Slashdot Mirror
A Mysterious Piece of Russian Space Junk Does Maneuvers
schwit1 writes What was first thought to be a piece of debris left over from the launch of three Russian military communication satellites has turned out to be a fourth satellite capable of maneuvers: "The three satellites were designated Kosmos-2496, -2497, -2498. However, as in the previous launch on December 25, 2013, the fourth unidentified object was detected orbiting the Earth a few kilometers away from 'routine' Rodnik satellites. Moreover, an analysis of orbital elements from a US radar by observers showed that the 'ghost' spacecraft had made a maneuver between May 29 and May 31, 2014, despite being identified as 'debris' (or Object 2014-028E) in the official U.S. catalog at the time. On June 24, the mysterious spacecraft started maneuvering again, lowering its perigee (lowest point) by four kilometers and lifting its apogee by 3.5 kilometers. Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May."
This is the second time a Russian piece of orbital junk has suddenly started to do maneuvers. The first time, in early 2014, the Russians finally admitted five months after launch that the "junk" was actually a satellite. In both cases, the Russians have not told anyone what these satellites are designed to do, though based on the second satellite's maneuvers as well as its small size (about a foot in diameter) it is likely they are testing new cubesat capabilities, as most cubesats do not have the ability to do these kinds of orbital maneuvers. Once you have that capability, you can then apply it to cubesats with any kind of purpose, from military anti-satellite technology to commercial applications.
This is the second time a Russian piece of orbital junk has suddenly started to do maneuvers. The first time, in early 2014, the Russians finally admitted five months after launch that the "junk" was actually a satellite. In both cases, the Russians have not told anyone what these satellites are designed to do, though based on the second satellite's maneuvers as well as its small size (about a foot in diameter) it is likely they are testing new cubesat capabilities, as most cubesats do not have the ability to do these kinds of orbital maneuvers. Once you have that capability, you can then apply it to cubesats with any kind of purpose, from military anti-satellite technology to commercial applications.
It's pretty crowded up there, can we still afford to play "1965 Cold War" in 2014?
Mostly random stuff.
Waa waa waaa! The fallen is alive!
"Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May."
That's is very worrisome. The nerve of the Russians controlling their satellite that pretended to be a piece of junk to incessantly and oppressively maneuver around in space without telling us first! Well, I never!
It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.
Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.
fak'in bot.
Have gnu, will travel.
In post soviet space race, space debris spies on you!
It could be a spy satellite and space junk at the same time. Perhaps the Russians like irony.
Get it down now. Then you can claim you were testing technology to remove space junk from orbit. Once the Ruskies admit it's a satellite that's no longer a valid option.
It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.
Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.
Mongoloids like you are the reason I barely read any news these days.
Why else wouldn't you announce it? Especially if it's the size of a cubesat but can manuever, that's a breakthrough.
At least the US admits the X-37B is there, even if nobody has a clue what it's doing...
The recurrent weakness in US military thinking (and procuring) is that small numbers of fancy, high tech stuff can beat large numbers of low tech things.
That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.
Who is going to be raising vodka shots when the 10 million dollar piece of space junk annihilates a 10 billion dollar XB-37?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
XB-37,,,,
That might have been a Freudian slip. Let's try X-37b.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Very interesting. Russia beat you in almost every space milestone, yet somehow Russia seems pretty backwards according to you.
So much for these mythical space spinoffs, eh?
these orbital changes seem rather large for a cubesat's payload. does anyone know the delta-v's / mass-equivalents involved?
They used to launch satellites and then call them debries or test missions or something like this if they aren't behave well from Soviet times. It could be one of these satellites which responded in some limited way after launch, but guys at the mission control still tweaking with it.
I know! We should help clean up space junk by blowing it up and launching it out of orbit with a laser or catching it with a giant net or any of the other proposed junk cleanup methods. If they want to call it junk, that's the space equivalent of leaving it on the curb. Now it's public domain for the snatching!
It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.
Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.
You must be an American. Ignorance is your name.
It's a Russian X-37B equivalent. The Americans used the X-37B to plant jammers and/or deorbit drives on the GLONASS constellation, and the Russians are returning the favor ;-)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This is also the same reason the Nazis tanks lost their battle against he Russians... most of them failed due to mechanical problems, only a smaller amount of them were destroyed in combat. One might almost think that all those scientists from Project Paperclip infected us with the need to do fancy things.
all depends on what milestones matter to who is giving the talk actually. 45 years and the US is STILL the only country to have put men on the moon
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The the NSA is waging a cold war on every nation on the planet. But trolls here are of course more concerned with the russian and chinese boogiemen.
