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,
Ther worst thing about the moon is all the damned Nazis.
Why spend money on peace when war pays off now.
I'm in my 50's and remember the moon shots. They were awe inspiring at first but they became more routine (for the public) over time. I believe NASA and the public were ready for the next big thing. The shuttles were exciting at first too and it seemed we were on a track that could lead to ordinary people getting into space. Of course the shuttle program ended and manned space flight hasn't really broken any new ground for awhile.
43 years ago, we quit going to the moon and it didn't seem like a bad decision given the expense and that we'd already been there several times. But I don't think anyone believed that it would be 50 years or more before a person would set foot on another planetary body.
I was a teen then, and recall all the stories, the promises in the popular press about how we'd be sending men to Mars by the 1980's and have a permanent base there by 2000. It seemed like a time of unbounded, and in hindsight naive optimism.
Since I was not very old at the time I was not able to rationally evaluate those claims on my own, so I bought into them. It was the popular consensus, and I had no basis to reject it.
Now, as someone much older, I believe there is a place for manned space exploration, and we should do both things, but that our science return per dollar is far larger from unmanned missions around the solar system. We should be spending 5X NASA's current budget on that. It would still be a drop in the bucket, easily paid for by stopping the War on Drugs say, but in return we would dream, we would explore, and we would learn.
I want to see a pluto probe every other year. A dozen rovers on Mars. Another half dozen on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We have the ability. We have the technology. We have the budget. We waste more money than that would cost.
We could. But we don't.
I thought it was because the aliens told us to keep off their lawn.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
We stopped going to the moon because we beat the Soviet Union and they eventually collapsed. The space race was a dick waving contest with the possibility of learning how to put weapons in orbit.
The only reason the U.S. goes back to the moon will be because China wants to try doing it. Otherwise a moon landing is in the hands of the rich entrepreneurs who are holding their own private dick waving contests.
Unfortunately, the Vietnam war and its aftermath bled the USA until there was nothing left.
The Vietnam War didn't bleed the USA. It drove the wrong group into power: The feel-good, anti-science hippies got their representatives to cut back on everything that didn't produce immediate self-satisfaction. That meant no nuclear power, no space program, little basic science. Only when scientists managed to convince the military that something could be a good weapon did anything get done: ARPANET, GPS, etc.
Did you see the Apollo 13 film (1995)? Part of the setup was that the moon missions were already old hat to Americans, who had mostly stopped paying attention after Apollo 11 had achieved the big goal.
I'm confident that the screenwriters had pretty good access to institutional memory at NASA re events that occurred 25 years earlier, there would've been a lot of old hands still around.
The spinoffs are a myth.[Federation of Ameican Scientists]
Kennedy sent us to the moon for prestige. "Look at America, aren't we wonderful!"
Where's the incentive now. It's a huge expense for little reward. Any mistakes cost billions, lives and ... prestige. Compare the costs and benefits and there is no logical reason to go. Some country more desperate for prestige will go next.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It is depressing to me just how few people admit haw mind bendingly awful it is that we have not been back for what used to be a lifetime.
As to why, I can think of several reasons that nobody from earth has been back in this time...
1. Lack of political leadership globally.
2. There are easier ways to fill pork barrels.
3. The press in the developed world is in the hands of an ever smaller bunch of sociopaths who take pride in being unscientific.
4. The world is too comfortable for the 1%
5. There is a myth that if we don't spend it on progress, the money will be used to feed/house the poor and hungry.
6. Fear by the powerful that once people are off earth, they will become "global citizens", not just good Americans, Russians, Brits or whatever.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
That was clearly an exaggeration. 9 manned missions got to the moon, 6 landed, and all 9 came back, with only one running into some problems.
If each had only 50% chance of survival, they had 0.2% chance of having no casualties in 9 flights. Even if you look at just 6 that landed, that's 1.6% chance of flying 6 times successfully.
I think their odds were likely quite a bit higher than 50%.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
In addition, the very first Apollo mission resulted in loss of life, and they still pushed on - albeit with a delay. Hardly ruinous.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Now the Space Nutters will.....
I presume by that description, you are referring to people who can do better mathematics than 10 year olds, know some history and perhaps basic sociology?
No. They will mostly ignore you. I just felt like a bit of troll feeding before I went to bed.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
It's you that don't understand how probabilities work.
You play heads or tails, and get heads 8 first times.
Gambler fallacy says that as heads and tails have overall the same probability, tails should happen next.
