Slashdot Mirror
47 Years Ago Today, Apollo 11 Landed On the Moon (foxnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At this point 47 years ago we had begun our orbit around the Moon," writes Buzz Aldrin in a tweet. Today, Wednesday, July 20th, 2016, marks the 47th anniversary of when NASA astronauts landed on the moon for the very first time. Fox News reports: "Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off from Earth on a massive Saturn V rocket on July 16, 1969. Four days later, the Eagle module landed on the surface with Aldrin and Armstrong inside; Collins stayed behind in the orbiting Columbia craft. Millions of people back on Earth watched, captivated, as Armstrong was the first down the ladder, then uttered his now-famous line: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' The astronauts eventually returned to Earth, splashing down four days later in the Pacific. On the moon, an American flag and a plaque that read, in part, 'We came in peace for all mankind,' remained." To this day, only 12 people have ever walked on the moon. Hopefully, that number will increase within the next decade. NASA is also celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Viking 1 lander's arrival on Mars. Viking 1 was the first American craft to land on the red planet on July 20, 1976.
Today is Thursday July 21.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I remember this like it was yesterday. Was four and a half years old, and I watched the landing with my father.
My dad was a pretty brilliant guy in the technology of the time. And he had tears welling up in his eyes when seeing Armstrong jump off the ladder to the lunar surface.
I remember his words to me: “We did it...”. Then he sobbed for a while but was ashamed of having his emotions that close to the surface.
Dad was a pretty smart guy in the high tech of those days. And he understood exactly how big this achievement was. He knew how hard the work was to do it. A lot of people in our family were involved in technology- it felt like the family had a part in it (and in fact my uncle educated NASA engineers in electronic engineering).
To this day, it is the most important moment in my life. It set the tone for everything I did in the future. And led to a career in technology.
That day- was perhaps my greatest lesson learned. It influenced countless other people I know in technology as well.
My proudest day as an American.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
The computer was slower than an Arduino and used about 10K lines of code to land on the moon
https://xkcd.com/893/
Well, there are dates that are important in our collective consciousness. 11/22/63, 07/20/69, 09/11/01. Get it ?
Well, there are dates that are important in our collective consciousness. 11/22/63, 07/20/69, 09/11/01. Get it ?
No idea what you are talking about.
I didn't even know there was a 22nd month.
Now that would be something worthy of Slashdot.
I am disappointment on human.
No, it wasn't. Simple economy, staging it would have cost more.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nearly every advanced thing we all live with today derived from 3 big tech programs: [1] the ICBM program, which contrary to popular cenception was the actual driver of the miniturization of electronics [2] The Apollo Moon program, and [3] The space shuttle.
The ICBM program preceeded Apollo and needed to miniturized electronics for guidance and needed it small and light because the missiles back then barely had the performance required to get the warhead to its destination. That same ICBM program created the need to study shapes needed for high-speed atmospheric entries and guidance and thermal protection, which ended up proving manned spaceflight would be possible and that blunt-body capsule shapes were best. All the early manned spaceflight was done in tandem with the ICBMS an shared launch vehicles thereby sharing the benefits. Mercury flew on Redstone missiles and then Atlas Missiles. Gemini flew on Titan missiles and on that particular program the USAF/NASA interests on the electronics andother things were in full bloom. The first Saturns (The Saturn I) were designed before Kennedy was elected President and were done under the auspices of the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency under the names "Juno V" and "Super Jupiter" (Wikipedia has this a bit wrong, you need to read the actual Army and Eisehower Presidential Library docs. When Von Braun and his team transferred from the Army to the new NASA after President Eisehhower (Republican) teamed up with Senator Johnson (Democrat and future President) to create NASA from NACA and the BMA the project name changed to "Saturn". The Saturn moon missions then had greater computing needs for its far more complex guidance and drove further electronics developments.
The Apollo program not only required the creation of more new materials and electronics, but also the creation of new manufacturing techniques and new techniques for inspecting and testing things and qualifying things non-destructively and with very high reliability. All this activity required the Apollo program to employ over 300,000 people (making it nearly impossible to argue that there was a huge conspiracy to fake it, and keep it covered up) and track many thousands of exotic parts and assemblies which created requirements for even new management and documentation techniques that then propagated into the entire economy. You had ladies at Playtex who'd previously made girdles and brassiers suddenly making space suits where the slightest flaw would kill an astronaut, which made companies like even a ladies' undergarments company elevate quality control to never-imagined heights.
