NASA Marks The 50-Year Anniversary of Man's First Steps on the Moon (thehill.com) 114
It's exactly one half century from that moment in time when men first walked on the moon, writes NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.
"Today, on the golden anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA looks back with heartfelt gratitude for the Apollo generation's trailblazing courage as we -- the Artemis generation -- prepare to take humanity's next giant leap to Mars." The lethargic lull of scientific fatalism afflicted portions of America then as it sometimes does today. There is nothing inevitable about scientific discovery nor is there a predetermined path of cutting-edge innovation. Long hours of arduous study and experimentation are required merely to glimpse a flicker of enlightenment that can lead to greater heights of human achievement...
The Apollo program hastened ground-breaking technological advancements that continue to bestow benefits to modern civilization today. Flame resistant textiles, water purification systems, cordless tools, more effective dialysis machines and improvements to food preservation and medicine are just some of the innovative wonders generated during that era. Furthermore, NASA's utilization of integrated circuits on silicon chips aboard the lunar module's computer unit helped jumpstart the budding computer industry into the massive enterprise it is today. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Apollo missions was their ability to inspire young Americans across the country to join science, technology, engineering and math related fields of study...
After more than 50 years, the benefits of human space exploration to humanity are clear. By proud example, the Apollo program taught us we cannot venture aimlessly into the uncharted territory of future discovery merely hoping to happen upon greater advancement. Technological progress is a deliberate choice made by investing in missions that will expand our limits of understanding and capability...
NASA is preparing to use the lunar surface as a proving ground to perfect our scientific and technological knowledge and utilize international partnerships, as well as the growing commercial space industry.
This time when we go back to the moon we are going to stay...
"Today, on the golden anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA looks back with heartfelt gratitude for the Apollo generation's trailblazing courage as we -- the Artemis generation -- prepare to take humanity's next giant leap to Mars." The lethargic lull of scientific fatalism afflicted portions of America then as it sometimes does today. There is nothing inevitable about scientific discovery nor is there a predetermined path of cutting-edge innovation. Long hours of arduous study and experimentation are required merely to glimpse a flicker of enlightenment that can lead to greater heights of human achievement...
The Apollo program hastened ground-breaking technological advancements that continue to bestow benefits to modern civilization today. Flame resistant textiles, water purification systems, cordless tools, more effective dialysis machines and improvements to food preservation and medicine are just some of the innovative wonders generated during that era. Furthermore, NASA's utilization of integrated circuits on silicon chips aboard the lunar module's computer unit helped jumpstart the budding computer industry into the massive enterprise it is today. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Apollo missions was their ability to inspire young Americans across the country to join science, technology, engineering and math related fields of study...
After more than 50 years, the benefits of human space exploration to humanity are clear. By proud example, the Apollo program taught us we cannot venture aimlessly into the uncharted territory of future discovery merely hoping to happen upon greater advancement. Technological progress is a deliberate choice made by investing in missions that will expand our limits of understanding and capability...
NASA is preparing to use the lunar surface as a proving ground to perfect our scientific and technological knowledge and utilize international partnerships, as well as the growing commercial space industry.
This time when we go back to the moon we are going to stay...
Re:One small step for man... (Score:5, Informative)
The moon landing hoax thing is just absurd. There is no way hundreds of kilograms of moon rocks made it back to earth other than through human collection. Further, the pictures of the Apollo landing sites by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and other non-American satellites cannot reasonably be explained any other way.
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The Luna 16 mission only brought back 101 grams of lunar soil, not hundreds of kilograms of rocks.
Re:One small step for man... (Score:4, Insightful)
all this shows is that there is no need whatsoever for people on the moon
If you wanted to get 100's of kilograms of Moon rocks in the 60's, sending a guy to pick them up would have been the simplest solution.
1960ties uh-huh (Score:2)
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I agree it would have been doable, but not simpler than just sending a guy in a suit.
Also, if you were going to send an unmanned sample return mission in 1969, you would just scale up the Luna 16 mission. Use a bigger drill, and get a bigger core sample. That would be much simpler than releasing a remote controlled machine to pick up loose rocks.
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I agree it would have been doable, but not simpler than just sending a guy in a suit.
Yes it is, for many reasons. Robots don't need life support systems. They don't need O2, or food, or water. They don't need to pee from inside a pressurized suit.
But most importantly, FAILURE IS AN OPTION. It is way cheaper and easier to build a system that is 99% reliable than to build a system that is 99.99% reliable.
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The Russians were not far behind the US in terms of space and related technologies. Indeed, although most of their attempts at moon rock return missions ended in failure, between 1970 and 1976 Russia had three successful moon rock return missions returning cumulatively a bit under 1/3 kg of moon rock. If the US could have had a bit over 1,000 similarly successful robotic moon rock return missions between 1967 and 1972, this could explain the presence of such a large amount of recovered moon rock. However, s
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And yet another 'let's get on my soapbox and pontificate because I can' post. Rather than, of course, actually reading the 'whole' post...
(j/k) ;D = Just Kidding
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There is no way hundreds of kilograms of moon rocks made it back to earth other than through human collection.
