47 Years Ago Today, Apollo 11 Landed On the Moon (foxnews.com) 185
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.
You're one day late (Score:1)
Today is Thursday July 21.
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Time lag at postings of stories is sometimes causing problems with causality.
In any case the Apollo program seems to have been the pinnacle of human exploration of the solar system. After that we have been using robot probes with a lot less risk for human life but also a lot less challenges that could spawn new useful technology.
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"In any case the Apollo program seems to have been the pinnacle of human exploration of the solar system. After that we have been using robot probes with a lot less risk for human life but also a lot less challenges that could spawn new useful technology."
But now that the private sector is getting into manned programs, this will soon change.
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Time lag at postings of stories is sometimes causing problems with causality.
I think there are some serious problems with the story submission and approval process. Given that clickbait isn't going away, I would suggest that more stories be posted. I've seen some interesting and relevant stories languish, while the clickbait runs right through. But enough of that.
In any case the Apollo program seems to have been the pinnacle of human exploration of the solar system.
It was an amazing tour de force that miraculously was carried out in a few short years. And it is almost impossible to choose what was the most impressive innovation. Was it the balls to the wall power of the mighty Saturn
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There is a woman space historian, Amy Shira Teitel, ...
I know you weren't intentionally being sexist - but a historian's gender doesn't really affect their ability.
Since when is mentioning a person's gender being sexist?
The irony of all of that is that the people who seem to love to deny mentioning a male/female gender seem to have a metric shitload of genders
Agender Androgyne Androgynous Bigender Cis Cisgender Cis Female Cis Male Cis Man Cis Woman Cisgender Female Cisgender Male Cisgender Man Cisgender Woman Female to Male FTM Gender Fluid Gender Nonconforming Gender Questioning Gender Variant Genderqueer Intersex Male to Female MTF Neither Neutrois Non-binary Ot
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It's sexist in the same way as demanding people of different races to participate in movies even if it is counteracting the script/book the movie is based on.
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It's sexist in the same way as demanding people of different races to participate in movies even if it is counteracting the script/book the movie is based on.
That's completely bizarre, Ms Teitel is not operating in a field where women are excluded, but she is female, and she promotes herself, she is not being promoted by anyone else So I don't get your idea that anyone is demanding a female space historian in a field that is exclusively male, but put her in there simply because she's not male. Sorry muchacho, your logic got lost somewhere. We'll bring this back to space.
You are really going to have to explain that one a bit better. Is it sexist to mention: Va
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Not yet, at least not everywhere on the planet, there are still places where it's the 20th.
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True. Otherwise it makes no sense, "Man" and "mankind" are synonyms in this case.
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I can remember the anniversary like it was only yesterday.
The Finest Day.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I was eight, watching it unfold on black & white TV, impressed because my parents told me how amazing it was, then going to school and not quite understanding just how significant the whole thing was.
We had information packs with lots of diagrams, and blocks of text with arrows all over. Info about the moon, the trajectory, the astronauts, a foldout showing the layers of the space suits, the rocket and stages, etc. Still got most of it somewhere in storage.
It was only later I found out how much involvem
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1/ The building is on the edge of the site so just pointing the camera the right way is enough to make it look the same as in 1969.
2/ When looking for a computer about the right age for a prop they found the original one that was used in Parkes in 1969, still in working condition!
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I was two years away from being born, and I feel betrayed that man's greatest accomplishment happened before my lifetime.
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You were born precisely at the moment you were supposed to be.
Don't worry, ~2024 First Contact is coming and it will make the moon landing look like kindergarten.
The golden era of mankind hasn't even _started_ yet.
--
The bigger question is: "Why the hell is the humanoid template so common across the universe?
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It was just a few days after my second birthday. My parents tell me I was kept up to watch it on the TV (not even sure what time the landing would have been in BST) but I have absolutely no recollection of that.
And I agree, "The Dish" was a good film.
Re:The Finest Day.... (Score:4, Interesting)
It was something pretty much everyone in the US had a hand in, directly or indirectly. Even a farmer in Kansas could credibly say that his efforts fed the people who built the rockets or shot it to the moon.
That's what makes this feat so great, not that 12 people hopped about on a moon that happens to orbit our planet. What made this a powerful achievement was the "WE did it" feeling. WE. Not "the US" but everyone really could feel that he did something for that.
That's really lacking today. There is no WE. NASA is that space agency that is doing its shit, the US military is fighting a war somewhere, US economy is building this or that and US TV is showing yet another dumb reality show, which is, scarily enough, pretty much the only thing the average American has a chance to feel part of by participating in the freak show.
There is no WE in the US anymore.
Re:The Finest Day.... (Score:4)
Your post pretty well captures a key value of manned spaceflight. It demonstrates a pretty astonishing human achievement that is largely bereft of politics and presents an image of human civilization moving forward.