The space shuttle pushed all this stuff much further, with its extremely exotic thermal protection, engine, and fuel cell requirements as that program too the US from a 3-man capsule to a spacecraft the size of a 1960's airliner that could carry 7 people and a cargo the size of a schoolbus.
If you use a cell phone, a tablet, a personal computer, the internet, a post-1980 automobile, fly on a post-1970 airplane (fly-by-wire was pioneered by Neil Armstrong at Edwards AFB using a spare Apollo computer in his post-Apollo carreer) then the three programs I have noted are vital to you. If you get ANY medical treatments or tests, you are probably using tech derived from these programs. When you consider all the things that are only made possible by the things made possible by those programs, then the scope really widens.
You have to do the moon shot AND stage the landing. Because the rocket has to exist and it has to go somewhere. And that somewhere better be the moon, because the Russians will listen for anything that could remotely be considered fake. And they will waste not a nanosecond to expose it, you really think they would not have jumped onto the possibility to pull your pants down?
So that rocket has to go to the moon and telemetry has to be in sync with what's to be expected. Because even if you want to spin the conspiracy further and say the Russians are in on it (yeah. Sure. Right. The reason this was done in the first place, the one who had to lose the most by being "one-upped" after their firsts, they play along with you), there were literally thousands of amateurs listening in. All over the world. You could never have squelched that if something went wrong.
The risk alone is impossible to assess. You have thousands of people working on it, thousands you have to silence. Or you have to give them the absolutely credible impression that they are currently running a moon mission. Which means that you have to run a moon mission, essentially. AND then pay for the staged landing.
Yes, that would have been more expensive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh dear deity of our choice, you actually believe that crap?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I don't know who the bozo is that wrote this page, but I would recommend he does a little bit of research on physics, especially plasma physics, and orbital mechanics so he would at least not write such a collection of bullshit in so few lines. Without going into detail, most of what he writes is basically wrong. Air is quite homogeneous at the speeds this deals with (a wind of 200km/h means little if you're traveling at more than 10,000km/h), additionally you're riding on a shockwave of plasma (which is essentially what keeps you from burning up, think of it as something akin to the water vapor that lets water drops dance on your glowing hot cooking plate instead of simply vaporizing the water instantly).
But let's pretend this piece of hogwash is actually correct. How did they silence the various space tourists? I mean, wouldn't you be pissed to pay a few 100 grand only to be told "fooled you, it's just a hoax"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, it totally was! This is how it was done.
Despite lots of other crap going on at the time - Vietnam, Race Riots and so on, mankind basically hit its pinnacle that day. It's been a slow downhill ride ever since. The election of Trump will prove me right.
http://www.theonion.com/graphic/july-21-1969-10515
Elementary: 47 = 42 + 5
At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
'One Small Step for Man': Was Neil Armstrong Misquoted?
aged 15.
Get it ?
No. We don't celebrate US events, not even nine-eleven. Because we get so much American television,we're reminded anyway but it's not a big deal: We've got our own tragedies to remember.
That's comparatively simple. "Here's your few 100 grand back, and a couple million extra. And if you don't pretend to have been in space, THEY will find you and have a little chat with you."
Nixon? For real?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You ARE aware that you're not talking about Joe Randomgeek here, yes? You want to silence people whose net worth trumps that of NASA with money? And you want to intimidate Russian oligarchs with your petty version of THEM? Watch out who you try to intimidate there or they'll show you what the real THEM is!
Please...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Old farts everywhere...
I'm jumping n your lawns!
Nixon couldn't successfully cover up a simple burglary involving a handful of people, but he was able to cover up a fake moon landing involving tens of thousands?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I remember watching that on TV when I was 5 and thinking "What's the big deal, the moon is like RIGHT THERE!"
