I hope people remember Apollo 12 (November 14, 1969) and all the other Apollo missions, but people tend to only care about who did it first. Even at the time, interest really dropped off after Apoll0 11.
Every mission was an amazing engineering accomplishment and feat of bravery.
12 might not get much press but 13 will/should. Getting those guys back after the accident was pretty remarkable given what they had to work with.
I’m still amazed any of these missions actually worked given the technical challenges and the tech of the time. As one of the guys interviewed in a documentary I watched semi joked, your fridge has more computing power in it.
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Hockey is just a game the way ice cream is just glucose, love is just
a feeling, and sex is just repetitive motion.
12 might not get much press but 13 will/should. Getting those guys back after the accident was pretty remarkable given what they had to work with.
I’m still amazed any of these missions actually worked given the technical challenges and the tech of the time. As one of the guys interviewed in a documentary I watched semi joked, your fridge has more computing power in it.
It's crazy to me and also to think that 50 years later we really haven't done much more (when you think about the progress made from 1919 to 1969 in comparison).
It's crazy to me and also to think that 50 years later we really haven't done much more (when you think about the progress made from 1919 to 1969 in comparison).
Ya no wonder all the sci-fi from the 50's and 60's figured that we'd have flying cars and Mars colonies by the year 2000, the amount of progress they saw in half a century was mind boggling
It's crazy to me and also to think that 50 years later we really haven't done much more (when you think about the progress made from 1919 to 1969 in comparison).
It does baffling me sometimes that we went from the manned exploration of space to what seems like the exploitation of space with a side of un manned exploration.
I mean the man walking on the moon was more then just a scientific mission, it was in a sense what felt like a moral booster and the first step in man really pushing himself to explore his neighbourhood.
When I was just a wee lad we talked about things like sending a man to mars. colonization bases on the moon, we talked about the advancement of rocketry and were excited about the possibility of the shuttle and its ability to be reused.
It almost feels like we just stopped.
I mean the robotics thing is cool, little cars roving the surface of mars. Hi Def photo's of other planets and moons.
But it just feels like we're under achieving.
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Lack of competition. The only reason the US sent men to the moon was to beat the Soviets to it, and when they collapsed there was no longer anyone putting pressure on the Americans to go further. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing a revival of manned space exploration interest now that China is getting into the game
Lack of competition. The only reason the US sent men to the moon was to beat the Soviets to it, and when they collapsed there was no longer anyone putting pressure on the Americans to go further. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing a revival of manned space exploration interest now that China is getting into the game
I agree with that, I also think that its budgetary and math as well.
Maybe we'll see a up tick in competition from private enterprise, though I think that the market for flying rich passengers to mars isn't there at the moment.
We basically launched men to the moon on a space craft with 2 million moving parts and a computer that had the processing power of a fit bit, you'd think that this would be easier to get back there.
I also think we became really risk adverse with the shuttle accidents.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
The US spent something like 4% of its budget each year on NASA to get to the moon.
I think the risk adverseness is a big part of the reluctance. Most of the Astronauts in Apollo believed that people would die during the mission and had about a 1/3 chance of death on any given flight.
The calculated risk on the Space Shuttle was about 1/288 based on failure of components.
I think that level of minimizing risk really complicates the program. When you put scientists rather than military test pilots I think the level of risk that is willing to be accepted is much lower.
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^That's only $22 billion/year. NASA's current budget is $21 billion. Obviously NASA has their fingers in a lot more pots now, but still, it isn't that much money in the grand scheme of US budgets.
^That's only $22 billion/year. NASA's current budget is $21 billion. Obviously NASA has their fingers in a lot more pots now, but still, it isn't that much money in the grand scheme of US budgets.
In the peak Apollo years it was 30-40 billion in today’s dollars and they had one single mandate.
GDP was roughly 1 trillion in those days, funding was 5 billion plus from 65-69 so .4% of GDP. Today GDP is 20 trillion so the 20 billion today is roughly .1% of GDP.
So somewhere between double and four times depending on how you look at the number with a very narrow mandate.
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