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.
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..."
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.
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.
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
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
...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
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
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.