Something would have to impact the moon at high speed, and knock chunks off at high speed, that then fell to Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps NASA has been secretly collecting lunar meteorites in Antarctica? They claim to have hundreds of kg, but since most of it is allegedly locked away in a vault in Houston, the actual amount collected could be much smaller.
Fascinating French documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7... [imdb.com]
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Further, the pictures of the Apollo landing sites by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and other non-American satellites cannot reasonably be explained any other way.
"Reasonably"... That's the problem right there. Expecting reason from the "moon hoax" people.
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#1: The moon isn't a planet
#2: How do you know life isn't there
#3: Being able to live on a place with no gravity would make space flight to other places easier. You know, because of the whole less gravity bit.
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Being able to live on a place with no gravity would make space flight to other places easier. You know, because of the whole less gravity bit.
Before starting a Moon base, let's first wait for sufficient demand to go to these other places.
Re:All planets and the sun are made of the same di (Score:5, Insightful)
Before starting to build airplanes, let's wait for sufficient demand to fly to other places.
Before starting to build computers, let's wait for sufficient demand to do automated computing (as opposed to the computers of WW2, which were a bunch of women doing the computing by hand for the engineers).
Yeah, you can use that excuse for not doing something a lot. If we'd used it consistently throughout history, we'd still be living in mud huts and throwing spears at each other...
My opinion - build a larger station in a slightly higher orbit around Earth, use it as the staging area for lunar flights, build space-space craft to travel from there to lunar orbit, build another station there to store lunar landers. Then build a lunar base. Use reusable lunar landers, space-space craft, and boosters/Earth-orbit vehicles to move between the ground/SS/SS/Luna, and start learning how to really do this stuff.
Then comes Mars, Ceres, and the Gallilean Moons of Jupiter, and beyond. I'd really like to see if there's life in some of those places....
Addendum (Score:2)
Re:All planets and the sun are made of the same di (Score:4, Insightful)
Before starting to build computers, let's wait for sufficient demand to do automated computing
Your analogy is flawed. We already had demand for computing, we added automation when there was a proven need for high volume. Just like we had a demand for travel before we had airplanes.
Likewise, if you want to go to Mars, it is possible to build a rocket and go there. That's exactly what Musk is attempting to do. At the point where he's successful, and we end up sending thousands of rockets, we can look for ways to make it cheaper, including (as a remote possibility) manufacturing stuff on the Moon.
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We already had demand for computing
Nope. The single biggest name in the computing industry famously predicted that it wouldn't find great success as there was a demand for maybe 5 computer worldwide.
we added automation
Magically? You can just add things? Like when we have horses everywhere and someone wanted to go a little faster we magically added cars? The reality is that pretty much everything is developed and built at a time where there is little demand. That is how markets are made.
Learn history. Make less foolish posts.
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The reality is that pretty much everything is developed and built at a time where there is little demand.
Using that logic, we should build a shoe factory at the bottom of the ocean.
Magically? You can just add things?
Yes, you can add things. People use clever thinking, though, not magic. And developments go in incremental steps. People didn't invent cars until they already had all the basic parts available to them. They already had carriages and engines, so putting the two together did not require magic. And the demand could be extrapolated from the demand from horse-drawn carriages. Furthermore, the cost of development was reasonable enough tha
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Re:All planets and the sun are made of the same di (Score:4, Interesting)
The demand for flight was there before the airplane was invented. People have travelled since before they even knew there were places to travel to. Travelling was huge before flight, and commercial flight was just a next step in a rapidly evolving progression. Hell, read the first chapter of around the world in 80 days (written long before flight).
The demand was there for computers which is why they used women doing the repetitive calculations by hand before they had machines to take over.
Pretty much everything that has ever been done in the entire history of civilization has been someone finding a better way to provide something that already had way too much demand.
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Before starting a Moon base, let's first wait for sufficient demand to go to these other places.
There's no demand is there? Are you saying you wouldn't spend a couple of grand to visit the moon if you could? 6.999999999 billion people on the planet would.
The demand is there, the technical capabilities and the cost is what is lacking. Hell there's enough demand just to experience weightlessness that companies make a healthy profit by faking it inside aircraft.
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There's no demand is there? Are you saying you wouldn't spend a couple of grand to visit the moon if you could?
Read the part that I quoted to understand the context of the word 'demand'.
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Exploration (Score:2)
Before starting a Moon base, let's first wait for sufficient demand to go to these other places.
That's not how exploration works. The Moon is an entire (mostly) unexplored world. Plenty to keep us busy there without worrying about other places. If a Moon base proves useful toward other goals then so much the better but it has to make sense on its own first. You go and do the thing just to learn about the thing. Research rarely shows a clear path from the start and insisting on one is an argument to remain in your cave and never venture out in the first place.
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If we are to get around anywhere serious, we will need acceleration approaching 1g. Lack of gravity won't be a problem.
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#1: The moon isn't a planet #2: How do you know life isn't there #3: Being able to live on a place with no gravity would make space flight to other places easier. You know, because of the whole less gravity bit.