Don't hold your breath. It's been more than 40 years since the last person walked on the moon. The US has no program started to get anyone up there again in the foreseeable future. Russia is happy just making money as a taxi service to the ISS. The private initiatives don't have the resources to make it happen either. Unless China pulls off a huge upset on the matter, I'd be surprised to see someone on the moon again in my lifetime.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You still wouldn't save the cost of a massive rocket capable of going to the moon!
I once worked in a company that had a UK and US presence. They had a great idea to do some sort of joint system but the date format got them stumped.
I proposed what could only be thought of by several managers as pure genius; the dd/mmm/yyyy format.
From that day Americans no longer got confused with a 31 month calendar.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Someone clearly isn't a J. J. Abrams fan...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Or you could have just used the ISO standard format, which also has the nice property that it's easy to sort: yyyy-mm-dd. ISO dates are big endian. UK dates are little endian. US dates are VAX byte order.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Can't wait 'til I reach the 47th anniversary of something!
And that somewhere better be the moon, because the Russians will listen for anything that could remotely be considered fake. And they will waste not a nanosecond to expose it, you really think they would not have jumped onto the possibility to pull your pants down?
So what you're saying is that the global elites don't always work together to screw the little guy, to pull the wool over their eyes? That is a fascinating idea, and quite counter to many posts that get made on Slashdot.
The risk alone is impossible to assess. You have thousands of people working on it, thousands you have to silence.
You make it sound like there couldn't have been a secret "inside job" conspiracy for 9/11 that could have been hidden. Interesting. Tell us more.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The "It was staged" scenario probably wouldn't have cost as much, but it's a violation of Occam's Razor: a plot more complicated and prone to being revealed than an actual mission.
...was the direct result of the unique experiences of WW2.
First, the US - despite the existential military challenge from the Soviet Union, which was only possible due to the disproportionately cheap annihilatory threat of nukes - was basically unchallenged as Earth's superpower economically, culturally, and militarily.
The rest of the world was still recovering from the aftereffects of WW2, from which the US had emerged largely unscathed but with a newfound taste/appreciation for the power of its science & industry marshaled by a central government (again, born of WW2).
At that same time, you had an entire generation of men that came back from war with a "we can accomplish anything" confidence (which in some cases tragically proved to be a dangerously entitled arrogance) AND an understanding that some things in the span of human events were WORTH the sacrifice of life and treasure. They accepted that.
I doubt we'll ever see such a time again.
We live in what remains the wealthiest, most comfortable society ever in human history, yet we still can't afford everything we buy.
47 years ago, we celebrated the triumph of landing people on the moon. In a short time, it became so pedestrian that it wasn't even front-page news anymore.
Today's triumphant news is about a new Tinder app that lets you 'hook up' with multiple people.
I know it's very "get off my lawn" but where we had an outward-looking, achievement-oriented society 50 years ago, today I see nothing but an enervated country suffused with ennui and a narcissistic obsession with carnality that leaves us paralyzed like a heroin addict on a buzz.
-Styopa
As you said, for the "Moon Landing Was A Hoax" theory to be true, NASA and the US Government would have had to silence thousands of people who worked on the project, the Russians who were our bitter enemies and who we were trying to one-up for putting a man in orbit, and thousands of amateurs listening in. Also, this silencing and cover-up would have to be both: 1) So iron-clad perfect that it eluded the detection of thousands of people over the decades and 2) So full of holes that a guy sitting in his basement looking at a video on his computer monitor could spot the forgery. Meanwhile, the conspiracy itself would need to be both so effective that they could keep all of these thousands of people who "knew the truth" silent for all of these years (through everything that the world has gone through in the past 40+ years) and so incompetent that they can't stop hoaxers from blurting out "the truth" all over the place.
This is the standard plot-hole of nearly all conspiracy theories: The conspirators need to be both highly effective and totally bumbling at the same time.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"No way... That's great! We landed on the moon!" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Others have covered that in order for NASA to fake the conspiracy they also had to play along and launch rockets anyway but to address your specific points, this commercial film maker lays out why faking the film wasn't likely possible. He does address other points like how conspiracy nuts like you don't really understand photography. To summarize, no one had the technology to "fake" a 143 minute live broadcast like that. These days with CGI, it's possible but at the time of the moon landing, 35mm film was the standard, not video like VHS. Faking it would have been extremely expensive with implausible edge film and computer technology not existing at the time.