Captured German scientists did that, not Americans.
Careful grandpa, put the saber down, remember last time!!
Ask yourself this, would you rather have the Russians or the Chinese rule the world? Me, I prefer the more civilized pirate...
That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.
Actually those wars were "lost" because the US didn't apply the necessary brutality it takes to win a war. Public relations, not high technology, is the determining factor.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
He may have a point though. Russia is one of those countries where one man pretty much dicates things: What Putin orders, Russia does. He depends upon maintaining a high level of national pride and patriotism, which is aided by showboating exercises. I doubt that's the case here, because it's just not being shown off - if this were a stunt, Putin would be proclaiming it on state TV, not trying to deny it.
It's a satellite. It's small. It's secret. So the obvious theories are more likely: It's probably a test platform for something Russia doesn't want rival countries to find out about, either because it has military applications or commercial applications. Maybe it's a new anti-sat weapon, or Russia is conducting their own tests on new thruster technologies.
Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Very interesting. Russia beat you in almost every space milestone, yet somehow Russia seems pretty backwards according to you.
Every person I know that has been to Russia - including a number of people who left the Soviet Union to live in the west - seem to share that assessment.
It sounds like it's somewhat better there now than in the 1970s though.
#DeleteChrome
The US space program isn't as behind as you think and also not as clueless about the Russian sats as you think.
Jeez, more even? Like... NBQ?
Good luck with that approach. Don't complain later when it come back to byte your very own ass in your very own home.
One man's junk is another man's X-37B
How about neither of the 3?
Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.
Not exactly. The Soviets tried to get to the moon in 1970, so 6 months after the american moon landing.
What killed the Soviet mission was the inability of the N-1 to not explode while going up. They even had a 1 man LEM module all ready for the landing on the moon.
If you read the article, you will see that the end of the article contains details about what happened - past tense - on November 12th, 2014.
We didn't "lose" the war in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
We went in to Iraq to toss out Saddam and in to Afghanistan to get bin Laden (we didn't really have a beef with the Taliban except that they wouldn't hand over bin Laden) and we accomplished both of those goals. Militarily we "won" in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The problem is, then we stuck around in both Iraq and Afghanistan for the wishy-washy goal of installing a stable democracy in a land that wouldn't recognize democracy if it bit'em on the ass. That's where we "lost". Although my impression is we came close in Iraq. Maybe if had kept a presence in Iraq, maybe in the northern part. The Kurds seem to have their act together.
I heard from a very high ranking US official that the Russians don't make anything, so I don't think it was them.
It doesn't have to be that the satellite fails for it to look like or be called debris. The US has done similar things before; some people think that the Misty program (which is positively known to have included satellite camouflage research) involved faking a satellite explosion and cutting the radar cross-section of the actual satellite with sleight of hand so that it seemed to be part of a "debris" field from the explosion. See http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077830/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/spy-satellites-rise-faked-fall/ for details.
The Misty program shows that radar cross section can be misleading, and that's the only real data suggesting that this is cube-sat sized. This could be an experimental stealth satellite, a Russian Misty, or, given its apparent intercept course with the rest of the original craft, an experimental satellite-killer, proving concepts of stealth and asat warfare.
The world considered Russia a nation of potato farmers, then without warning they made the first ICBM, launched the first space satellite, the first creature in space, the first man in space, the first spacewalk, the first women in space, the first probe to the moon, the first lunar landing, the first moon rover, the first interplanetary probe. NASA and American commercial space ventures still uses Russian fucking rocket engines (admittedly Soviet designs but still the best).
I admit since going capitalist Russia isn't the amazing powerhouse it once was but to underestimate the potential of that place can only be due to having no knowledge of history.
The entire point of the X-37b, is that it's incredible value for money for what it does.
I'm just saying it is foolish to say the US "lost" the war. It didn't happen that way. It was not a defeat, not when "winning" is not the goal. They walked away, and invested their energies elsewhere until the business climate became more suitable for investment, and now you see Coke and Pepsi. Riddle me this, did we actually "lose" the war?
On my other note, the war is not won until everybody surrenders. If you want to win, you do whatever it takes and use all of your resources at hand to make it quick. Otherwise you're just playing sadistic games, like a cat playing with its prey before killing and eating it.
Russia and China are wannabes. The petro-dollar rules the world. It is the center of the universe. Oceania will make sure it stays that way. This story is very movie like. Pieces of "junk" coming alive to attack. Who says obfuscation doesn't work? It only has to while the mission is in progress.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Concur. The notion that the US always loses wars is bullshit. Typically they achieve their military objectives in days, if not hours. And the casulties they take while doing so, are unbelievably low by historical standards. There is simply no comparison. If the Americans want to smash you, you're toast, no matter who you are.
