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40th anniversary of the moon landing - July 20

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

  1. hondo

    hondo Well-Known Member

    Plus, sky on the Moon is black because, duh, there's no atmosphere (and clouds and weather) which is what colors the sky.
     
  2. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Yeah, but a whole summer? It sounds fun and all, but after a few weeks I'd at least want to be singing about the summer of doggystyle.
     
  3. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    It's for that reason that I think the Apollo 13 mission might have been the single greatest engineering feat in the history of mankind.
    It's hard enough to get someone to the moon and back. It's even harder when you're doing it with pencil and paper. Then you throw in all the random foul ups they had to deal with, stuff they never conceived of and had to come up with solutions for in essentially a matter of minutes, and it's incredible that those guys lasted more than an hour in space let alone made it back alive.
     
  4. Pete Incaviglia

    Pete Incaviglia Active Member

    Put me in the conspiracy theory group. I don't think it happened. Period.

    Why haven't we been back? And why hasn't another nation been? Surely there must be some use for the moon.
     
  5. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Actually, any of our cell phones probably have more computing power than the entire computer array in Mission Control in 1969.

    I remember my dad getting a tabletop calculator in 1970-71, which could do basic arithmetic. It was a super big deal a year or two later when Texas Instruments came out (at extravgant prices) with models which could do square roots, exponentials, etc etc. I had learned how to do some of that junk on a slide rule by that time, which thankfully I haven't had to mess with ever since.

    Because it costs a LOT of money; no one else in the world could afford it. Plus there is a matter of engineering competence; the only other nation in the world who could have probably done it technologically, the U.S.S.R., had other fish to fry.

    The reason we haven't been back is that the presidential administration at the time of Apollo 11 basically pulled the plug on the whole program the minute Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins splashed down. The missions that were already in the pipeline with finished hardware were allowed to fly; everything beyond that was cancelled. The Shuttle was mandated to be put together largely out of off-the-shelf components, resulting in a cobbled-together-with-duct-tape design which ended up being wildly more expensive and hugely more dangerous (resulting in the deaths of 14 astronauts).

    And if you want to get semantic about it, we did go back. Six times.

    If we were going to fake it once, why fake it seven times? (Actually nine times, if you count Apollos 8 and 10, which also orbited the moon.)
     
  6. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Well, we did go back five or six more times. I think there were six Apollo missions that landed on the moon, plus Apollo 13. Part of the reason we haven't been back since is that a lot of the knowledge and data on how to do it was lost when the shuttle program was started.
    There was a great miniseries on The History Channel a couple years ago on the history of NASA. Lots of interviews with the old-timers, guys like Lovell, Glenn, Gene Kranz. According to Kranz (who was director of Mission Control for years), when the shift was made from the moon missions to orbital projects like the shuttle and Skylab, NASA pretty much ditched all of its old moon data. The Saturn Vs were also used up on other projects like the link-up with the Soyuz capsules.
    So it's not that we couldn't go back. Our focus just went in the other direction for a while. And whenever anybody brought it up again, the equipment wasn't there. So it would have been like starting over -- which means it would have been unbelievably expensive -- and the dedication to take that long road has never really been there since.
     
  7. Pete Incaviglia

    Pete Incaviglia Active Member

    Yes by "back" I meant humans setting up shop for an extended period of time. I just wonder what the monetary difference between a space station and building something on the moon is.

    And I also wonder couldn't the moon be useful for setting up satellites or equipment, etc.

    I don't know I just don't buy into the walking on the moon thing. Partly because wouldn't faking it six to nine times be cheaper than actually doing it?

    By no means am I arguing. Just wondering out loud.
     
  8. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    Like BTE, I was a young space program junkie. I used to get up at 5 a.m. to watch all the pre-launch coverage going back to the Gemini flights (I was too young for the Mercury stuff) and watched all the spacewalks and knew all the astronauts' names (Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad were and always will be my favorites). I knew all the jargon and a lot of the science they would talk about on TV during the missions. I even bought a record album about the Gemini missions that included the astronauts' conversations with Mission Control and the other ground stations (Canarvon in Australia is the one that springs to mind).

    Oh, yeah, I also had this:

    [​IMG]

    That's right, the GI Joe space capsule. My brother and I used to make Joe orbit around the house. When we passed the refrigerator, we said he was over the Sandwich Islands (ain't 6-year-old humor great?).

    Not surprisingly, I was glued to the TV for the moon landing and Neil Armstrong's first steps -- got to stay up late to watch that (I was 8 by then). I was awestruck. I especially liked the plaque they left behind, even if it was signed by Richard Nixon. And I liked the fact that a malfunction left the flag appearing to be waving in the wind, even though, of course, there is no wind on the moon.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  9. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    Definitely remember that show. That whole Later series with Costas was TV gold. Might be the greatest pure talk show ever.
     
  10. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Well, going to the moon could indeed be tremendously useful; the problem is, the value of this "usefulness" is a matter of great debate.

    It would most likely not be "useful" in the sense of immediate commercial return or substantial military advantage, so the people writing the checks over the last 40 years haven't been too interested in it.
     
  11. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Think about building a house. You have to put up the shell, hook up the plumbing and electrical, all of the little bits. Now think about doing that kind of intense labor in a bulky spacesuit 200,000 miles from earth, with a work window of two or three days at a time every few months.
    The space station is basically a collection of lego pieces. This capsule snaps together with that one, and none are very big (they all have to fit either in the cargo bay of the shuttle or on top of a rocket). Any kind of permanent settlement on the moon would probably be much bigger, which means bigger pieces. That means more power to get it off the ground, bigger rockets, more fuel, etc.
    It's not that it can't be done. It's not that there aren't benefits. A moon base is almost essential to any kind of Mars mission because the lower gravity would make it easier to launch a larger rocket with the amount of supplies you'd need for a year-long mission.
    It's that it's cost prohibitive right now. The window to push onward from the moon to deep space closed in the early 1970s. Now you have people wondering why we even have a space program (never mind that pretty much every form of electronic communication on earth is dependent on satellites). There's no desire from the public at large to spend the money it would take to go further. Until we get that same sort of zeal for exploration that we had in the 1960s, we'll never get beyond orbit.
     
  12. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    What we need is a good, strong enemy threatening to beat us to the punch. If we could just get the damned Soviets back, we'd be on Mars by 2015.
     
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