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I'm afraid this might actually keep fueling moon-landing denial conspiracy theories: "Look how hard it is to get to the moon in 2022! How can we have possibly d

I'm afraid this might actually keep fueling moon-landing denial conspiracy theories: "Look how hard it is to get to the moon in 2022! How can we have possibly done it in 1969?"

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Perhaps a good reason to go back. Every day that passes makes it more suspect purely from natural reason.
- jfengel 4y ago
  This won't change anything. They are surely gearing up to deny that Artemis goes to the moon even after it does. Hell, today we actually could do it with CGI, which we couldn't in 1969. Or they'll just continue to assert that it didn't happen with Apollo. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. There my be good reasons to have another moon mission, but demonstrating things to paranoiacs isn't on the list. Even if it would accomplish anything, I simply don't care what they think. They don't have anything to contribute, and can only distract.
endisneigh 4y ago
What would your response to that be?
- xwolfi 4y ago
  That if it was fake Russia wouldn't have stopped everything, would have tried a little bit more to go there and would have proven the world how fake the US was. These theories make no sense in the context of intense surveillance both blocks were subjecting each other to and it's quite recent, after the advance in movie making and recorded television, that we think the US could have faked it all. I mean, we can ping the mirror on the moon, they came back with rocks and they went to walk on the moon several times, there s no doubt.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  The scientists and engineers were actually trying to get to the moon back then. This thing in the launchpad is just a giant dildo monument to bureaucracy and “jobs creation” with going to the moon being merely an undesirable side goal they’d rather not have to do anyway.
  - mmmpop 4y ago
    I think this is part of it, but I’m certain the real heads at NASA are busting ass to get this done. Probably a lot of dead-weight, also we didn’t have the help of a couple thousand of Germany’s finest working 80 hour weeks to defeat actual threats to humanity. I feel bad for a lot of these folks… it must be an uphill battle.
- Joeri 4y ago
  Look at how much was spent back then, and how few rules were imposed on how it could be spent. Just look at this graph, it says it all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3ANASA-Budget-Federal.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3...
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    I fucking hate this graph so much. Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything. Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s. Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on. So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Good point, so I looked up inflation-adjusted Apollo costs, which came to $257 billion.[1] By contrast, SLS so far has been closer to $20 billion.[2] But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower. [1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo [2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion [3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reveals-unsustainable-cost-for-sls-launches https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reve...
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Apollo was many missions, totally bootstrapping and industry, plus lots and lots of infrastructure. This included all the subsystems, multiple engines and so on and so on. SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  That the Apollo program had launch delays too, it probably should have had more to prevent things like the Apollo 1 fire that killed the crew. For example, https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-delay-april-16-1972/ https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-dela... Plus NASA was much more tolerant of failure back then. The first Apollo mission failed and the program continued. If this launch fails, it could set back this program by years or more.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    If this first launch failed, it might actually make the program faster because it would allow NASA with some support form Congress to kill these dumb programs and free up the budget for smarter things.