OR
NASA had this secret fabulous film/computer technology developed decades before anyone else. Yet at the same time used primitive analog computers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not trivializing the achievement but what's the news here?
The fact that it's the 47th anniversary or the fact that Buzz Aldrin is tweeting about it? I don't see how either is newsworthy.
All I said is that the cold war was quite real and that the USA and the USSR did not "cooperate" on anything. You have two very different economic systems that both sides supported with a zeal that bordered on religiosity. Moreover, both sides vehemently believed in their own system enough to want the other system destroyed (just in case this sounds familiar, we're currently working on something similar, hoping that it would last at least as long). "Cooperation" is rather unlikely in such a scenario.
Also, don't forget that the USA had to pretend to be the good guy back then, because the idea of total equality does have a nice ring to it. Not so necessary this time around when the other side is arguably a pack of nutjobs with insanity written across their foreheads.
9/11 was less of an inside job. It was more likely a mix of various things coming together. Not really the topic now, but most likely IMO it was a mix of a disgruntled ex-ally of the US, a US that needs a reason for a war and a failed foreign policy. In the end, if you want to, yes, the US politics caused it, but it was most likely not an inside job. Again, far too many people to silence, far too many variables that could go wrong. And most of all, why bother when you get it done for free?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The German variant of Bill Nye (who is actually an astrophysicist, unlike Nye) put it best: If the moon landing was a hoax, it must have been done by two teams. The first one was a team of top notch experts who could flawlessly construct this whole hoax, fool millions, silence thousands and orchestrate the whole planning. And then, this team of perfect experts leaves the stage and makes room for the stooges, fools and idiots without a clue about space, physics, filming, lighting or prop handling that then went and filmed the whole thing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or you could have just used the ISO standard format, which also has the nice property that it's easy to sort: yyyy-mm-dd. ISO dates are big endian. UK dates are little endian. US dates are VAX byte order.
Bah, who wants universal when my way is right!
No, the great achievement really was putting people on the moon, and the enormous technical, industrial, and organizational effort that took....
At least one major power other tried and failed. It wasn't a given.
Tried and failed ?? Who was that ?
The Soviets once tried to work with the US on manned space missions to the moon but gave up.
A significant difference between the Soviet and the American space programs is that the American program was done in public, with failures as well as successes in the public eye, while the Soviet program was done in secret, with missions not announced until they succeeded.
After the Apollo successes, the Soviets let it be assumed that they didn't have a moon program at all; they never tried to beat the Americans. It was only years later that the Soviet society started to embrace openness ("glasnost", in Russian), and the full history of the Soviet manned moon program was slowly revealed.
They did have a manned moon program, and a big one.
* http://www.wired.com/2010/10/r...
* http://fas.org/spp/eprint/lind...
* http://www.popularmechanics.co...
The Soviets could have sent a man there but they realised it was too expensive for the result
As it turns out, no, they could not. They tried, but failed.
Ultimately, they gave up after their large booster, the N-1, failed for the third time. It was a key element in their lunar program, but they never got it to launch successfully. (By this time the Americans had already landed on the moon, so at best they would have come in second in a race with two competitors.
so they put their money into robotic exploration...
Or, more specifically, they made the announcement that this is what they were after all along. But it wasn't.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Well, considering that the US must have made some kind of deal with the Soviet Union about playing along with the whole moon landing thing, I'm sure that keeping Russian oligarchs in line can be outsourced to the Russian version of THEM.
Never underestimate the imagination of conspiracy afficionados.
What happened on the 9th of november 2001 ??
You didn't know? That was the first occurrence of an idiotic date format related comment by an Anonymous Coward.
Russian oligarchs ARE the Russian version of THEM...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The russians were in on it. The US President at the time was a Russian mole.
Thanks for making my day a bit brighter.
Nixon, a commie mole. That's one for the books :-)
"the USA and the USSR did not "cooperate" on anything. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Geophysical_Year
Only if they're ex-KGB. If they are, then they will keep their part of the deal (and possibly book touristy space flights just to keep up the conspiracy).