Pulzar guesses that the coin is most probably a biased coin, and heads should happen next.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
You fell for the Gambler's fallacy.
You misunderstand gambler's fallacy.
Let's say the chance to come back alive is indeed 50%.
We had 8 missions. The chance for the 9th is still 50%.
We have no missions. What is the chance that we get 9 missions coming back alive? (1/2)^9 = 0.001953125 = 0.2%.
Gamblers fallacy would be saying after 8 successful missions that the change for the 9th is 0.2% - which is not what the GP said.
GP is talking about statistical significance.
If the chance top come back alive is 50%, we expect 4.5 out of 9 missions to come back alive.
Null hypothesis: The difference between 4.5 expected and 9 observed missions coming back alive is due to chance.
Alternative hypothesis: The chance to come back is higher than 50%
SD = sqrt((1/2)^2*(1/2)^2) = 0.25
z = (observed result - expected result)/SD = (9 - 4.5)/0.25 = 18
NormalCDF(18,infinity) = 1.04E-70% = the chance that the probability to come back alive is indeed 50%
Conclusion: GP is correct, it is very unlikely that the chance to come back alive was 50%.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
Due to the low number of flights, I should have used a t-test, rather than a z-test. Anyway, the conclusion will be the same.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
(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.
Primary objective was to beat the Reds to the stars, back then it was them or us. When Apollo program started, USSR scored a number of firsts in the Space Race that demonstrated the superiority of Communism (not really but there's extensive discussions on all that). Whatever, Hugh Dryden suggested putting a man on the moon and there was already the Saturn rocket and F1 engine in development. Kennedy used his great oral skills, Johnson used his huge political power, James Webb used his knowledge on how to work the system to maintain budgets over a multi-year period.
Once we achieved a manned landing the race was over. What's even interesting is Bob Gilruth suggested no more Apollo flights as each one had so many opportunities for things to go wrong and lose a crew (and almost did with 13). Apollo 18, 19, 20 were cancelled to save money (wouldn't have saved much as hardware ready to go, crews pretty much fully trained).
There is the "What If" Gargarin never made the first space flight? Would we have worked on economic development of space like we are trying to do now? Dennis Wingo has some articles including past studies from those years after Sputnik but before Gargarin's flight. https://denniswingo.wordpress....
mfwright@batnet.com
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.
The Soviets were never in the 'race to the moon'. The Apollo program had many goals:
By the time the USA was finally putting people on the moon, their rocket program was highly competitive, the military/espionage value of humans in space was seen to be low, domestic opinion of the program was mixed (although people did see the achievement as a sign of the superiority of the USA over the Soviets), and the low-hanging scientific discoveries were completed in the first two landings. The Apollo program had achieved most of its goals and remaining goals were of dramatically decreasing value while the cost of the program remained extremely high. Humanity stopped putting people on the moon because governments couldn't justify the cost of continuing doing so.
The USA has no reason to go to the moon just because China wants to go. China has reason to go because they want to develop their rocket program in order to compete should they need more autonomy for a variety of reasons. They also need to show their domestic population that the Chinese government and people are a world power which can do crazy, inspiring things. The USA gains very little from getting into this game. Where the USA might have an interest is in something like asteroid mining, but the pressing concerns there are surveying and orbital capture of desired objects, which won't likely involve manned space flight.
I've never seen any evidence that the same left wing groups who opposed nuclear power opposed landing people on the moon. Those two issues seem very unrelated to me in fact.
Meanwhile, fiscal conservatism has always been the reason for NASA budget cuts in my experience. With a shrinking budget should NASA have kept landing people on the moon or invested its limited resources in other less understood aspects of our universe?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Lunokhod automatic vehicle was the actual victor of the Luna race: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This approach was copied for Mars exploration, and will be used in many other expeditions. Not an Apollo type approach.
The Soviets were never in the 'race to the moon'.
First attempt to land on the moon: Luna 1, 1959
First hard landing on the moon: Luna 2, 1959
First soft landing on the moon: Luna 9, 1966
First unmanned sample return from the moon: Luna 16, 1970
First unmanned moon rover: Luna 17, 1970
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
The Saturn program (Saturn I, IB and V) had virtually zero relevance to developing ICBMs. They used the wrong fuels, were not rapidly available, and were far too large and expensive. While Mercury and Gemini did make use of Atlas and Titan, it was primarily because they were the only large rockets currently available in the US arsenal. The USAF was investing plenty in ICBM research without the need for a "cover"