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I give my answer, it all comes down to FOCUS. NASA just on base level, now has to do far more things at the same time, only a small part of its budget is focused on the moon. So they have science sats, space station and lots of other things. Second is budget, NASA of course had a larger % of the federal budget but that is bad analysis as that was before social spending exploded. But even in absolute terms, during peak spending, NASA had higher yearly spending then now. Even more important is that if you are working towards a mission many project, lander, rocket, crew capsule all hit peak cost at the same time, so you will need much more money at that moment (in that year). Current NASA can't do this, they have to make development sequential. That's why NASA switched to this concept called 'capability based planning'. So instead of saying we need to do X,Y and Z to do 'Mission A'. Its we have P, L and we could invest some development in O so we can attempt do 'Mission B'. The thirds is just as important. In pure money terms, even with the reduced amount of flexibility and money because of the above, doing a moon landing is very possible. However, NASA does not have architecture freedom. Every single component of the moon landing architecture has to be separately battled for politically. NASA does not have the mandate of going to the moon and here are 5 billion a year to do it. That is how it worked during Apollo. The politicians didn't care what the architecture was. Now Congress tells NASA, you need to build a rocket like this, a capsule like this and so on. To be more specific, its totally clear to everybody who really thinks threw this that SLS/Orion make very little sense. The US has a grown fleet of commercial rockets that can launch pretty large payloads to LEO. And soon NASA will have access to multiple providers for both human and cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) transportation to LEO. So up to LEO NASA has everything it needs. What it really needs is some craft to go from LEO to LLO (Lower Moon Orbit) and then a Lander to go up and down to surface. Those could be the same craft. NASA has to pay nothing of their yearly budget to have the ability to put stuff and humans into LEO. So really their 4-6 billion $ in budget should be 100% focused on how do get that cargo (including human) from LEO to the moon. Instead SLS/Orion cost 4-5 billion $ per year, and the result is only a tiny amount of cargo can go to the moon, and not even to LLO. How to use those 4-6 billion $ to do that is up for debate. There are multiple answer that would work just fine. Depots and reusable tugs. Mega lander (like Starship). Assembly in moon orbit. All would be doable if you could spend 5 billion $ a year on it. NASA is not the moon lander agency now. NASA is the do these 100 things and do it the way congress wants them agency.
melling 4y ago
Who cares? Seriously. Conspiracies tend to live on, and you can’t fix stupid. It’s noise. Now let’s move onto some signal.
sweettea 4y ago
It absolutely has been cited as evidence by my moon-landing-denying friends. "It's a struggle now, yet they claim they're using the same technology as they used back then when the field was young? Seems unlikely."
- simonh 4y ago
  Apollo 4 was the first full up unmanned test flight of a Saturn V. It took almost a year of pushed launch dates and scrubs before they got it flying.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
Well, I'm sure logic isn't going to deter conspiracy theorists, but the Saturn V that look us to the moon in 1969 used Kerosene as fuel not liquid hydrogen which is notoriously leak-prone. FWIW the Atlas V that delivered the Mars rovers was also Kerosene (RP-1) fueled. It is possible to make liquid hydrogen work reliably - the Ariane 5 ECA, which delivered the James Web telescope uses it, but it seems the SLS was congressionally mandated to reuse ancient Space Shuttle tech, which also used to suffer on average one launch scrub per mission ...
- perihelions 4y ago
  Saturn V did use liquid hydrogen for its second and third stages. One of the original plans for SLS was to adapt and modernize the original Saturn hydrogen engine, the J-2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-2X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-2X
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Only the first stage of the Saturn V used kerosene and it dropped off at about 61 km altitude. The two upper stages that actually pushed the spacecraft to the moon used liquid hydrogen.
black6 4y ago
Nothing made me doubt the moon landings more than actually working for NASA the past five years.
squarefoot 4y ago
Most deniers wouldn't stop even after dozens of successful crewed launches, just like most flat earthers keep spreading their nonsense when they could send a balloon with a camera and take shots of the Earth curvature by themselves. Also, some of these people profit from others' stupidity, so a small percentage of them, I'd dare to say the most active, are perfectly aware that we in fact went to the Moon and the Earth isn't flat, but books, gadgets, TV appearances, YouTube ad impressions, conventions, and generally having at disposal a huge flock of gullible people, brings money, popularity and by extension, power (see politics).
CapitalistCartr 4y ago
We are returning to the Moon regardless. Mother: "Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