Where these things are lost, is where politics gets involved: the utter catastrophe of the occupation in Iraq was brought to us by the utterly useless, moron American Right (mostly followers of Leo Strauss, who are criminally stupid, yet fancy themselves as philosopher-kings) and its lackeys, namely, Paul Bremer (who should be stabbed in the head because of his sheer stupidity -- EVERYTHING that right-wingers touched in Iraq turned to shit.)
Given the terrible leadership we see in the West these days, it's nothing compared to the joke the Russians must endure now. Everyone thinks that Putin is some kind of insane strategic genius and that he's playing chess while us stupid imperialists are playing checkers. See the state of their economy to decide for yourself whether or not this is actually true. At least when our moron leaders screw up, we can blame ourselves for electing them. The Russians, with their laughable Potemkin democracy, don't even get that.
Like the Soviet moon landings? Or the Soviet equivalent of the Viking or Pioneers probes?
Must've missed those. My bad.
The R7 was a straightforward extrapolation of the V-2. They had to change the fuel to synthetic kero, because the drunkard operators kept getting blind drunk on the rocket fuel.
Von Braun's team built mostly brand-new stuff.
Sadly, they only get their shit together in times of crisis.
In the meantime, they end up with people like Brezhnev, Yeltsin or Putin -- and they're massively the worse for it.
We went in to Iraq to toss out Saddam and in to Afghanistan to get bin Laden...
Yes, I'll accept that for the sake of argument that the mission was "accomplished".
More like installing another, more complaint puppet regime. Let's not mince meat here. The locals know what the intentions are. They were not being offered "democracy". They only got an *offer they can't refuse*
Note, don't take any of this as singling anybody out. Empires are empires. Sure hope we have our own similarly rigged "junk" up there though. And we might want to relearn celestial navigation. Bombs in space are fairly indiscriminate. I'll assume the X-37 has lasers...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No problem, you're an ignorant fucking American. The list of things you've missed is getting pretty long.
Here's a few other things you might have missed while you were too busy tracking the #gamergate controversy and masturbating. Try and keep up, yank, if you can. Direct from Wikipedia:
1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka
1957: First satellite, Sputnik 1
1957: First animal in Earth orbit, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2
1959: First rocket ignition in Earth orbit, first man-made object to escape Earth's gravity, Luna 1
1959: First data communications, or telemetry, to and from outer space, Luna 1.
1959: First man-made object to pass near the Moon, first man-made object in Heliocentric orbit, Luna 1
1959: First probe to impact the Moon, Luna 2
1959: First images of the moon's far side, Luna 3
1960: First animals to safely return from Earth orbit, the dogs Belka and Strelka on Sputnik 5.
1961: First probe launched to Venus, Venera 1
1961: First person in space (International definition) and in Earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, Vostok programme
1961: First person to spend over 24 hours in space Gherman Titov, Vostok 2 (also first person to sleep in space).
1962: First dual manned spaceflight, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4
1962: First probe launched to Mars, Mars 1
1963: First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6
1964: First multi-person crew (3), Voskhod 1
1965: First extra-vehicular activity (EVA), by Aleksei Leonov,[19] Voskhod 2
1965: First probe to hit another planet of the Solar system (Venus), Venera 3
1966: First probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the moon, Luna 9
1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10
1967: First unmanned rendezvous and docking, Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188.
1968: First living beings to reach the Moon (circumlunar flights) and return unharmed to Earth, Russian tortoises on Zond 5
1969: First docking between two manned craft in Earth orbit and exchange of crews, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5
1970: First soil samples automatically extracted and returned to Earth from another celestial body, Luna 16
1970: First robotic space rover, Lunokhod 1 on the Moon.
1970: First data received from the surface of another planet of the Solar system (Venus), Venera 7
1971: First space station, Salyut 1
1971: First probe to impact the surface of Mars, Mars 2
1971: First probe to land on Mars, Mars 3
1975: First probe to orbit Venus, to make soft landing on Venus, first photos from surface of Venus, Venera 9
1980: First Hispanic and Black person in space, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez on Soyuz 38
1984: First woman to walk in space, Svetlana Savitskaya (Salyut 7 space station)
1986: First crew to visit two separate space stations (Mir and Salyut 7)
1986: First probes to deploy robotic balloons into Venus atmosphere and to return pictures of a comet during close flyby Vega 1, Vega 2
1986: First permanently manned space station, Mir, 1986â"2001, with perman
Shoot anything you can't understand, kill anyone you can't control.