Otherwise, they are merely tolerated by the Russian version THEM and this tolerance can be withdrawn if their behavior is inappropriate.
Hey, this is fun if you don't seriously believe in it ... ;)
And of course those Russian THEM are capable of silencing all the people from all over the world that took a trip upstairs. Or, wait, I got it, of course ALL governments around the planet are in on it, right?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Falmebait is:
That's a been a staged fake! Haven't you all m0r0n5 read ll those books and articles?
Humor is:
...
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Sure, we believe you. That makes TOTAL sense. Re-entry is impossible:
http://heiwaco.tripod.com/moontravel.htm
Look at the shape of the re-entry module: the broadest part (the heat shield) allegedly faces into the atmosphere and magically stays that way all the time! Despite being constantly buffered by the atmosphere at 11,000 m/s! You seriously don't think that the module would immediately start spinning? And kill the occupants due to centrifugal force? Not to mention that all parts of the module would be heating up now, instead of the heat shield?
It can't be all staged so far.
I've personally talked to Sandra Bullock from Greenland while she was reentering with the Chinese module.
I am Aningaaq in person!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Nah, none of the real verifiable stuff matters, it was all fake too because after thinking about it for a few seconds I decided so. None of the legitimate refutations of my batshits crazy claims are accepted or understood and are therefore hogwash
On a more serious note, I do love how a couple of the big conspiracy claims, namely the shadows and waving flag just assume such stupidity in the midst of absolute professionalism. Like they think the people planning it wouldn't have figured to to just use one big spotlight and turn off the AC.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Mitchell and Webb covered this hilariously at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If You really believe that any of the Apollo missions landed on the moon, I feel for You. I was involved in the microchip industry in the late 1960's! The "only" integrated circuits then were NAND gates, period, end of story. Nasa claims they hand wired graphite ropes to achieve the same memory as a Commodore 64, and then this .. amazing computer.. went to the moon, landed, took off and returned to earth! Imagine the instruction set to do all of the above tasks? Nasa even claimed these hand wired graphite ropes were termed: "Little Old Lady" memory!
If You geeks out there think this was feasible, or even possible.. then imagine a "Sinclair ZX80" was incredibly more complicated than the NASA computer!
Would You trust the lives of humans to "the computer" that NASA built?
Geeks are gullible, but You can't seriously be "this gullible"!
The Russians simply don't know. They could probably monitor a rocket launching to the moon and possibly return back to earth. But there's no way the Russians could've known if there were actual astronauts in it. The Russians were fooled by the star-wars project. They are not all that powerful. To fake the moon landing, a real rocket must be sent to the moon, orbit it, land something onto the moon, do some remote controlled navigation and come back. The trick is whether there are poeple in it. The films could be recorded before hand and beamed back.
I'm not saying the moon landing is fake for sure, but I have my doubts about it. It just appeared too much of an anomaly. The unreal speed the project was developed with primitive technology, the near perfect success rate, the sudden stop and the seemingly lost ability to redo the same with vastly more advanced technology. I watched a NASA interview on Orion, the guy never mentions Apollo as past experience. The reporter (just a regular reporter, not a conspiracy nut in any way) specifically asked couldn't the problems have been answered by the Apollo missions, The interviewee simply answered the technology is lost in time. Really? It's only 40 years, many people who worked on it are still alive. All the essential documents are supposedly still in place. How could it just be lost as if it happened centuries ago? Then there are the overwritten Apollo 11 tapes, the recordings of the most monumental event in human history. If it's the tapes of any other mission it's still explainable, but the first man on the moon tapes should've been locked up in a museum, not casually laying around in the warehouse waiting to be reused. All this just defies common sense, and you can't blame people for questioning it.
And look how far we've come since then. Seriously, look for me because I can't see much.
Heck, I do blacksmithing and knifemaking for a hobby, and even that was impacted by the space program. My propane forge has insulation based on the space shuttle heat protection; the grinding belts I use were developed for making rocket and jet turbine blades, some of the steel I use came out of those programs, and the titanium I sometimes play with is only affordable because the aerospace industry uses enough that there's an economy of scale for production of Ti now.