I'm afraid this might actually keep fueling moon-landing denial conspiracy theories: "Look how hard it is to get to the moon in 2022! How can we have possibly done it in 1969?"

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Perhaps a good reason to go back. Every day that passes makes it more suspect purely from natural reason.

jfengel 4y ago
This won't change anything. They are surely gearing up to deny that Artemis goes to the moon even after it does. Hell, today we actually could do it with CGI, which we couldn't in 1969. Or they'll just continue to assert that it didn't happen with Apollo. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. There my be good reasons to have another moon mission, but demonstrating things to paranoiacs isn't on the list. Even if it would accomplish anything, I simply don't care what they think. They don't have anything to contribute, and can only distract.

endisneigh 4y ago

What would your response to that be?

xwolfi 4y ago
That if it was fake Russia wouldn't have stopped everything, would have tried a little bit more to go there and would have proven the world how fake the US was. These theories make no sense in the context of intense surveillance both blocks were subjecting each other to and it's quite recent, after the advance in movie making and recorded television, that we think the US could have faked it all. I mean, we can ping the mirror on the moon, they came back with rocks and they went to walk on the moon several times, there s no doubt.
ramraj07 4y ago
The scientists and engineers were actually trying to get to the moon back then. This thing in the launchpad is just a giant dildo monument to bureaucracy and “jobs creation” with going to the moon being merely an undesirable side goal they’d rather not have to do anyway.
- mmmpop 4y ago
  I think this is part of it, but I’m certain the real heads at NASA are busting ass to get this done. Probably a lot of dead-weight, also we didn’t have the help of a couple thousand of Germany’s finest working 80 hour weeks to defeat actual threats to humanity. I feel bad for a lot of these folks… it must be an uphill battle.
Joeri 4y ago
Look at how much was spent back then, and how few rules were imposed on how it could be spent. Just look at this graph, it says it all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3ANASA-Budget-Federal.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3...
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I fucking hate this graph so much. Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything. Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s. Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on. So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Good point, so I looked up inflation-adjusted Apollo costs, which came to $257 billion.[1] By contrast, SLS so far has been closer to $20 billion.[2] But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower. [1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo [2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion [3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reveals-unsustainable-cost-for-sls-launches https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reve...
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Apollo was many missions, totally bootstrapping and industry, plus lots and lots of infrastructure. This included all the subsystems, multiple engines and so on and so on. SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.
boomboomsubban 4y ago
That the Apollo program had launch delays too, it probably should have had more to prevent things like the Apollo 1 fire that killed the crew. For example, https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-delay-april-16-1972/ https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-dela... Plus NASA was much more tolerant of failure back then. The first Apollo mission failed and the program continued. If this launch fails, it could set back this program by years or more.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  If this first launch failed, it might actually make the program faster because it would allow NASA with some support form Congress to kill these dumb programs and free up the budget for smarter things.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
panick21_ 4y ago
I give my answer, it all comes down to FOCUS. NASA just on base level, now has to do far more things at the same time, only a small part of its budget is focused on the moon. So they have science sats, space station and lots of other things. Second is budget, NASA of course had a larger % of the federal budget but that is bad analysis as that was before social spending exploded. But even in absolute terms, during peak spending, NASA had higher yearly spending then now. Even more important is that if you are working towards a mission many project, lander, rocket, crew capsule all hit peak cost at the same time, so you will need much more money at that moment (in that year). Current NASA can't do this, they have to make development sequential. That's why NASA switched to this concept called 'capability based planning'. So instead of saying we need to do X,Y and Z to do 'Mission A'. Its we have P, L and we could invest some development in O so we can attempt do 'Mission B'. The thirds is just as important. In pure money terms, even with the reduced amount of flexibility and money because of the above, doing a moon landing is very possible. However, NASA does not have architecture freedom. Every single component of the moon landing architecture has to be separately battled for politically. NASA does not have the mandate of going to the moon and here are 5 billion a year to do it. That is how it worked during Apollo. The politicians didn't care what the architecture was. Now Congress tells NASA, you need to build a rocket like this, a capsule like this and so on. To be more specific, its totally clear to everybody who really thinks threw this that SLS/Orion make very little sense. The US has a grown fleet of commercial rockets that can launch pretty large payloads to LEO. And soon NASA will have access to multiple providers for both human and cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) transportation to LEO. So up to LEO NASA has everything it needs. What it really needs is some craft to go from LEO to LLO (Lower Moon Orbit) and then a Lander to go up and down to surface. Those could be the same craft. NASA has to pay nothing of their yearly budget to have the ability to put stuff and humans into LEO. So really their 4-6 billion $ in budget should be 100% focused on how do get that cargo (including human) from LEO to the moon. Instead SLS/Orion cost 4-5 billion $ per year, and the result is only a tiny amount of cargo can go to the moon, and not even to LLO. How to use those 4-6 billion $ to do that is up for debate. There are multiple answer that would work just fine. Depots and reusable tugs. Mega lander (like Starship). Assembly in moon orbit. All would be doable if you could spend 5 billion $ a year on it. NASA is not the moon lander agency now. NASA is the do these 100 things and do it the way congress wants them agency.

melling 4y ago

Who cares? Seriously. Conspiracies tend to live on, and you can’t fix stupid. It’s noise. Now let’s move onto some signal.

sweettea 4y ago

It absolutely has been cited as evidence by my moon-landing-denying friends. "It's a struggle now, yet they claim they're using the same technology as they used back then when the field was young? Seems unlikely."

simonh 4y ago
Apollo 4 was the first full up unmanned test flight of a Saturn V. It took almost a year of pushed launch dates and scrubs before they got it flying.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

Well, I'm sure logic isn't going to deter conspiracy theorists, but the Saturn V that look us to the moon in 1969 used Kerosene as fuel not liquid hydrogen which is notoriously leak-prone. FWIW the Atlas V that delivered the Mars rovers was also Kerosene (RP-1) fueled. It is possible to make liquid hydrogen work reliably - the Ariane 5 ECA, which delivered the James Web telescope uses it, but it seems the SLS was congressionally mandated to reuse ancient Space Shuttle tech, which also used to suffer on average one launch scrub per mission ...

perihelions 4y ago
Saturn V did use liquid hydrogen for its second and third stages. One of the original plans for SLS was to adapt and modernize the original Saturn hydrogen engine, the J-2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-2X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-2X
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Only the first stage of the Saturn V used kerosene and it dropped off at about 61 km altitude. The two upper stages that actually pushed the spacecraft to the moon used liquid hydrogen.

black6 4y ago

Nothing made me doubt the moon landings more than actually working for NASA the past five years.

squarefoot 4y ago

Most deniers wouldn't stop even after dozens of successful crewed launches, just like most flat earthers keep spreading their nonsense when they could send a balloon with a camera and take shots of the Earth curvature by themselves. Also, some of these people profit from others' stupidity, so a small percentage of them, I'd dare to say the most active, are perfectly aware that we in fact went to the Moon and the Earth isn't flat, but books, gadgets, TV appearances, YouTube ad impressions, conventions, and generally having at disposal a huge flock of gullible people, brings money, popularity and by extension, power (see politics).

CapitalistCartr 4y ago

We are returning to the Moon regardless. Mother: "Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]