Are we worse at Moon landings than 50 years ago?

BBC ^

[nickcarraway]

Japan's Moon lander ended up on its nose when it made its historic touchdown on the lunar surface. A US lunar lander has "no chance" of making a soft landing on the Moon due to a fuel leak.

We've set foot on the Moon multiple times. So why all the recent mission failures?

[cgbg]

Elon has got to do the heavy lifting.

My concern with him is that taking risks is a good plan for unmanned missions to work out the kinks in the tech—but a very dangerous one with humans on board.

NASA had real dead bodies as the price of failure—quite a few actually.....

This is going to be hard—very hard.

I am not sure folks have the stomach for what comes next.

[MikelTackNailer]

I play the clown but keep up. Elon keeps aware of failure ratios and balances successes with failures - while counting on failures as inevitable until they’re overcome. This is also my attitude (without billions of dollars). New tag line.

[cgbg]

It is all fun and games until you have to make the consolation calls to the families.

[9YearLurker]

Yeah, right.

[Tijeras_Slim]

The rovers and such have seriously out performed what was expected.

[9YearLurker]

Revisit the issue and it really was laughable.

Just look at Nixon’s AT&T “call” to the moon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLyJ9FHDO-c&ab_channel=CBSNews

[your other brother]

What has changed in the last 50 years? Diversity, equity, and inclusion combined with declines in academic standards. The people running the show simply are not as good at their jobs as the folks who ran things 50 years ago pretty much without computers and totally without calculators.

[Ancesthntr]

A combination of new math and diversity hires, plus a complete lack of vision in our so-called “leaders.” Give me Ike, Kennedy, Nixon and a bunch of sliderule-trained engineers who fought in WW2 and knew how to get stuff done well and quickly any day over the current crew.

[MikelTackNailer]

It is all fun and games until you have to make the consolation calls to the families.

No 'fun and games' at all because you have volunteers understand the risks up front with no bullshit. That the radiation shields are experimental and they'll likely be insufficient to prevent an involuntary sterilization at the least.

The understanding that, as the first out there, there's absolutely no chance of rescue should things go wrong.

But it's THE CHALLENGE of overcoming seemingly impossible odds with a reasonable chance of success that WILL find great people stepping up to willingly do so.

Without colonizing off this blessed rock and eventually beyond our solar system we're through when the next dinosaur-exterminating rock falls or even the Yellowstone volcanoes erupt as hard as some predict.

[Ancesthntr]

[MeganC]

Glad that gave you a giggle! (-;

[cgbg]

NASA had brave volunteers as well—no-one questions their courage.

The problem is that it is not “real” until somebody gets badly injured or dies in space or on the Moon (or Mars).

I don’t think the public is ready for it—even if the volunteers are.

We will find out soon enough.

My concern is the rush—there is some really great tech that is a couple of decades away that could make these missions hundreds of times less risky—nanotech shielding for all vehicles and spacesuits is one example.

I would also like to see robots land first and build and stock underground settlements—that would greatly reduce the risk to humans.

We will get it done eventually—I am not worried about that for one moment.

[daniel1212]

They faked it in 1969. Fake it till you make it! (BTW…we still can’t figure out how to get astronauts through the Van Allen Belts and beyond because of high cosmic radiation levels

I was expecting a MLD to show up, which makes conservatives, and worse - Christians blind if among the few who deny the moon landing. I just posted this yesterday:

daniel1212 to MtnClimber

And MLD (moon landing deniers) many of which likely support Putin (and think Van Allen belts would prevent safe travel thru them), must be squinting to find the flying dust since such claim that is why the flag (with a rod holding it out) was due to wind. As for the belts, by now you must have time to read what refutes this nonsense.

The innermost Van Allen belt sits somewhere between 400 to 6,000 miles above the surface of our planet. ... For near-Earth missions, the Van Allen belts are not a hazard to spacefarers. It was, however, a hazard for the Apollo missions. ...Charged particles are damaging to human bodies, but the amount of damage done can range from none to lethal, depending on the energy those particles deposit, the density of those particles, and the length of time you spend being exposed to them.

In the case of the Apollo missions, the solution was to minimize the second two factors. We can’t control the energy of those particles, though they can be large. The density of the Van Allen belts is well known (from sending uncrewed probes through them), and there are hotspots you can definitely avoid. In particular, the innermost belt is a rather tightly defined region, and it was possible to stay out of it for the trip to the Moon. The second belt is much larger, and harder to avoid, but there are still denser regions to avoid. For the Apollo trips, we wanted to send the astronauts through a sparse region of the belts, and to try and get through them quickly. This was necessary in any case; the crafts had to make it to the Moon in a reasonable amount of time, and the shorter the trip, the less exposure to all sorts of radiation the astronauts would get.