It's been proven that Armstrong said, "That's one small step for *a* man, one giant leap for mankind." The equipment cut off the "A," as it often did. People need to stop misquoting it.
All you old timers remember the "we got a 1201 alarm" (or something like that) the LM computer indicating to Neal and Buzz it is taking in data too fast to handle. I was always puzzled by that story as what action can an astronaut do for something like that (unlike low fuel, high temperature, off course, loss of Bus A voltage, etc.), the book "Apollo: Race to the Moon" by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox gave a detailed explanation of that. Disclaimer: I'm extracting what I read 20 years ago so some details a little off.
Authors of this book interviewed many key and other notable people of the Apollo program but not much of any astronauts. That 1201 and similar alarms were intended for computer programmers for debugging (the digital display will flash certain numbers to indicate software problems). The LM software obviously thoroughly tested before flight but this situation occurred the Flight Dynamics Officer "FIDO" in MOCR heard this call on the loop. He then talked with one of his backroom guys (each one of those controllers in that "Mission Control" room, formally Mission Operations Control Room, has a group of guys with more monitors and indicators he can talk realtime intercom with). FIDO asked one of them should he call for an abort? One of the backroom guys said its ok as long as that particular alarm code doesn't occur again if a 1205 alarm is flagged. So FIDO says to Flight Director, "Flight, we're go as long as we don't see that code again [or 1205]." Flight says to Capcom they are go, which Capcom radios "you're go for landing."
So a 23 year old in the backroom says to a 27 year old in the main control room they are go for landing, who relayed it to Kranz and rest is history. If they said otherwise, then Pete Conrad would have been the first man on the moon.
mfwright@batnet.com
The Russians and other space agencies were/are in on the con. Look at the space agency logos around the world and you will see a prominent v shape in different orientations. NASA,Russian space agency, Jaxa, ISRO.CNSA, CSA... It is a symbol of their allegiance to a common secret goal.
47 in Trek seriously predated Abrams. Joe Menosky started it with TNG.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
mark
Have you SEEN the the transsexual beauties created by modern science and medicine? Real Dolls? Etc. The future is very bright my friend.
If anything the sexual drive that results in things like Tinder is pushing the most amazing developments in human creativity, esthetics, and pleasure the world has ever seen.
I welcome our Sextocracy Overlords!
And this is how history becomes legend and legend become myth until one day an advanced species of cockroach travels to the moon and gets confused.
Russia beat you in most space milestones. Where are their spinoffs?
The moon landing hoax thing was started by Hollywood.
> The moon landing hoax thing was started by Hollywood
No, it wasn't. They just cashed in on the conspiracy theories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kaysing#Charges_that_the_Moon_landing_was_a_hoax
Interesting how one can be so interested in American space exploration and so ignorant about Russian?
so they put their money into robotic exploration...
Or, more specifically, they made the announcement that this is what they were after all along. But it wasn't.
The Russians where leaders in robotic space exploration for decades.
Perhaps as a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was too young during Apollo 11 to remember anything coherently, but Viking 1 memories are robust.
Our TV was acting up at the time such that Viking 1's first images didn't show up very well on the news.
But a few days later at summer school, the teacher unfolded the daily newspaper at her desk while students were (supposed to be) studying. Her eyes suddenly lit up, and she stood up and walked toward the center of the room and placed the paper flat on a desk in the middle of the classroom without saying word.
On the very top of the front page was a stunning black-and-white image of sand/dust dunes and a big-ass boulder, with just the words "Mars!" as a label.
The students started gathering around in amazement. "It looks like a rocky beach! Maybe it landed on Earth by mistake, like on Gilligan's Island [TV show]," one kid shouted.
It was a trimmed version of this image.
Table-ized A.I.
And your point is? Venera 7, the first Soviet probe to land on Venus, was launched in August 1970-- that's a year after Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
During the Apollo years, the main focus of the Soviet program was on their human space program. Yes, they did some robotic planetary mission, withs (up until Venera 7) rather indifferent success. But their robotic program was much smaller and much less well funded than their human program, contrary to what anonymous coward had posted.
Over the same time period, we were flying the Mariner missions and just beginning the Pioneer series, both of which had some spectacular successes, so I'm really not sure what your point is.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Ok, I'll take you seriously, just in case you are serious, and genuinely interested.
