Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back At Apollo 17, and Why We Stopped Going To the Moon (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The 43rd anniversary of the mission of Apollo 17, the last time men walked on the moon, has elicited a strange kind of nostalgia, and no little melancholia in some parts of the media. These qualities are captured in a story in IO9 that purports to tell us why no one has been back to the moon in over four decades and why we might soon return at last. Deadline Hollywood informs us that "The Last Man on the Moon," a documentary on Apollo moonwalker Gene Cernan, is set for a release to both theaters and video on demand in February, having been shown at film festivals for the past year or so,
(A comment I made over at io9 as well.)
As someone who lived through the ‘false dawn of space travel’ (to use Heinlein’s phrase), who grew up intensely following the space program, and who actually worked at NASA/JSC on the Space Shuttle flight simulators back in 1979-80, I can give you my observation: the American people got bored with space. Seriously. No one (outside of a small group of space enthusiasts, such as myself) was clamoring for yet more Apollo missions. TV ratings of flight and moonwalk coverage sank to the basement. It was all just more men in space suits skipping around in a black-and-white environment.
With no public demand or support, neither Congress nor the White House had much stomach for pushing things forward, not when the funds had other uses. The NASA manned flight division evolved into a jobs program, which is why NASA fought against privatization of space flight for so long. (The NASA unmanned space exploration division continued to work miracles, even as it does to this day.)
Of course, the real root problem was that the Apollo approach was fundamentally flawed in the first place; as some wag put it decades ago, it was like building a cruise liner for a single crossing of the Atlantic and sinking everything but one lifeboat at the end of the trip. Prior to Kennedy’s challenge, the US was working on an incremental approach: SSTO (single stage to orbit), gliding re-entry, and a space station. We basically lost half a century due to the Apollo approach (and the horribly expensive, horribly fragile kludge that was the Space Shuttle). Frankly, NASA’s current Orion effort is a repeat of just about all the mistakes we made with Apollo and threatens to soak up NASA’s budget for years to come, even as goal dates keep getting pushed back more and more.
The night that Apollo 11 landed, I was part of a group of friends (we were all high school students) who stayed up all night to watch the coverage. When I heard the words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”, I felt the future had begun. I was sure I would live long enough to visit LEO myself and to see humans colonize the moon and land on Mars. If you had described to me back in 1969 what the state of space exploration (and, in particular, US space exploration) would be in 2015, I would not have believed you. And yet here we are.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Why is the loss of life in going into space always seen as such a big, scary risk with ruinous repercussions?
You want safe? Stay home and play in the back yard.
Pretty much any human exploration endeavor worth a damn risks life and limb -- exploring the poles, sailing to "the new world", etc.
Limiting space travel because somebody might die? That's lame.
Space exploration is for the patient. Science fiction is for phonies.
The popular science fiction (always endemic on this board) with its fantasy physics always ignores immense distances, energies, time, politics and money.
Most importantly money.
During the last 43 years we have probed the entire solar system and are currently roving the sands of Mars as we peck away at our keyboards at a safe distance and for costs that do not over burden society. Space exploration is a constant source of scientific achievement and with advanced directives and equipment (Kepler, Webb) we are going to explore the galaxy in the comfort of our sofas without breaking the bank
Because that's the trick, our robotics can pave the way for us because Space is a harsh place.
Now the next step, and it could take 50 years, is the when we land a lathe and a robot to operate it on the Moon. Soon after there will be an image of a dome and behind it the earth and in the dome there will be a bunch of green leafy things curling up from the lunar soil to reach for the sun. And then things will probably go a lot faster.
There are precisely 2 points on the moon that have (basically) uninterrupted line-of-sight to earth AND line of sight to the sun (ie power).
Nice idea, but the lunar axis is inclined 1.5 degrees to the ecliptic. Not as bad as earth, but you are going to need a tower half a mile high holding up your massive solar array, to catch the winter sun. Small engineering problem there.
Worse, the lunar orbit has a 5 degree inclination, so the Earth (2 degrees across) will be rising and setting on a monthly cycle. Hardly uninterrupted.
What were you planning to do with this polar base?
has a de-facto ownership based on occupancy.
You might want to google the South Pole of the earth for a precedent that contradicts that.
The problem is that you are suffering from two-bit thinking - literally. For you it's either a choice between leaving them alone or engaging in hot war, because your mind is incapable of understanding subtlety, adaptivity, and planning ahead. Bullshit analogies with France serve to further cloud your judgement. Your analogy with Germany is bullshit because we HAVE been intervening in the middle east militarily for about three decades now, and it's always under the guise of "let's keep more bad things from happening." Something which uniformly backfires.
You correctly acknowledge that our miserably dumb policies were instrumental in creating the problem, but fail to see that it's precisely your type of thinking that enabled those miserably dumb policies.
Iraq would not be in the situation it is today if we hadn't deposed Saddam.
Having deposed Saddam, Iraq would still not be in the situation it is today if the streets of Iraq were properly policed and order was maintained.
Having descended into chaos, Iraq would still not be in the situation it is today if the advice of all the analysts and experts were listened to, rather than appointing military yes men who would do Cheney and Rumsfeld's bidding without question.
And given all of the above, Iraq would STILL not be in the situation it is today if we didn't play an active role in destabilizing Syria.
At any part of the process from the late 1980's to the present, simply doing nothing would have been far better than doing the stupid things we did.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.