In the end, it seemed that these tactics worked; the on-board dose counters for the Apollo missions registered average radiation doses to the skin of the astronauts of 0.38 rad. This is about the same radiation dose as getting two CT scans of your head, or half the dose of a single chest CT scan; not too bad, though not something you should do every week. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillianscudder/2017/06/16/astroquizzical-van-allen-belts-barrier-spaceflight/?sh=22c61b556f8d

Are there any risks for humans passing through the van Allen radiation belts?
There are mainly two types of radiation risks to humans. Firstly, what we call deterministic effects, which can be long term low-level, or short-term high-level radiation exposure: they result in disruption to the central nervous system, suppression of haematopoiesis in bone marrow, cataracts and other vision impairment, and acute radiation sickness, which would be a significant risk on extravehicular activities (EVAs, or spacewalks). Secondly, there are stochastic effects, which are normally thought of as an increased chance of cancer. Especially in the case of stochastic effects, heavier particles present greater risk of impact on human biology, because those heavier particles have a greater ionisation over a short distance.

So they do not represent such a serious issue. Why?
Because we know where they are, we know when we’re going to fly through them, we can do that quickly...Technically any astronaut on the International Space Station crosses some parts of the belts at a low altitude but all Apollo mission astronauts will have flown through the radiation belts on their way to the Moon. The Apollo missions followed ballistic trajectories, so they passed through the belts very quickly which reduced the risk from this population to a very low level. Apollo missions took only about 4.5 days to get to the Moon. The Moon is just under 400 000 km away and the radiation belts only extend to around 60 000 km, so not a huge fraction of that time is necessarily spent in those belts.

Did these astronauts report any radiation-related symptoms?
That’s hard to say because there’s a lot of personal data that is protected. Some astronauts have reported “seeing” radiation – some kind of “snow” or flashes of light – that they can see even when their eyes are closed. This effect is well reported. - https://blogs.esa.int/orion/2022/12/10/the-van-allen-belts-are-they-dangerous/

But you can make us look ignorant if you want.

[Chickensoup]

We are worse at cathedral making too

[daniel1212]

Gus Grissom tried to blow the whistle on the Apollo program and he was killed. The other astronauts got the message. Most of the won’t do interviews to this day, and will not swear on a Bible that they landed on the moon

Dead men are not here to correct you, but the answer is because as Gene Cernan - the last man to walk and live on the moon, and swore on the Bible that he did - said, to question it in the light of evidence is ludicrous.

https://youtu.be/7Djbjx89rLU?t=17

MLD absurd rabid conspiratorial nonsense does not warrant dignifying it with a reproof, yet "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." (Proverbs 26:5)

[DesertRhino]

” So why all the recent mission failures?”

Because Apollo 11 was flown by a skilled USN test/Fighter pilot, and a skilled USAF test/Fighter pilot.

The ones today are piloted by code.

[NorthMountain]

Quit lying.

[daniel1212]

You need a lot of fuel to land on the moon. No atmosphere to slow you down.

Not quite, Since gravity on moon is only one-sixth that of our Earth then you do not need anything close to the fuel needed on earth. And look at the rapid assent when going back to the CM.

[daniel1212]

That Grissom “accident” was strange one indeed.

Which killed Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee as well. Rushed too much to disallow high probability of risk.

Immediately after the fire, NASA convened an Accident Review Board to determine the cause of the fire, and both chambers of the United States Congress conducted their own committee inquiries to oversee NASA's investigation. The ignition source of the fire was determined to be electrical, and the fire spread rapidly due to combustible nylon material and the high-pressure pure oxygen cabin atmosphere. Rescue was prevented by the plug door hatch, which could not be opened against the internal pressure of the cabin. Because the rocket was unfueled, the test had not been considered hazardous, and emergency preparedness for it was poor.

A pure oxygen atmosphere at higher than atmospheric pressure - with the cabin pressurized with pure oxygen at the nominal launch level of 16.7 psi..The high-pressure oxygen atmosphere was similar to that which had been used successfully in the Mercury and Gemini programs.
A cabin sealed with a hatch cover which could not be quickly removed at high pressure
An extensive distribution of combustible materials in the cabin
Inadequate emergency preparedness (rescue or medical assistance, and crew escape)
An ignition source most probably related to "vulnerable wiring carrying spacecraft power" and "vulnerable plumbing carrying a combustible and corrosive coolant"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Investigation

[Glad2bnuts]

Some people hate others who are consistent. Thanks for being that, when others mock. Tell your truth. I am with you, but am nutz.