Look how well that's worked out for you in Iraq. "Mission accomplished," oh you're absolutely right, you accomplished your mission. You came to royally fuck things up and it's exactly what you did, now you have people ISIS rolling over your CIA-backed government and satellites being launched by the Russians that you don't notice until they're literally doing cartwheels in space.
Maybe you should do the world a favour, turn the guns on yourselves. You know, like your own soldiers are doing. At least they still have their morals intact. Better to die a hero than live to see yourself become the villian, etc.
It's a space station!
The Russians lifted this idea from Han Solo in ESB - just hiding out in the Imperial Destroyer's garbage dump. If Boba Fett can see through that ploy, so can the US.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Putin ensured ordinary Russians get a decent share of the raw materials income. While the relatives of your NY banksters wanted to exfiltrate all the raw materials and pay for that with some measly billions into Jelzin's private account.
THAT is why the U.S. media+establishment hates Russia. And why the Kievians hate Russia. Russia is a country not under the control of NY billionare-maniacs and their relatives like Chodorkovsky and the wacky blonde gas-thief Timoshenko who "wants to kill all Russians".
Without the SS Unterscharführer von Braun America would never have reached the moon before the Russkies. You simply dont grok Newtonian physics, thats all.
So, the Chinese then?
Absolutely, we could solve this ISIS problem in 12 hours, yes in 12 hours we could kill 90% of ISIS......and most of the middle east at the same time.
11 of those hours would be a bunch of fat rich men waving their dicks at each other pretending to be leaders.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Given the fun you have with NY finance fucking up your lives at random occasions, I am not sure your description conveys any truth. Next think America will get is John F. Hitler, a U.S. marines corporal rising to the top after NY fucked up once more.
That would not be in the interest of Raytheon, Lockmart, L3 and the like. They want a Never Ending Business Success Story. Apparently the War On Something is programmed to last for the next 30 years.
It's all about pork. And to ensure pork deliveries, they need to consume Human Meat.
I think this is yet another proof how devious and barbaric Russian regime really is. We cannot allow Putin to do such things like putting (???) a satellites in orbit and doing maneuvering with them. Only one country on earth is allowed to do such things. If we allow Russia commit acts of such treachery all sorts of bad things may happen or even Klingons may materialize in orbit!!!!
You should not have had sex with those Fremde Heere Ost and SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt thugs in Munich, my dear Americans. Those nice chaps first killed Millions cold-blooded and soon later made YOU pay their nice salaries.
Bavarians really have some sort of hypnotic capability, it seems. First they hypnotized one Austrian and 80 million Germans, then they hypnotized American Intelligence, too.
Most of that "bad, evil Russki" is the product of their wicked, insane work.
ISIS does all the MIC wants them to do. And that includes the NSA portion of the MIC. They want this thing to go on for 30 years, so that all they jobs in comfy chairs are secure.
Concise and spot-on! Thanks: I'm using your comment in future posts, when the conversation inevitably turns nasty against Russia or Putin.
The reason the leadership of the West so hates Putin is that he stands between them and their ability to violate Russia's natural resources.
In fact, Putin went one better and reclaimed former state-owned institutions that were sold for peanuts a couple of decades ago.
Of course, those same leaders are violating their OWN citizens back in the US / UK, but it's so much easier when the local media is also controlled.
Sorry, but Western elections are no more (or less) free than those in Russia.
Riddle me this:
Why did Obama need to raise and spend over a billion dollars to get elected?
And after such money is raised, to whom is he beholden? Big pharma? Car industry? Big tobacco? Food industry? All of them?
Everything isn't peaches and cream in Russia, but nor is it in the West.
Your hard-coded vitriolic response to anything Russian says more about you (and the powers that have moulded you) than anything else.
There's one thing that Russia is behind the west on, there isn't a single bricklayer who can use a spirit level. It doesn't sound much and even though houses in the US are made from the cheapest materials that'll just do, at least they're dry and draft free.
Actually, von Braun's team (brought over in Paperclip) was very conservative in their rocket engineering. They preferred incremental improvements over big leaps in technology. Thus the V-2 begat the Redstone, which begat the Jupiter, which together begat the Saturn I which begat the Saturn IB which (and this was a pretty good sized leap) begat the Saturn V. Two explicit examples -- notice that the Saturn IB and Saturn V both had fins on the first stage -- what other space boosters had or have fins? Also, the Huntsville team flew the Saturn I four times with a dummy second stage before they tried it in the two stage orbital configuration. As a result no missions launched with any Saturn booster failed due to launch vehicle problems (though the second [unmanned] launch of the Saturn V was close). Some other engineering teams in the US were pushing the state of the art harder -- such as the Atlas missile which relied on constant pressurization of the fuel tanks to maintain structural rigidity.