Russia did indeed beat the US on many early steps, but there are some critical differences:
Please read the whole thing, or you will get the wrong idea. It's NOT an "oh, yeah? We COulda don it too!" type piece like you'll think if you skim.
Sputnik (world's 1st man-made satellite): Russia certainly had the guts and competence and capability to launch Sputnik first. It's a more complex issue though. This will sound like US-centric-chauvanism from a troll, but it's not and it does not take away from the Russians: President Eisenhower, as the former general who lead the Western allies in WWII, was very focused on strategic intelligence for national security. The man had little interest in manned spaceflight fantasies, and he was having issues with the increasing vulnerabilities of spy planes overflying Russia. Back then there were real questioons of international law about just how high up a nation's airspace went and Russia was complaining about overflights and getting better at shooting at high-altitude spy planes. Eisenhower, with Von Braun's team in his pocket, was running parallel rocket programs (one in the Navy, project Vanguard, and one in the Army (Von Braun's team)) and he chose to allow the more risky and likely to fail navy project to go forward with the idea that it might not be bad to let Russia beat the American team, because the Russians would then have over-flown every nation on Earth and set the precedent that national boundaries ended above the atmosphere and would then have no right to complain when the US put up the spy satellites the Eisehower admin had on the drawing boards. On the day Sputnik launched, the Von Braun team had an orbit-capable rocket set-aside under tarps in the shop in Alabama and they were itching to launch it but had been odered to stand down and let the navy team try. It was only after Sputnik flew and the Navy team failed that the Von Braun team was told to proceed to launch. It was a sore-spot for a while for the Von Braun team for years, but faded as the US caught-up and passed the Russians. This is all documented history. The Eisenhower stuff is in the Eisehower Presidential library archives, a documentary that aired years ago included a Von Braun team member laughing and recalling that side of the tale many years later. Both of those stories mesh perfectly, and none detract from the magnificent Russian success.
Early Russian manned flights: The Russians had an easier time getting to initial manned flights for two basic reasons. First: they started with a bigger more powerful ICBM (the R-7), because their nuclear warheads were more primitive and larger and heavier. The US started with smaller missile designs because they planned on smaller warheads. Second: They were more interested in the spectacular short-term international PR. As a result when Gagarin flew there was no way for him to return to Earth in his spacecraft; the flight plan, which he followed, called for him to fly into space, re-enter the atmosphere, then eject and land as a man under a personal parachute. The Americans were more patient and only flew after they had a capsule that could complete the entire mission with the crewman aboard and had proven it more than once with a chimpanzee. This still applied to the first spacewalk which the Russians completed using an inflatable airlock and which was a VERY harrowing near-disaster saved only by the extreme talents and quick thinking of the amazing Alexi Leonov. None of this is intended as an insult to the Russians, who were competent and gutsy.
The combined effects of a Soviet command-economy, extreme Soviet secrecy, and a program more dedicated to global headlines of glorious communist success than to technical innovation all took their effect of the ideas of any USSR spin-offs into their economy. That much was structural and outside the control of the very competent Russian engineers and schientists. Internal political stri
I watched the moon landing on TV like most people at that time. It had not been that long since the first airplane; my grandfather got his pilot training from the Wright Brothers and and a photo with them and the signed papers. Aerospace advanced VERY rapidly.
I fully expected a permanently manned moonbase by the 1980s, followed by a Mars mission and missions to Jupiter (with Jupiter moon landings) or Saturn (with saturn moon landings) or Venus etc. It was not just Gerry Anderson SciFi, it was absolutely natural to expect all that. After all, it only took a decade of work to go from one guy on a suborbital capsule flight to a moon landing.
I started to suspect the future was dimming when environmentalists agitated against the SST and one political party (the SAME party whose president sent us to the moon!) raged against supersonic airliners, and then against nuclear power (President Kennedy had also been FOR supersonic flight and had demanded funding from congress for the ROVER nuclear spacecraft engine).
