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40th anniversary of the moon landing - July 20

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by OnTheRiver, Jul 14, 2009.

  1. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Interesting take on the moon landing by Tom Wolfe,

    Wolfe's argument is that the race to the moon was basically a military venture against the Soviets.

    The US HAD to beat the godless Commies to the moon and after they did the space programme was, for all intents and purposes, over.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19wolfe.html?scp=2&sq=tom%20wolfe&st=cse

    The most eloquent spokesman for the space programme was Wernher von Braun. but as Wolfe points out "Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent"
     
  2. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    For all the national pride and the fear of going to bed under a "Red moon", the space race pretty much came down to this:

    Our captured German scientists were better than the USSR's captured German scientists.
     
  3. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    That's one of the great missed opportunities of the 1970s.
    The whole space program was basically stepping stones to the moon. We needed to do the Mercury missions to learn how to get a rocket off the ground and survive in space. That led to the Gemini missions, which taught us to track two spacecraft at once and link them up. Put both of those together, and you get the Apollo missions -- which also was a series of stepping stones. With each mission, we learned a little more, got a little more efficient.
    The next step should have been a Mars mission. It's the natural progression. Keep building on the previous steps. If we had done that, we could have been to Mars by the mid-1980s. Instead we settled for the shuttle program and Skylab, both of which were giant steps backward. It was boring. We weren't moving forward. If we had, a lot of those technical problems would have been solved. We'd have developed better engines and a way to deal with the long mission duration. Probably within a decade or so.
    As it happened, there was no rush to create solutions. We've been using essentially the same technology for 30 years.
     
  4. Armchair_QB

    Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

    People always talk about the technology involved in sending and manned flight to Mars but what I'd like to know is how you calculate how much food and water you need to pack for a two-year trip. That's about how long they'd be gone, right?
     
  5. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    That's where things like improved engines and whatnot come in. You build a better, faster engine, you cut that trip down to maybe six or eight months. People already live in the space station that long. The ship would have to be big enough to carry enough supplies, but cutting the trip time in half means you only need half as much.
     
  6. Football_Bat

    Football_Bat Well-Known Member

    The logistics of a Mars trip have been worked out at least as long as a moon trip has been. We already have the technology and the planning. It's just a matter of funding. Given the economy, the wars and the pending demise of the existing shuttle program with no replacement vehicle in sight, I wager we won't step on Mars for another 30 years.
     
  7. OnTheRiver

    OnTheRiver Active Member

    They're gonna need a stack of girlie mags, too.
     
  8. Kind of reminds me of that scene from "The Right Stuff" in which a bunch of the pilots and engineers from Edwards are sitting around the bar and one aks, "You know what makes that bird go up?" One of the engineers says it would take hours just to explain the aerodynamics of it all, and the guy who asked the question says, "Nope. Funding. That's what makes that bird go up. No bucks, no Buck Rogers."
     
  9. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    They want funding? They should sell ads on the rocket and make it look like a NASCAR vehicle. Then, during a broadcast en route to Mars, Joe Astronaut can say, "The Coke Zero Command Module is performing great today. If all goes smoothly we will be executing our docking maneuver with the M&M's Mars Lander at the end of the week."
     
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