Elon Musk On Why First Moon Landing Was An 'Anomaly'

benzinga.com ^ | 11/27/2022 | Shivdeep Dhaliwal

[bitt]

SpaceX and Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk said recently that the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon-landing mission was an “anomalous situation.”

What Happened: “The fact that we were able to go to the Moon in '69 was such an anomalous situation, it was like reaching into the future and bringing the technology forward,” said Musk on the "Full Send" podcast.

The landings, which saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to step on the lunar surface, were “not the natural pace of technology development,” according to the SpaceX founder.

“It’s just that the United States just collectively decided that this has got to be done,” Musk said, referring to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Why It Matters: Musk agreed with the podcast hosts that it was “weird” that the U.S. had not returned to the Moon’s surface since 1972.

"We’ll go to the Moon, SpaceX has an asset contract to take astronauts to the Moon," Musk said, adding that SpaceX’s super-heavy-lift launch vehicle Starship is “gigantic compared to anything that’s been done before.”

“It’s capable of putting 100 tons of payload on the Moon. You could build a Moon base with a Starship.”

Musk said, “We could go way beyond what was done with the Apollo program, where they had a small lander.”

SpaceX would take astronauts to the Moon before it took them to Mars, the billionaire entrepreneur said.

"I think we should build a city on the Moon and on Mars."

[Fledermaus]

The underlying issue was building ICBM rockets.

[x]

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did

[rx]

While the Saturn V rocket was in testing, Wernher von Braun gave lectures and made videos in which he stated that the US would have to build a much more powerful rocket than anything in existence at the time (~'61-'62) to feasibly bring man to the moon.

In the years that followed, he laid plans for such a rocket, but that project was cancelled when the time schedule and budget grew out of control. No other more powerful booster was completed before Apollo 8, the three-manned mission that was claimed to have circled moon in a vehicle that was essentially the same as that which would be called Apollo 11.

Did Wernher get it wrong? Did Nixon and the desire to win the Cold War with the Soviets change the US and NASA's space plans that Wernher couldn't have contemplate? Why wasn't that someone else, whose vision must have outstripped Wernher's to be able to use Saturn V to do the Apollo moon missions put in charge of the has-been Von Braun?

No, Wernher wasn't replaced and no other rocket science genius took over. Hmmm.

Apollo 11 images such as this one below show a necessary lunar excursion wardrobe change that could not have occurred and was never claimed:

Then there are internal contradictions such as these among the official Apollo 11 photo imagery:

Here's the official NASA spokesman Donald R. Pettit, Ph.D. explaining why we haven't been able to go back to the moon for 50 years:

Priceless!

[Gasshog]

“I think we should build a city on the Moon and on Mars.”
= = =

And the roads will be full of electric cars.

Rocket packs, wernt we promised rocket packs?

[magooey]

If we had a permanent base on the Moon, what would be its purpose?

Astronomers on Earth would have to periodically check if the people up there were mooning us.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Why It Matters: Musk agreed with the podcast hosts that it was “weird” that the U.S. had not returned to the Moon’s surface since 1972.

No, it's not all that weird - Musk was right when he said the US landing on the moon was what was weird. There's simply been no financial or political incentive to return to the moon. Now, in 2022, we have private corporations seeking to establish bases on the moon for financial profit - that gives us a sustainable reason to go to the moon and stay there.

[Freedom4US]

That’s not quite true, the Apollo spacecraft itself, the Lunar module, the Command module, had little computing power, because of size and weight considerations.

The navigational computing power responsible was actually back on Earth, occupying entire floors at the MOC. They had some pretty heavy duty computing power available, but the results of all that number crunching had to be read up to the astronauts with manual input on the DSKY.

[Freedom4US]

Well they wanted it that way - being able to independently navigate (if necessary) without benefit of comms with ground control was one of those things set in stone early on. One of the practical reasons were fears that the Soviet Union might try to hack the radio frequencies used to send and receive data back and forth from the earth to moon.

Buzz Aldrin on the first attempt wasn’t simple luck of the draw, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on lunar orbit rendezvous, if something went wrong, Buzz will get you home with a #2 Ticonderoga and some scrap paper.

[AndyJackson]

Entertainment. Same purpose as hookers, but we spend a lot more on them.

[Freedom4US]

Flying cars. (And electricity, “too cheap to meter”)

Yeah, they pulled the rug on all that, huh? The Jet Packs were too early, they only had about 60 second flight time. The Army messed around with them a little bit, but couldn’t come up with any use for them due to limited flight time. There are vintage Jet Packs on display (or were) at the Army Transportation Museum, located at Ft. Eustis, VA.

[BobL]

Outstanding! Didn’t know the Soviet end of it, but I do remember that the Soviets did congratulate us some point right around the Apollo 11 launch...classy of them, considering how hard each side tried.

[robowombat]

Nixon, in his strange narrow way, despised the space program as a ‘democrat’ thing and just cancelled the last three missions to ‘save’ a few million dollars in budget numbers game playing. Nixon hated private firearms ownership and never even bothered to look at the staffing papers on the negatives of the EPA mandate. He just wanted a evening news headline just like he used the POW issue as a domestic political football. And yes the norks did keep some (now dead) prisoners as holdbacks to guarantee the big ‘loan’ RN promised them for ‘making peace’ would be delivered on. It wasn’t (Tricky never meant to, and the POWs the norks had were killed). This is still the biggest Beltwayland scandal that remains hidden. Some day when all of the principles are long dead some nork will write a blockbuster revelation about what great grandpa was involved in with Tricky and Kissinger.

[Regulator]

The giants still live among us

https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/the-apollo-11-moon-landing-spacecraft-design-then-and-now.html

[rktman]

Thanks. I did see it.🚀

[Jumper]

The moon would serve as an antenna array for communications and make it easier in war to kill the enemy.

[allendale]

Not one to mock progress or innovative accomplishment. However revisiting the moon and establishing a permanent presence of humans will be enormously expensive. What will be the return to justify the cost? When the huge sums were committed to build, launch, man and maintain a permanent orbiting space station, it was not only exciting but the claim was that the “science” performed on the lab would bring huge benefits and insights to mankind? So far there have been no such accomplishments or obvious return on the huge investments. Philosophically the moon landings were important because they showed that mankind had the intelligence and capability to achieve such a feat. Little doubt that it has the capability to establish a moon station and possibly go to Mars. However is it wise to do so? Perhaps it is but the taxpayer supported effort should be debated thoroughly.

[OldMissileer]

They did have computers, but primitive as hell, and it took super-human skills to squeeze the code to fit the tiny memory.

Yes. Their computers were extremely rudimentary but mostly worked.

Remember, when the Eagle was landing Armstrong and Aldrin kept calling out a certain number over and over. It was the computer buffer overload code so Armstrong took over and manually flew the Eagle to touchdown. Because of the terrain they had only a few seconds of fuel left to burn at touchdown and that is why Mission Control said they had a lot of people breathing again.

[BiteYourSelf]

What was anomalous was allowing the technology to be lost.🙄

[BiteYourSelf]

They didn’t have computing power of a modern day programmable calculator.🤔

[BiteYourSelf]

Actually they did have crude computers on board.🤔