In ten years we did both the Gemini program AND the Apollo Program. In the 40+ years (FOUR TIMES AS LONG) since we only did shuttle and ISS, a reduced version of "Freedom" which was already a rather pathetic gesture. On a certain level it is just downright depressing. We SHOULD, as a nation and as a bi-partisan act, have built a second generation of space shuttles by the early nineties, and be on a third generation by now that would be far more capable and fully re-usable NOT a huge step backward to the tiny capsules that are now the plan. Musk's flyback 1st stages, and the Dreamchaser are glimmers of hope but far less than what we SHOULD have had. All the original shuttle plans had included flyback 1st stages (though most were winged proposals, and one was a parachute-into-the-ocean Saturn booster). The idea is not new. Even flyback stages landing on rocket engine thrust is not a new idea - all the aerospace firms of the sixties had proposals (see all the Rhombus related projects) but none were willing to invest their own cash and the politicians had other uses for the money. Musk is doing great, but he is not yet moving past where I naturally though we would be LONG before the year 2000.
NASA and Boeing have been studying the blended wing body shape for aircraft for nearly 20 YEARS. They still have not built a sinlge full-scale airframe and flown it! America's participation in WWII opnly lasted from Dec'41 to Aug'45, that's LESS THAN 4 YEARS!!!! and in that time we rolled out THOUSANDS of aircraft in probably a hundred varieties (when you count sub-types and test aircraft). There's simply no actual guts anymore.
Don't imagine your far-fetched dreams, just imagine what you think is going to really happen in the next 40 years based on things we have actually completely accomplished today (i.e. NOT "concept art"). Now imagine yourself 45 years from now seeing that NOTHING you expected came true, primarily because the politicians spent the money spreading it around buying votes, including from luddites who oppose many of the technologies that would have been needed. Imagine that the alternate future you arrived in not only had spent the money on other things and favored other technologies, but that NONE of the alternate stuff was anything more than cheap trinkets for the entertainment of the masses and provided no lasting infrastructure and fostered no big dreams for the future and a population that no longer even dreamed big. Then imagine that this alternate future was NOT the result of some wave of responsible fiscal discipline. Imagine that the politicians had borrowed and spent more money in those years than you could have ever imagined and that the INTEREST PAYMENTS on all that debt were now bigger than the costs of the future you had presumed would have been bought. It's not a pretty picture.
Younger generations who were not there to see a man put his boot into the lunar soil connot possibly imagine what it was like and how much that one action changed everything. There was a d
And 47 years ago, Mr. Gorsky may or may not have got a blowjob.
Interesting how one can be so interested in American space exploration and so ignorant about Russian?
It's pretty clear you are the ignorant one.
Go to bed Vladimir. You've still got more balls in your small toe than Michelle Obama - the MAN in the Obama family.
It's so wonderful to see Baracky sending US troops BACK to Iraq to fight the "JV" - who is really Al Qaeda in Iraq. But hey, the media can't report on how Obama was so fucking WRONG about Iraq and having "Al Qaeda on the run", now can they? People might realize what an utter failure Obama's been.
And hey, we can't wait to see what happens when Iran gets nuclear weapons, now can we? If Shiite Iran gets nukes, how long will it take for Sunni Saudi Arabia and Egypt to get theirs? Nuclear war in the Middle East! Thanks Obama!
When your Mars orbiter crashes on another planet costing everyone years of work and billions of dollars it's not so funny.
The scientists and engineers etc involved all used standards...but the problem was that it was not immediately obvious AT A GLANCE which standards.
Next time, if you wonder which standards use dd/mmm/yyyy so when I say I told you so on 22/Jul/2016 everyone knows what date was referenced.
To your credit I'd say that at least you recognise that my way is right.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Not only that, but to my knowledge have not even sent a manned spacecraft AROUND the moon yet.
Nothing and I mean Nothing since that time has come even close to that accomplishment. Hell we can't even put a man in space anymore, forget about land them on anything. The u.s. space program is a joke. It's a joke because it's lost 90% of it's budget over the last 20 years. Ever president for the last 20 years has cut R and D spending in space. That's why I never got the flying cars or hotels on the moon in my lifetime. It is also why I don't that even my kids or grand kids or great grand kids will have them either. We will spend billions of dollars fighting over stupid crap here on earth forever.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben