Posted on 11/29/2022 7:29:23 PM PST by 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."
Exactly!
Remember Ralph Abernathy’s People Caravans down to Kennedy Space Center) Canaveral) to protest the Apollo launches?
Yep.
“If we can land on the Moon, why can’t we end poverty???”
It was hideously expensive and Apollo 13 demonstrated how many single points of failure there were in the design, how "close to the edge" we were riding, and that the Law of Averages couldn't be held back forever.
Plus, we had six successful moon shots, and NASA (the real NASA, not the STS NASA) already had crammed into those six missions all the research they could think of that could justified the exorbitant expenditure.
Lol...(insert pic of Sam kenison here).. “Good answer!! I like the way you think!!
Will we finally get The Jetsons?
Amen to that. If only...
Musk is another history-ignorant victim to “recency bias.”
The USSR scrapped its own moon shot program in 1974 (still not having built a booster capable of the mission) because there was no longer any point in spending that much money and expending that many science-years in the process. America already had stolen its thunder because the whole thing was basically a political “dog-and-pony” show.
It was never about advancing science, it was next to entirely about who’s (national) penis was larger.
Also, until it had been proved that we could get there, no one gave much thought to what uses it might be put to once you’d got there. Before Apollo, the general consensus was that the moon was uninteresting dead rock. It was only after Apollo that serious men put serious thought to what it could be used for, and began creating the technologies that would be needed to exploit it.
“Why was it weird? It was expensive, dangerous and a dozen more visits wouldn’t have pushed science, commerce or geopolitics forward much. Have we even yet fully exploited the samples we brought back?”
It’s been 50 years and should be a slam dunk to transit back-and-forth with personnel and materials for a moon base. Constructing, living, and experimenting in said environment would have advanced our knowledge for long-term Mars projects.
Your narrative is seriously flawed.
The best book on the issues you discussed:
https://www.amazon.com/One-Small-Step-Great-Dominate-ebook/dp/B07NB2QL13
Understand the mindset of the era.
The Cold War was raging. For fear of a Soviet attack, kids in school were practicing the “duck and cover” drill. There were regular Civil Defense messaging tests on TV and radio. Many large civic buildings (and caves) had signage designating them as Civil defense emergency shelters. And as if the shock of the launch of Sputnik wasn’t enough, when the godless Russians also put the first man in space, the American people were apoplectic.
JFK wasn’t thinking about the cause of science (or colonizing Mars) when he proposed putting a man on the moon, he was thinking about a project that would give the American people hope and, if successful, would assure them that American tehcnocracy was superior to communist technocracy.
America got to the moon six times and the Rooskies hadn’t even managed to get a working moon rocket on the drawing board. What would have been the point of spending more billion$ and risking more highly skilled Americans’ lives on such shaky technology?
The point already had been made and the point of diminishing return already passed.
From what I’ve read in books written by the principal people of that era, the “1202” error was actually a problem of data overload, which caused the onboard computer to miss its processing time targets. Luckily, one of the ground staff had seen the error in simulation tests, and knew what it was and why it was occurring. The cause was determined to be from the radar system’s data, an early case of “TMI” as we now know it. The solution was to turn off the radar, forcing Armstrong to manually fly the lander at the end.
And the countdown you hear on the audio isn’t really how much fuel was actually left, but more the time left until the fuel supply was low enough that an abort and return to the command module would be indicated to avoid Eagle’s being stranded on the moon. The added fuel usage was due to the terrain problem and Armstrong’s need to reposition landing to something better suited. I believe they added more fuel to later flights to be prepared for similar situations.
I worked all that stuff in missile guidance systems and know it very well. Had to learn how they were designed so I could fix them when needed.
No. The countdown was remaining fuel. Armstrong was manually flying and was going to put it down no matter what. There was not enough fuel to abort the entire LEM. There were only a few seconds left of fuel.
I first learned to write programs in the late 1970s in FORTRAN using punch cards. I decided that computer programming was not for me because even then software was still, for the most part, painstaking created manually by humans working at the machine language level.
I have nothing but admiration for the programmers in the 1960s who managed to write all of the software necessary to send men to the moon in back on computers that used reel to reel tape drives for storage and that had less total computing capacity than a modern pocket calculator or smart phone.
“I have nothing but admiration for the programmers in the 1960s who managed to write all of the software necessary to send men to the moon and back on computers that used reel to reel tape drives for storage and that had less total computing capacity than a modern pocket calculator or smart phone.”
Feel free to revise and extend your remarks—lol:
https://www.aulis.com/pascal.htm
Don’t forget all the parts were fabricated by high school graduates running manually controlled machines. ;-)
Excellent movie. Does make one wonder!🍺
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