The 6 Moon Landings

Well we have robots now, why would we risk people when we can send robots to accomplish the mission?

Supporting human life in such a hostile environment is certainly part of the knowledge to be gained.

A more permanent exploration might allow us to explore the crater Tycho and some of the debris field, too.

Look at the changes in aviation in its first 50 years, from the Wright Brothers' first flight to airliners carrying passengers over the ocean. I suppose I had the same dreams when I saw the first moon landing on TV. But space travel will only be experienced vicariously by the vast majority of us, save the trained astronauts and a billionaire or two.

Well, I suppose the rest of us can just pull another SF book from the bookcase.

Over 180 years after Ada Lovelace did the first software for Charles Babbage and software still cannot get their work right. This is today's XKCD comic:

Too true!

Sad....

And frightening!!!

Yes we build in mechanical fail-safe devices but software is just 1's and 0's that are easily changed by other 1's and 0's.

The Wright Brothers? Does Henri Giffard's prior achievement not count, then, Mildred? https://www.space.com/16623-first-powered-airship.html

The Wright brothers achieved flight. Giffard achieved float.

Cool, none the less, but doesn't count as the same.

The technology to use bouyancy to float in a fluid has been around for thousands of years before Giffard.

Just as cosmic rays can/have randomly changed human DNA over the eons, so too can/have they changed 1's and 0's in software. Another reason to have a human activated s/w "reset" button in spacecraft.

Many people don't realize that these missions were flow before CAD was in use.

Hand held calculators were rare and very expensive.

Drafting tables, T-squares and slide rules filled room after room when I worked at Motorola in the late 60's and on.

Surface mounted components and circuitry didn't exist.

And,it all worked when it was needed. (Apollo 13 excepted)

It was a great time to be in the industry.

Early '70's at NASA Langley. Each desk in the engineering department had a 4 function calculator with tube display (with filaments) that was hardwired to a very large "computing machine" in the basement. Each desktop box had to be plugged into a 110V source and the cables were long enough to reposition it to my drawing board.

And I think it was circa 1972 or 1973 that I splurged and spent $250 on an early Commodore 4 function handheld. It was cool but my slide rule was much more versatile.

That was also the same time period we got our first Xerox copier which included a 3 days of classes on the care and feeding of the beast.

Hooker

I thought I had died and gone to Heaven when we got a word processor (Word Star) and I didn't have to cut and paste specifications and instructions with an X-Acto knife and tape.

This was circa 1980.

Yeah, no more frantic scrounging for a sharp blade.

Well, that's true but mainframe computers existed and the critical calculations were done on them. The IBM 700/7000 series was available in the 1950s, and then the 360 series in the early 60s. I used a 360 in college in the 1970s and it was an old unit by then. But still (even for the time) extremely powerful. Fortran, man, Fortran... Honeywell and Sperry/Univac had their own lines of mainframes, too. And other companies.

Sliderule -- only three (3) digits to work with, but you HAD to remember the "powers-of-tens" in your head (or paper).

Still have mine, including a circular one.

Somewhere, I have some French curves, triangles and circle templates I used in college in 1967. Everything else has long been misplaced.

Our bodies are designed for life on this planet, not for zero g nor for the moon or mars.

If we'd made more trips to the moon, extended trips or "moon base" we would already know what we need to know about the effect of a trip to Mars.

1% bone density loss per month in zero g. That is 30% down by the time you get there, plus whatever rate applies to the time spent on Mars in 30% gravity, and then another 30% for the trip back...

Not even to mention the effect on your heart, immune system, and nervous system. All of which may also make you a little moody or something.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319971.php

So realistically, if lucky, you are coming home blind crazy jello or you are accepting that you will never return from Mars. I'm sure time on the moon would be similar.

Is there a practical solution to the problem of gravity in space travel and/or colonizing worlds with different gravity than our own?

I agree. Leave it to the robots.

Someone raised the question in another thread, if aliens visited earth why wouldn't they come out and say something... After reading about human bodies in space, I think the chance of a traveller being ready to face earth's gravity is pretty slim, even if they did come from a very similar world. In all likelihood, these cosmonauts (if they existed) would be very very fragile by the time they got here.

Klaatu barada nikto.

Intelligent beings will never visit here, after watching recent TV broadcasts and Twitter feeds.

Besides, they would have to deal with the:

Well, they certainly won't approach us hoping for peaceful trade!

"Leave it to robots"
Here's quick read for you.

Victory, unintentional.

http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/81838/12/Azimov_-_The_Complete_Robot.html

I agree that there is no immediate need to understand what it will take for people to thrive off of this planet. That doesn't mean useful information on humans cannot be discovered by putting people on the moon. Hopefully for much longer than two weeks.

I think that there is no need to colonize other planets. We should start creating space-based habitats with artificial gravity from spinning. The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" had a vision of a space hotel. If Elon wants to really make a space tourism industry, he should start making one of those.

I've said elsewhere that I think that as a necessary first step in colonizing Mars, we should make a set of self-sustaining space habitats that orbit the sun and periodically pass by Earth and Mars without slowing down. That way they can be repaired and restocked near Earth, and they can change crew at Mars. They should be big, capable of accommodating a few hundred people each. And build maybe a dozen of them so the interval between visits at Mars is only a month or two, in case of emergencies.

Anything we learn doing that will apply to building habitats on any planet, both from the engineering and the psychological perspective.

How feasible is artificial gravity on a space flight? What are the fuel constraints for example? If it was easy or economical to do, I think at least a prototype would have been tested in space already. Or perhaps they will be doing that ASAP before the Mars mission?

