA were willing to fake the Moon landing, they would have done something else by now.
Let's reach for the stars again!
What a great example of what can be achieved with real leadership, and an environment that bolsters creative problem solving and innovation.
sig: sauer
... we returned from the last manned mission to the moon. For a while it seemed like it was going to be a routine event, then we just gave up on it. We haven't put a man on the moon in over 40 years now.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Great generation defeated Nazis, landed on the moon; Baby Boomer generation built Internet and tackled racial and gender issues. What are we doing other that building surveillance state and wealth inequality?
I was 5 watching the landing on TV and I remember being kind of annoyed that they preempted the cartoons that morning. I mean what's the big deal? The moon is RIGHT THERE (pointing up)!
I'm kind of curious what the space program would look like today if we hadn't sent people into space and had only used remote landers. About half the current Slashdot audience is critical of manned space exploration and prefers robotic exploration only. Would we be more or less down the road of space exploration if we hadn't done a manned moon mission?
It cost a lot of money to send people to the moon vs. just robotic stuff, but I wonder if there would be as much interest in it if we had never sent humans to the moon.
NASASpaceflight.com site is doing a nice forum coverage "live" as if this were happening now. The site does these coverages on all launches and have a massive pile of detail on the Apollo 11 flight.
About 5 hours from landing as I write this. Really interesting bits coming up.
Current "LIVE" tread for the landing: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35227.0
Earlier thread that covered the flight from launch up until lunar orbit: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35180.0
Discussion thread for "in character" commentary as-if-it-were-45-years-ago: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35181.0
Damn cool to follow... new posts covering what's going on posted according to the historical timeline, taken from the transcripts of the mission and with screen shots from historical TV broadcasts & links to videos of them.
China is the new United States. It has a "future belongs to us" mindset that the US had in the 1960's. It values science and math, and it's willing to invest in its own future. It has many problems it has to solve, social and economic, even bigger ones than the US has, but it will solve them because it has the will to do so.
The US has fewer problems than China, but lacks national will and foresight. It gets tied up petty bickering and political infighting. It no longer values science or understands how much of what it takes for granted has come from basic research in science and technology. Entire fields it once dominated, in everything from medicine to technology, are moving step by step to countries like China. It's little by little strangling its former best-in-the-world national labs, NASA, and other national assets. It's shipping its technology over to China wholesale as industrial theft and voluntary outsourcing of production transfers the know-how elsewhere.
The US is Rome in the last of its days, trying to hang onto its position in the world, but watching the future slip through its fingers.
I was in Nam at the time, captured, in a stick cage.
I heard about it from the guards, one of em pointed to the moon and made a motion like a gun.
Like now the USA could just shell them with artillery from the moon.
They were scared that the USA would shoot them .. from the moon.
We learned this from Grassy Noel, the famed British snitch.
And what affect does that have on our manned space flight program? None. It was George W Bush that killed it. The solution he pushed isn't going to be past development for years to come. Business doesn't see the money that's up there due to their inability to see beyond the next quarterly earnings statement. Get over stupid your "OBUMMER IS RESPONSIBEL FOR ALL THE WORNG AnD BAD AND EVIL IN THE WORLD" schick. It's long past old. It's just plain stupid. Obama's not perfect but he has had more foresight than any President in modern history. It's too bad people like you oppose him on "principle", even things you once supported. The Tea Party is stupid, corrupt and mindless. Just like your corporate masters intended.
Get this: Hussein installs a black guy in as NASA chief,...
I'm not from the USA so I don't understand your country but your joke? confuses me. Hussein is dead. His fellow Iraqis hung him after a lengthy trial. Also, it has not been seen as a common role of anyone from the USA to help Moslems feel good about anything. You have it in your constitution to keep church & state separate. That's why nobody would get elected president if they were an atheist or anything but a follower of a western variant of Christianity.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Well at least it wasn't his brother, Gassy Noel.
Mostly random stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"Barack Hussein Obama II"
Nutters like to use Obama's middle name because of the negative correlation with Saddam Hussein.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I've never understood how they were able to launch from the moon back towards Earth. Launching from the Earth requires massive infrastructure and huge rockets. Yes, the moon's gravity well is shallower, but still significant.
It's because the fundamental equation that relates a rocket's performance and the mass fuel it requires to orbital velocities is exponential. This makes it work out so that any chemical rocket leaving earth has to have the vast majority of its weight as fuel, where as a rocket leaving the moon only about half of its weight as fuel.
