Is going to the moon today any easier than in 1969? (Navy, Russian)
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That the technology has advanced is a given. My question is if we will take the same path to the moon. NASA eventually settled on the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. How would anyone think that such a complex operation would work is beyond me. You shoot up the Landing Module which will dock with the Orbiter that just happens to be passing by? How many things have to go right for this to work. This feat is far more impressive to me than even building the Saturn V. Can we just land the spacecraft on the moon today and lift off when we want to? If the answer is no, then not much has changed.
The point of all this is that the LEM lower stage only descends to the moon, the ascent stage stays at the moon, so you save a good bit of weight that would need to be accelerated out of lunar orbit, compared to a single module that lands on the moon, takes back off, then leaves lunar orbit to return to Earth.
There was no luck involved, it's all math. The launch from Earth orbit decoupled the ground launch from leaving Earth orbit. The LEM ascent stage launched at a specific time to more or less "merge" with the Command Module/Service Module. After that, again, heading out from Lunar orbit to Earth was "decoupled" from exactly where the LEM launched from, which moved while the crew was on the Moon.
The whole idea of a "Buck Rodgers" space ship that is like an airplane, and you just add fuel before your next adventure, would be damn hard to make work, it would require a LOT more fuel, than expendable or at least detachable stages, the way it was actually done.
It certainly was not a "political fiasco," it was a stunning political victory.
Not arguing with you on this, but.. Was it? I'd tend to agree that it was, but perhaps not in the way you'd expect, or at least, not in the way that we currently think of a political victory.
It was a political victory for the US as a whole, on the world stage. It cemented a legacy for Kennedy and his image, for lack of a better term, has benefited from it.. The credit Johnson gets from it is basically mission control was named after him.. and he probably is the one person most responsible for it happening by continuing to get the high funding levels pushed through for it. Nixon reaped some of the glory due to the landings all happening on his watch and really didn't catch a whole lot of heat for cancelling 3 of the missions.
Internally.. It was a moral victory for the US, but not really a large political victory.. Strictly from an internal standpoint. NASA, generally considered apolitical, got the glory internal to the US.
All three Apollo 11 astronauts had Irish ancestors, so technically...
And the reason we had a space program at all was due to Wernher Von Braun. Do you know who he used to work for?
There's a great line in the movie "The Right Stuff" and I assume the book of the same name. When speaking about the Russians advancement prior to ours, someone said, "Our Germans are better than their Germans". I laughed my you know what off!
Bottom line. None of it would have happened without the U.S.
And the reason we had a space program at all was due to Wernher Von Braun. Do you know who he used to work for?
There's a great line in the movie "The Right Stuff" and I assume the book of the same name. When speaking about the Russians advancement prior to ours, someone said, "Our Germans are better than their Germans". I laughed my you know what off!
Bottom line. None of it would have happened without the U.S.
The Right Stuff is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. I picked it up a few months ago and couldn’t put it down until I finished.
So why all this talk about going to Mars? I see a lot of politicians out front on this. More astronauts have died on space shuttle flights to nowhere.
Not sure really. Although I am a strong advocate for space exploration, the most logical future approach is improved automation and unmanned exploration. Look at everything that was discovered with the Mars rovers. Open to arguments for it but none seem compelling yet.
Well, I don't know if I would characterize it as "easier".
True, it's been done now, so you wouldn't have to redesign some things.
But you've still got to perch some people on top of a rocket full of highly explosive fuel, and then set it off, and then hit what you're aiming at 240,000 miles away. None of that qualifies as "easier" in my book.
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