Or maybe the Mars mission should just happen in a big hangar in the desert somewhere...

Don't get me wrong, I totally believe we walked on the moon, I remember it to boot, but I'm not a bit convinced there's going to be a manned flight to Mars a few years from now. We're not even close to being ready for that.

OTOH, if we could vote for just a couple of people we'd especially like sent to Mars, or the Moon for that matter, I'd be totally onboard....

To me, artificial gravity on a "space flight" is different from artificial gravity on a large rotating habitat. I think once you get a habitat spinning, the energy to maintain that is negligible. But I don't think it is feasible at all unless the structure is much, much larger than what we have already put into space. You can't live in a habitat that is spinning once every few seconds. Once a minute might be tolerable.That might be a circular habitat like in "2001: A Space Odyssey," or it might be two big objects at opposite ends of a strong cable.

My favorite option would be to have two rings or spheres rotating in opposite directions on the same axle, so that you can start them spinning with electricity and stop them with regenerative braking rather than by rockets, which means you can change the spin with energy from solar panels rather than wasting fuel.

Getting such large structures into orbit takes a lot of energy. We might have to wait until we can capture a decent sized asteroid and mine it, or maybe mine the material from the moon. Corning is making some phenomenally strong glass these days, called Gorilla Glass.

https://www.corning.com/gorillaglass/worldwide/en/glass-types/gorilla-glass-6.html

I saw a play that boldly suggested it was all Hollywood.

It was quite the tale.. OR WAS IT?

It was really just a good laugh..

That said. If you ever have a Chance to see a production by the Jackalope Theater?

don't hesitate.

____________________________

and now...

To the original point, the next generation is being educated by the video and media industry that the moon landings never happened. Case in point: Having a slightly one sided conversation with my 5 year old grand daughter in her family's garage while I'm spooning on a set of new tires on my adventure bike, bear in mind that these particular tires are extremely stiff and require far too much energy to hold a conversation, but she is chatting away at a breakneck pace none the less. So, amid the flurry of words emitting from her, she says: "And we never landed on the moon." I stopped wrestling with the tire and stared at her in disbelief. Now, she is pretty smart for her age and can hold a pretty steady conversation with anyone speaking to a subject she is interested in, but this threw me for a loop. I did not want to dive too deep, but just asked her where she heard that? She rattled off the name of a show that I can't seem to recall at this moment. But it struck me as to how a 5 year old would even have an interest or the breadth of knowledge to even suggest such a thing.

I live 2500 miles away from her, so I don't have the opportunity to 'steer' her exposure to video and media influence. But, the point is that our next generation is being taught thru various means that historical events never actually occurred. Like: "... we never landed on the moon".

This is the power of propaganda. Some might say George Orwell is now spinning in his grave. I don't. He warned us this would happen. Being forewarned is not always sufficiently forearmed. He may have delayed the inevitable with his writings, but only a delay. He got the power of propaganda painfully right.

I find stories like this very worrisome. Countries who don't believe in science and believe in an altered version of history don't fare well for long. I used to laugh stuff like this off until Flat Earthers became a real thing. If a subset of the population feels comfortable admitting that they believe the world is flat, we've messed up.

This is a perennial problem. One of the best-recorded examples of this is the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Galileo is long dead but the Roman Catholic Church lives on. A few centuries after the incident the Roman Catholic Church recognized their error.

So don't mislead yourself into thinking that those who refuse to acknowledge what has happened must recognize it as true or suffer a shorter existence. Every society has members that want to forget the actions of the past for good and bad reasons, even some actions they should be proud of.

Wernher Von Braun (and Disney!) had centrifugal "gravity" functioning back in the 1950's ! ! !

No they didn't have it functioning. They had proposals and animations, neither functioned.

So different from what I see happening in my centrifuge!

But once again, why bother with the expense of going to Mars - any old amusement park will do....

I rest my case...

https://www.quora.com/If-we-were-to-use-the-most-powerful-telescope-in-2017-could-we-see-the-US-flag-on-the-moon-today

Photo shop?

Nice work.

Then there is the joke about the moon landing having been faked and directed by Coppola.

The reason the films were so expensive was Coppola insisted on filming on location.

To the original point, the next generation is being educated by the video and media industry that the moon landings never happened. Case in point: Having a slightly one sided conversation with my 5 year old grand daughter in her family's garage while I'm spooning on a set of new tires on my adventure bike, bear in mind that these particular tires are extremely stiff and require far too much energy to hold a conversation, but she is chatting away at a breakneck pace none the less. So, amid the flurry of words emitting from her, she says: "And we never landed on the moon." I stopped wrestling with the tire and stared at her in disbelief. Now, she is pretty smart for her age and can hold a pretty steady conversation with anyone speaking to a subject she is interested in, but this threw me for a loop. I did not want to dive too deep, but just asked her where she heard that? She rattled off the name of a show that I can't seem to recall at this moment. But it struck me as to how a 5 year old would even have an interest or the breadth of knowledge to even suggest such a thing.

I live 2500 miles away from her, so I don't have the opportunity to 'steer' her exposure to video and media influence. But, the point is that our next generation is being taught thru various means that historical events never actually occurred. Like: "... we never landed on the moon".

Perhaps she has learned she can get a rise (out of those who at most other times appear have a fairly good grip on what is going on) by throwing claims like that into the mix.

Maybe she has learned she can appropriate undivided attention ...no longer having to share it with a spoon-demading too-tight tire.

That we went to the moon without the help of something as complex as a new top of the line tablet or smartphone is astonding.... amazing.... unbelievable for some....apparentlly dumbfounding for many.