I'm sure the lander/robotics crowd are right that we can do more *science* (as measured by dollars per mission) without people in space, and while the achievements are no less amazing in terms of technology, they don't capture the imagination quite like human space fight.
Re:The Finest Day.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Erh... well, the whole moonshot thing was a political thing if there ever was one. Kennedy wanted to do this to "one-up" the Russians. They were the first in orbit, so the US had to be the first on the moon. There wasn't really any other "real" reason to do this.
Of course, in the end it gave the US an incredible boost in many economic fields, purely out of necessity. This was the beginning of modern process management, and various fields in technology made groundbreaking leaps ahead, materials research alone was enriched with a wealth of new materials that came into existence out of pure necessity, plastics and composites, ceramics and metal alloys that are heat resistant and cold resistant, efficient heat and electronics conductors or insulators, a LOT of materials that can withstand extreme conditions from vacuum to the stress of reentry.
And of course the already mentioned "WE did it" spirit that filled the country. This is important, it gave people something to believe in, not something intangible like some religion or a promise for much later, something that people of all trades had a part in that they could be proud of, from the astronaut who put his foot on the moon to the assembly line worker who could imagine that the screws he sorts are used to hold two parts of the Apollo space ship together.
And something like this is sorely missing today. Yes, of course you can send a probe to Mars instead of men. But, again, the value of the moon shot was not in the rocks they brought back. The value is the research necessary to get them there and back. The technological advantage the US got out of this carried them well into the 90s, at the beginning of the 1970s the US was more than a decade ahead of the rest of the world in technology and management. And that reflected on their industry. "Made in the USA" was highly prized, and I mean globally, because it was the synonym of "made by someone who knows what he's doing".
This was taxpayer money funneled into various corporations, much like it is today. But back then it was done way more sensibly. Not only did that taxpayer money indeed trickle down to the working people (because something as secret and high-tech as bleeding edge space technology isn't something you outsource easily, you have to employ US workers), it also was an investment into US technology and research, which led to the aforementioned edge in international trade and a competitive advantage over foreign products which were invariably inferior due to inferior technology, worse materials and production processes.
Today, taxpayer money poured into corporations is siphoned away to pad C-Level salaries. That's not going to give the economy a boost. That's money wasted on parasites.
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Politics may have been the motivation for the space program, but that doesn't mean that when people stopped what they were doing to watch a man step on the moon that the politics that drove the space program were even on their mind.
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" pretty astonishing human achievement that is largely bereft of politics"
I hope you're joking. The only reason you had Apollo was BECAUSE of politics. There's no rational reason to do it.
Was there a rational reason to move out of the caves?
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Was there a rational reason to move out of the caves?
Probably the Bears and the Saber Tooth Tigers that wanted to get back into their homes?
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I'm sorry, but voting in the US has been reduced to something that's not far away from "American Idol". Quite frankly, do away with this "one person-one vote" thing and do a text voting, 5 bucks a vote and the revenue goes to the tax pot, maybe we can at least lower the tax rate that way. Because in the end, you get to vote for one corporate shill or the other one. So why not do the sensible thing, do away with the figure heads and just vote for the corporations behind them. Who do you want to rule the coun
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Public Discourse in the age of show business, how could you expect a different result. Brave new world, here we come.
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Could I at least get enough Soma that I don't have to be fully aware when it happens?
The Russian Moon Program [Re: The Finest Day....] (Score:5, Informative)
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... [wired.com]
* http://fas.org/spp/eprint/lind... [fas.org]
* http://www.popularmechanics.co... [popularmechanics.com]
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.
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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/... [wikipedia.org]
Venera and other probes (Score:2)
And your point is? Venera 7 [wikipedia.org], 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
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The point is that you basically ditched the Russian robotic program as "nothing" while it in fact was very successful.
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The ascent engine had its own fuel tank. The descent engine, it's fuel, and the whole lower half of the LM were left on the lunar surface. The complete loss of fuel before the LM was landed would only have necessitated leaving before landing, triggering the ascent engine while still above ground.
Re:The Finest Day.... (Score:5, Funny)
The second finest day: It was 9 Sep 2002 outside a Hollywood hotel. ...
One small punch for one main,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Side note, due to all the cold war paranoia none of the names were
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I was ~9 years old and watched the whole thing from start to finish. I was glued to the TV in the den for about 30 hours straight, lol. Got to skip school for part of it if I remember correctly. When they landed you could hear people all over the neighborhood screaming and cheering.
Re:The Finest Day.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Viking [Re:The Finest Day....] (Score:2)
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 wor
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Technically, if we go there, the statement will be true. :-)
In honor of Plagiarism Week, he was inadvertently quoting Heinlein: "There will be life on Mars."