If you can manufacture most everything you need on the moon. I'm assuming you meant lesser gravity instead of no gravity
The issue is that of gravity wells. Because you would first have to get most of the way out of Earth's well, to put your goodies there, then get out of the moon's well also when you launch to wherever you are going.
The Moon (Score:2)
#1: The moon isn't a planet
Planet is an arbitrary taxonomic word. Call it a world if you like instead because the Moon is basically a world even if technically it isn't a planet. Further the Earth/Moon system is effectively a binary planet system given how close the two are in size.
#2: How do you know life isn't there
Because that's what all the evidence shows. Everything we know about life as it exists here on Earth could not survive on the moon for long and despite quite a lot of looking we've found no evidence to the contrary. Find some evidence or even a plausib
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but dead planets like the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury are all the same
That is probably the single most insanely ignorant thing I've heard. I mean this is not a complex topic and I'm sure I proved this statement wrong with a primary school picture book which leaves us with 2 possible options:
1) You're an 8 year old who reads Slashdot (unlikely)
2) You are the most ignorant person on the planet and have carried your purposeful ignorance around for many years until you got to the age where people read Slashdot.
Re: All planets and the sun are made of the same d (Score:1)
The most ignorant person on the planet canâ(TM)t read and write, so they must be the third most ignorant person on the planet.
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Everything looks "the same" if you take a grand enough view. I'm picturing him as a kid saying "who cares, they're just a bunch of dumb rocks" in geology class and now it's "who cares, they're just a bunch of big, dumb rocks... in space". Biology? Seen one carbon based life form, seen them all. I got to admit that sometimes I get in the "yay, another 14 species of toads" mode where it just seems like trivia such as enumerating all the pointy bits of the earth's crust and calling them mountains.
Maybe I shoul
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Gil Scott Heron 1970, Whiteys on the moon.
And yes, the lyrics are completely accurate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nzoPopQ7V0
If it's the former, you now know it was a real protest poem from 1970,
If it's the latter, well stupidity is a lifelong affliction and you're still wrong.
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The *what generation? (Score:2)
What about the other musketeers?
It was a Giant Step and a Great Leap. (Score:2)
You don't realize how much they had to do with those old systems going to a place we had never been to before. The risks were so high and yet we went and did it successfully. That was because of the attention to detail by the people behind the scenes, and the Crew, to think of everything without the aid of the Internet and Computers.
Listen to it all here:
https://apolloinrealtime.org/ [apolloinrealtime.org]
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Looks like cayenne8 forgot his password.
Re:Old news is old. (Score:4, Insightful)
50 years ago, it was all about 'beating the russians' to the moon, nothing more.
nobody has wanted to go back because it's expensive af (and/or they 'lost' the 'space race') and the tech to efficiently use resources up there doesn't yet exist or is not mature enough for a space mission.
there's NO POINT in going unless we're going to accomplish something equally monumental to armstrong's first step.
without a purpose, it's just a 'been there, done that' thing.
Re:Old news is old. (Score:4, Interesting)
there's NO POINT in going unless we're going to accomplish something equally monumental to armstrong's first step.
How about a Netflix series based on "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", filmed on location?
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Woah... I see the mods didn't actually check the link I was pointing too. It's just a comedy skit folks... Worth checking out if by some chance you haven't seen it yet.
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With how much they spend on original programming each year, they could easily afford to send a few landers to the moon on Falcon 9s. I bet "filmed on THE FRICKIN' MOON!" would be easy to market, even if they have to digitally insert the actors and CGI bases and stuff.
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there's NO POINT in going unless we're going to accomplish something equally monumental to armstrong's first step.
How about a Netflix series based on "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", filmed on location?
Only if it is a documentary or historical reenactment.
Why we haven't been back (Score:3)
50 years ago, it was all about 'beating the russians' to the moon, nothing more.
"Nothing more"? No. You are correct that it was PRIMARILY about beating the Russians (who beat us to nearly every other major milestone) but it wasn't ALL about beating the Russians.
nobody has wanted to go back because it's expensive af (and/or they 'lost' the 'space race') and the tech to efficiently use resources up there doesn't yet exist or is not mature enough for a space mission.
Partially true but the reality is more complicated. First off PLENTY of people have wanted to go back - just not the people in charge of the budget. Second, part of the reason we haven't been back is that we spent 30 years on a misadventure with the Space Shuttle program costing untold billions for a space bus that never liv
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The mass of the station is the problem. It would take a fairly large array of ION engines thrusting continuously for years (decades perhaps?) to transfer orbits from the E
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How about a solar sail / ion engine to slowly move the ISS to lunar orbit?
The ISS wasn't designed for that purpose. Even if you could/did boost it to such an orbit, it really isn't practical for that sort of mission. Plus we don't have a working solar sail and ion engines are extremely low thrust. Would be cheaper and better to build a purpose built station if that is your goal.
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As far as moonlanding goes, I don't believe nor disbelieve it happened, I didn't get any think that convinces me either way. and frankely I don't care that much.
As a non native English speaker I learned that when we use "first" in stories it implies other events of the same nature, do other moonlanding missions happened ?
Also, I consider myself relatively reliable, when i tell a story i like to exp