What's more, the entire lunar module and its fuel supply is dead weight as far as the earth launch is concerned, which makes the earth rocket and its fuel multiple all the bigger. Then there's the issue of bringing along enough fuel to slow down the craft into lunar orbit, and escaping lunar orbit back to earth. The lunar lander didn't need to handle any of that, either.
I don't see the word "allegedly" anywhere?
Editors, did you somehow miss this, or deliberately omitted it?
I suspect it has more to do with it sounding Islamic / non-American.
#DeleteChrome
And the retroreflecting prism arrays sent to the moon, that anyone with a big enough laser can bounce a beam off and determine what the distance of the moon is at the moment, were presumably put up there by Elvis on his way home. Hell, it's just a few pairs of his rhinestone trousers that fell out of his trunk.
The biggest problem with the space shuttle wasn't tiles or tanks or SRBs or O-rings. Or even needing to practically rebuild it between flights.
The biggest problem was that the first four orbiters should just have been the Mk-I model. All those things that were found to be problems in the Mk-I model should have been improved or even fixed in the MK-II and subsequent orbiters.
Yes, they made improvements in the later orbiters based on early experiences with the Columbia, and fixed the O rings after the Challenger accident, but there never was a truly improved model.
Check this out to see Buzz Aldrin answer questions on Reddit not too long ago The way the guy speaks is a more romanticized version of humanity and space exploration. It is good to see someone still have a positive attitude about things.
God spoke to me
While I agree with this, I think there is also the issue that the shuttle was not a very good general purpose launch vehicle - or more correctly general purpose launch vehicles do not seem like a good engineering solution.
For missions where you need to send men and equipment into orbit and bring them down again the Shuttle is fine. If you just want to put cargo into orbit, the extra weight and complexity is not worth it. If you just want to put men in orbit and return them, then a smaller vehicle works.
The design of launch vehicles is so marginal that it is not worth providing for a lot of mission flexibility. The early shuttle concepts recognized this and had non-returning heavy-lift variants.
US may be more like Byzantium, a slow centuries-long decline. Reliving its past glories "safe" behind its invulnerable walls.
Civilizations rise and fall. Its not clear who's next. China is making rapid progress, but it isn't clear if they will regain their millennia long place as world leaders, or crash and burn on the next economic downturn. I hope they make it though - I'd rather it were us, but I want someone in space.
I think the mods fell victim to a Poe there.
NASA has suffered a series of layoffs and cutbacks. If they spend ONE DIME in that enviroment making "muslims feel better about themselves" that's one dime too many.
You think that's absolutely lovely, though.
And you can ME a "nutbar". When you find absolutely NO ISSUE with the administrators statement? NO ISSUE WHATSOEVER? Not only that, but you PRAISE IT? And I'M a "nutbar"????
Leaving aside all the froth-mouthed name-calling there is an important detail the author does not write in
> This guy says in an interview:
Namely that the interview was to Al-Jazeera, the premier Muslim news channel.
Normally politicians (and the NASA chief definitely counts as that) try to tell something nice to foreigners they talk to.
You know, I can't remember the huge outcry of "Lies!", "Pampering Foreigners!", "Forgets his U.S. values and heritage!" when Kennedy said "Ich bin ein Berliner.".
To come back to "News for Nerds" it should also be noted that the statement about Muslim contributions to science, math and engineering is definitely true. There is a reason the numbers we are using are called "Arabic Numbers".
By Robert Zubrin: If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon?
To be fair, the 'Great Generation' fought Nazis at age 18. The Internet (really ARPNET at the time) would have been built by young(ish) engineers in the 60s and 70s (Baby Boomers). The current political problems we have are a result of legislation that has been passed for the last 10-15 years (government moves slowly), which would have been passed mostly by the elder politicians of the time (your 50-70 year olds at the peak of their power and careers) who would have basically been Baby boomers. Gen X is only now starting to come into the senior positions of power in government. Obama is youngish and he was born in 1961, which is at the very end of the Baby boom generation and the beginning of the gen X group, so you won't know what the 'current generation' (who ever you consider that to be) leaves as a legacy for quite some time.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Immigants! I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I wonder if it is possible to prove or disprove a human landing on the Moon irrefutably?
And if yes - how and when?
Sort of.
Go there. See for yourself.
It won't necessarily prove exactly when it happened, if you're going to be really skeptical about it, but it should prove that it happened... at least to the extent that you can trust what your own senses tell you, and what you will find there will be completely consistent with what should be there. At an absolute worst case, it would prove that somebody spent a whole lot of money to fabricate a replica set of the"fake moon landing" on the real moon just to convince future people who land there that it actually happened... of course,even that still means that somebody has already been on the moon.
