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India Acknowledges Lunar Lander Crashed
- dreamcompiler 7y agoLanding on the moon is very hard. Landing on the moon without a human at the controls is even harder.
- Aperocky 7y agoThat's arguable, the Soviets landed a rover in 1970 and it worked for about a year. Nobody regarded that as a greater achievement than American landings on the moon - and probably because it isn't.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoYou forget with the Apollo mission, the fleshy bits came back instead of staying on the moon.
- jquery 7y agoIt's really incredibly hard to understate just what a phenomenal accomplishment the Apollo mission was. I consider it one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mankind. Not just sending a human on a rocket to the moon, but with enough finesse to make it a round trip. The bravery of the astronauts blows my mind. The risks were extreme.
- rsmckinney 7y agoAnd it was accomplished in 1969 — engineering with a slide rule. I wonder what was different with American culture 60 years ago that enabled such an achievement?
- maha96 7y ago>I wonder what was different with American culture 60 years ago that enabled such an achievement? You should read Peter theil's book zero to one then. In the book, he highlights how the culture have changed from taking deterministic risks to placing non-deterministic bets all over the place to minimize risks. This pessimism according to him came due to the numerous bubbles like dot-com bubble, the real estate crisis, and the clean energy bubble that have gone bust due to over optimism.
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoIf we're talking specifically about the Apollo 11 mission, there are quite a few other differences as well. The obvious one was that it was entirely fueled by politics to "beat the Russians." The other fact that few people seem to talk about today is how incredibly dangerous it was. There were many individual components that had known failure rates - some of them as high as 50% - and if any of them failed everybody would 100% die. Now combine all of these. Based on the limited testing they did (and don't forget the first Apollo crew died in training), there was at best a 1/6 chance of the mission succeeding. If you had the chance to go to the moon but knew you had about a 10% chance of success (the odds improved substantially with later missions), would you do it? And keep in mind, you literally watched your colleagues - the original crew that was supposed to be the first on the moon - burn to death. For all intents and purposes, going to the Moon was a military campaign. We had to do it, even if we killed people in the process (the Russians killed way more people than we did in their attempts). Americans (I cannot speak for other countries and cultures) just don't have that mindset anymore, for better and for worse.
- Udik 7y ago> there was at best a 1/6 chance of the mission succeeding. If you had the chance to go to the moon but knew you had about a 10% chance of success (the odds improved substantially with later missions), That doesn't seem very plausible, given that six missions brought astronauts to the moon (plus one that famously failed but returning all the crew to earth alive). If the initial odds were under 1/6, what brought them so much higher in the following missions that you had seven in a row without loss of human life?
- manderley 7y agoAlso, probably because of propaganda.
- trothamel 7y agoThe first lunar landings were in 1966, and didn't have computers on board. Certainly, it was possible to land without a human or even a computer. Not having a human to support or return massively simplifies the process.
- capableweb 7y ago> The first lunar landings were in 1966, and didn't have computers on board. Certainly, it was possible to land without a human or even a computer. Are you saying that the first lunar landings where made without humans or any sort of computer? I think the first landings without computers or humans were mostly impacts, not actual landings where the vessel is still intact afterwards.
- manojlds 7y agoBut I guess landing on the human with a human with intention of bringing the human back is much much harder.
- Fjolsvith 7y agoMoving target?
- zeta0134 7y agoCondolences on the failed landing. That it got as far as it did continues to be a fantastic achievement. Space is hard. Good to hear that enough data was recovered to establish the cause of failure; that means it wasn't a total loss. Nothing to do but learn from it and move forward.
- ganitarashid 7y agoBeing from India myself, I always believed these funds would be better spent on helping the less fortunate.
- rishav_sharan 7y agoBeing from India as well, i think that sentiment does more harm
- tehlike 7y agoI suggest you read this: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html?m=1 http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html?...
- manderley 7y agoMaybe we should invest in research on Earth instead. Any investment in space exploration is a bad use of funds.
- postsantum 7y agoIf we make churches pay taxes there would be enough money to fund several NASAs
- javagram 7y agoChurches have the same non-profit status as other 501(c)3 charities, are you advocating for removing the nonprofit tax exemption entirely or do you specifically want to target churches?
- kfrzcode 7y agoBoth options can coincide.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take HN into classic flamewar topics, about which nothing new will be said. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nikhiltilwalli 7y agoAs an Indian national I find this embarrassing. Not that they failed but that they even tried. We have much bigger more immediate problems to solve.
- mfrw 7y agoIt takes courage to admit failure. Appreciate the transparency.
- roberson87 7y agoThey were literally coerced to making the admission by lawmakers, if it weren't for them they'd still be "analysing data".