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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)!
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.
We learned this from Grassy Noel, the famed British snitch.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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".
Immigants! I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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'
You need to watch this: http://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw
Laughs aside, I guess the point is, conspiracies just don't scale.
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