40th anniversary of the moon landing - July 20

"While you were wasting your time with orbital mechanics and rendezvous techniques, we were perfecting the imaginary timeout and the court-length pass with 3 seconds left on the clock. So you can keep your silly moon rocks. We have the 1972 Olympic basketball gold medal."

[aleksandr_belov]

 

March 1969: The Soviets test-launch the N-1, their equivalent of the Saturn V.

 

You're either being naive or purposely contrary. We haven't been back because Congress began cutting off the funding. There were two more planned moon missions after Apollo 16 that got whacked, plus a plan to establish a permanent station on the moon. No other nation has gone there because they can't get it done. Pure and simple.
Why don't you find out who killed JFK?

 

You're wondering out loud in the same way that a 10-year-old wonders if there's still a Santa Claus. Grow up.

 

In case no one else has mentioned it, this is an awesome site. You can follow the entire launch as it happened 40 years ago, with actual archival audio clips. Right now, they've docked with the LM.

http://wechoosethemoon.org/

Yes, once a Canaveral kid, always a Canaveral kid. I watched all six Mercury launches from the front yard in Indian Harbour Beach.

 

Well spoken, Caped Crusader. People who wonder aloud about why we don't spend the money used on aerospace "down here" clearly aren't paying attention.

One other reason humanity hasn't established long-term outposts off the Earth is the effect of diminished gravity on the body. One man (whose name escapes me at the moment) who spent six months on the International Space Station lost 14 percent of his bone mass during that stretch, all due to his body adjusting to the lessened strain.

There's not much point sending astronauts to the moon or Mars and starting colonies if they'll be too weak to do the work when they get there. Until we figure out how to alleviate, or at least account for, that problem, colonizing space isn't an option.

Pete: If you have Netflix, get Season 2, Disc 4 of The Universe by the History Channel. That episode explains the challenges in greater detail.

As for the bit about the moon landing, I'll just pretend I didn't read that.

 

The effects of bone and muscle mass loss for extended periods in zero-G are fairly consistent -- that's why the ISS astronauts have regular exercise sessions, to partially offset this effect.

Of course gravity would be much less on the moon (1/6 Earth) and Mars (about 40 percent) so they wouldn't have to be as strong to do the same work. Still it's a serious problem for long-term missions. Most concepts for a Mars vehicle use rotation to generate centrifugal force to produce "artificial gravity" for long-term missions.

 

I hope the national media gives no air time to the conspiracy theorists on this anniversary.

That bullshit has to stop.

 

And that doesn't even take into account the psychological effects of spending six months cooped up in a tin can spinning through interplanetary space.

Just that huge lag in radio communication alone would be unsettling.

 

AWESOME site.

 

NASA releases photos from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing the landing sites of the Apollo lunar modules, with the descent stages clearly visible. (Higher-resolution pictures will be coming later as they get all the imaging equipment properly calibrated.)

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html







(Oh yeah I know, the photos were all faked, etc etc)