Fair enough, Putin is a danger who is more interested in the romanticism of the Soviet block than achievements. In fact progress is so dire that the two Russians who developed Graphene had to accept a lab in the University of Manchester, UK to do their work.
Yet, in the grand scheme of these things, the Soviets and subsequent Russians didn't really use these firsts to build on each other in most of the later cases.
The Russians haven't had long-term scientific exploration rovers on other planets with multiyear missions. The Russians haven't expanded their human presence in space beyond a token few individuals. At this point, Russia doesn't even have its own launch facilities within its borders- it relies on Kazakhstan. The Americans and Europeans are unlocking Mars' secrets with numerous successful scientific missions, and even India is getting in on the act.
Fact of the matter is, Russia has its strengths and weaknesses, just as everyone else does. Russia's initial space overtures were helped by their challenges in building small nuclear weapons, as the launch vehicles for ICBMs had to be bigger, directly leading to more payload and being able to repurpose that technology for space. Americans built smaller nukes, and had to play catch-up when it came to space, but as the event on July 20, 1969 showed, Americans were very good at achieving results when they felt they needed to.
And America is headed there again, in the form of private ventures like SpaceX, that are attempting to recreate the capabilities of the Saturn rockets but with significantly less cost. I fully expect that they will succeed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So, do the names Plesetsk cosmodrome and kapustin jar ring any bells in your head?
Actually, Putin does not fancy the CCCP but the tsarist russia.
Problem is this. Young people in russia do not like the communism, but they like the strong russia, so russian officials are talking about glorious past and russian derzava, meaning the tsarist russia, that ruled Poland and Finland and states in eastern europe.
Sadly, they only get their shit together in times of crisis.
In the meantime, they end up with people like Brezhnev, Yeltsin or Putin -- and they're massively the worse for it.
Putin is vastly better than Yeltsin ever was. Yeltsin was a robber baron who was selling Russia's assets for pennies. That's why he was the darling of the west. Democratic leader my ass. He was a fucking criminal. Putin while an authoritorian man put an end to Yeltsin's backyard sales. He made the state owner of the country's assets and he improved the life of milions of russians who were sidestepped by Yeltsin's economic miracle.
You don't know the damn Chinese! They skin and boil live cats!
This thing could be a psychotronic weapon w/ brain imaging capability. The US has dozens of satellites that work like this, in their TAMI / Thought Amplifier Mind Interface system.
Everyone stands around not even knowing what these beasts are allowing governments to do .. In terms of surveillance and weapons.
obamasweapon.com
Utterly untrue. If you think the R-7 was a V-2 derivative you are entirely ignorant of rocket science. It used different fuel, vastly different aerodynamics, different combustion chamber design, verier thrusters instead of control surfaces, strap on boosters, and an entirely original launch pad. The redstone rocket, on the other hand, was just a V-2 derivative.
The Russians ?
I'm happy this is becoming more common knowledge, if only on technology sites.
It's not like the US hasn't got their secret crap up there... So it's ver hypcritical to judge the russians...
I'm not a cat.
We spent billions of dollars installing a "puppet regime" that subsequently kicked us out.
Doesn't sound very "compliant" to me.
Petro-dollar still rules. *Mission Accomplished!*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That doesn't matter. They do it to people too. They don't care. They think suffering is good.
"Putin ensured ordinary Russians get a decent share of the raw materials income. While the relatives of your NY banksters wanted to exfiltrate all the raw materials and pay for that with some measly billions into Jelzin's private account."
Yes, that's why the average Russian has a poverty level low enough to rival the poorest African nations and why the average American has a poverty level that's actually first world.
What?
People hate Russia because it's a fascist and increasingly far right dictatorship, whose leaders allow so much corruption to occur that your typical $10bn Winter Olympics ended up costing $51bn.
There's a reason that half the billionaires in London are Russian- because Russia is like what you say America is, but worse. NY bankers are amateurs at taking wealth for themselves compared to Russia's Oligarchs and ironically that's precisely why Ukraine wants to get the hell away from Russia - because the Ukrainian people have seen the Russian way where the Oligarchs (like Yanukovych) get insanely rich, whilst the average person stays poor.
Still, keep sipping on your Putleraide. You obviously enjoy it.
And for the military it was a ridiculously good value, because NASA paid $109 million of the initial development before it lost interest.
Because there wasn't then, and still isn't, any reason to send men to the moon. There are today about a dozen countries that could do it if sufficiently motivated. The problem (if you want to see it that way) is finding a reason to go.