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In honor of Plagiarism Week, he was inadvertently quoting Heinlein: "There will be life on Mars."
Wrong quote attribution - that was Melania Trump who said that.
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"four and a half years old? i'm sorry, you don't remember shit from that age;"
I have continuous memories from that age. The family was still in the old country at that time, in a coastal town dominated by a tall tower, with a lot of beach activity going on. Thirty years later I went back as part of our honeymoon and although there had been major cultural changes, it was physically just as I remembered it.
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I was about that old (closer to 4 and 2/3) when Kennedy was assassinated. And I have very clear memories of watching the funeral on TV, wrapped in a blanket next to my mother and brothers.
Mind you, that's about the only clear memory I retain earlier than Apollo (ten then). Some things you forget (what you had for dinner three weeks ago Thursday), some you remember forever. Even if you're very young.
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I have very clear memories of watching the funeral on TV
I was a little older, and I have vivid memories of that, too. In my area, "Superman" (the live-action TV show) came on at 3:30 weekday afternoons, and I remember how annoyed I was one Friday to discover that it was canceled, replaced by a lot of boring people in suits talking -- and it was the same on all three channels! However, I consoled myself that tomorrow would bring Saturday morning cartoons (a staple of life for children in the US for some decades, now swept into history). Boy, was I annoyed to d
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You are an idiot.
I was two and a half and remember the moon landing.
My father woke me up at night and put me onto his lap while we watched the landing.
Of course I remember that. And I remember lots of stuff from that age.
No idea where this myth is coming from that children ... adults later, obviously ... can not remember their early years.
Probably a myth spread by molsters and child abusers so the adults don't sue their parents?
The computer was slower than an Arduino and (Score:1)
The computer was slower than an Arduino and used about 10K lines of code to land on the moon
Re:The computer was slower than an Arduino and (Score:4, Informative)
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Tens of millions of people would pay a monthly subscription to view live video of the moon? Ha, maybe tens of people would. That's wackier than the conspiracy theory. If it were so profitable I'm sure China would be selling webcam access to their recent lunar rover.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:2, Insightful)
https://xkcd.com/893/ [xkcd.com]
47 Years Ago Today, Apollo 11 Landed On the Moon (Score:2)
Mankind peaked on that day (Score:2)
Within the next decade? (Score:3)
The High Tide of the American Empire (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
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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.
Wow, I really enjoyed your comment, so I "liked" it, Tweeted it to all my "friends", and will post it on Facebook too!! (...After I'm done playing Pokemon Go for an hour or two.)
I don't get it (Score:2)
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.
look! (Score:2)
They almost didn't make it! (Score:3)
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.
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I'm surprised the flight controller didn't call for an abort.
Another mention in the book was a portion of descent called "dead man's zone." If a landing abort is commanded (the computer will first need to switch to Abort mode), LM first needs to shutdown descent engine, separate ascent stage from descent stage (there's a lot of stuff that happens on that one), and then fire the ascent engine. All this takes time and if too close to surface.... there comes a point too low for an abort.
Time to listen to Hope Eyrie (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
mark
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47 in Trek seriously predated Abrams. Joe Menosky started it with TNG.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Funny)
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!
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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.
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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.
You simply cannot be on Slashdot and be that dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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No, it wasn't. Simple economy, staging it would have cost more.
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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.
Re: Fake (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 base
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The German variant [wikipedia.org] 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 w
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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 bi
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Nixon? For real?
One more bit of evidence against a hoax... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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This is a conspiracy theory we're talking here, logic and reason is one thread over.
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I'm still waiting for your answer on this "bullshit". For the third time, too.
By the way, in case you need to read up on the "bullshit", Wikipedia is hopefully available to you. It is not really arcane knowledge and hardly a secret. Everything in there is documented and far from disputed. In case you find anything that you deem "bullshit" you might want to point it out so I can help you find the relevant information so you can get a clue.
And about Trump, well, to be honest, in this election, I'm really glad
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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?
I have a copy of some of the Boston papers for July 21 and 22. The Watergate scandal is prominent. As is the Vietnam war.
I never thought of that argument - but then, I tend to joke with people who claim it was all done on a soundstage in Burbank. I was fifteen, and I have absolutely no doubt that I watched the moon landing, live (with a propagation delay, of course) on b&w TV. If we could successfully fake something like that, and keep the secret for 40+ years, we'd have no need of Donald Trump. Sad
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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 :-)
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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, d
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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 [youtube.com] 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
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Oh dear deity of our choice, you actually believe that crap?
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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 es
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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."
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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...
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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.
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Russian oligarchs ARE the Russian version of THEM...
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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 ... ;)
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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?
Re:Fake (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Falmebait? (Score:2)
Falmebait is:
That's a been a staged fake! Haven't you all m0r0n5 read ll those books and articles?
Humor is:
...
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From there it is an ite