Oh, and of course, any stories you might tell upon your return would be categorized by skeptics as either you being paid off to say what you saw. And the really die hard skeptics who go up themselves would probably just believe that they were being brainwashed if they saw it for themselves.
There is a difference, you see, between proving that something happened and having somebody believe that it happened.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Wow, talk about giving someone the rope to hang themselves with...
Mostly random stuff.
Do you also think we never went to the bottom of the Challenger Deep because there's no base there?
Mostly random stuff.
Every country was made of and founded by immigrants.
What are calld "Arabic" numbers are more properly called "Hindu-Arabic" "Hindu-Arabic" numerals were invented by Hindu mathematicians in India thus called "Indian numerals" by Persian mathematician Khowarizmi. They were later called "Arabic" numerals by Europeans, because they were introduced in the West by Arabized Berbers of North Africa.
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/un...
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
You need to watch this: http://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw
Laughs aside, I guess the point is, conspiracies just don't scale.
Inflation has been relatively mellow. The cost of raw materials has gone up largely due to higher demand by a modernizing Asia and Brazil. But, services have been almost flat due to a jobs recession such that total inflation averages out to a "typical" historical rate, perhaps even a little low.
Table-ized A.I.
I see you're scoring -1 which is an abomination (obamination?), just as the quote you gave is.
The hubris of the image: Moslims needing the USA, nay the NASA (the very NASA who get their
feet and meters mixed up sometimes), to tell them about their, the Muslim's, great contributions
to science, math and engineering.
In that case, I don't care if they DO fake it!
Table-ized A.I.
It was a soundstage on Mars.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I'm not sure which came first, the fake landing theory or the movie Capricorn One.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Armstrong: "I thought we had a 90% chance of getting back safely to Earth on that flight but only a 50-50 chance of making a landing on that first attempt. There are so many unknowns on that descent from lunar orbit down to the surface that had not been demonstrated yet by testing and there was a big chance that there was something in there we didn't understand properly and we had to abort and come back to Earth without landing."
Seems like a decent estimate. The landing computer had issues that almost was cause for an abort. I'm surprised NASA decided to ignore the alarm. Who wants to try to land with an active error code? Two even. In hind-site it was the correct decision, but the cause was unknown at the time.
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
Table-ized A.I.
Finished this book recently: writer catches up with the living 'moonwalkers'. At that time, there were nine. We've lost Neil Armstrong since then (anyone have a website that gives current state of the NASA astronauts? Or the Soviet Cosmonauts?)
Anyhow - author (Andrew Smith) states that it's as if a decade of the 21st century had been dropped in to the 20th century. Good comment, I thought.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The saddest part about this is that soon, probably, we'll live in a world where there's no living memory of what it's like to walk on another world. Armstrong and his successors are no longer young and none of the projects to return to the moon or to go to Mars look likely to happen quickly enough. Who in 1972 would have thought that they were watching the end or an era instead of the beginning? I don't think anyone's made it past 1000 miles up since then.
So how does one learn how to colonize space without "slinging meat bags" out there? Robots can do a lot of exploration and even do some of the preparation for installing habitats, but the only way to learn how to live in space is to actually GO THERE. Yes, LEO is barely "in outer space", but until we come up with good shielding we need to rely on the Van Allen belts for protection. For now, we're just taking baby steps, and the pols insist that killing brown people is more important than learning to run so that's what we'll continue doing for now. Space is our future, though.
The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever. - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I had just graduated High School. There were several boys in my class that went on to attend West Point. One of them, Steve Oswald graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1973 and went on to pilot two missions aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and retired from NASA in January 2000. I, on the other hand, married twice, have one son, climbed the corporate ladder, retired and now am a graphic artist, web designer, work at marketing for Milestones Building and Design [http://mbdbuildings.com]. I just wanted to say that the Apollo Moon Landing inspired many of us.
He's done much more to be an evangelist for space exploration than Neil ever did. It was almost impossible to get Neil out of his cocoon. We need someone making space exploration real and desirable to get funding.
Not only that, but you PRAISE IT? And I'M a "nutbar"????
Considering that you are apparently hallucinating praise that doesn't exist in the GP's post, I'm going to say that you may indeed be a nutbar.
When you graduate kindergarten, and learn to read, go back and read the exchange and note that spin-offs are the topic of discussion - not follow on missions.
Until then, toddle off to bed with the other infants, the adults are have a conversation here.