8 ms·

The Apollo moon landings were such an insane achievement. They did it in a time where digital processing was in it's infancy and barely existed, minimization te

The Apollo moon landings were such an insane achievement. They did it in a time where digital processing was in it's infancy and barely existed, minimization technology was undeveloped, many modern materials which are much stronger and lighter weren't invented yet. And they managed to live broadcast from the moon! Storage was in it's infancy, so even storing a video from the moon was impossible (they would need many reels of film that just wouldn't fit. Digital cameras weren't invented, you only had analogue cameras. Most of them required film - and can't be developed on the spot, it requires special equipment. So to get video from the moon, the used cathode ray tube cameras - and even the cathode ray tubes of TV news were huge at the time, you can look at pictures, these things used to take a whole truck to carry. But they managed to get a very small cathode ray tube camera there, and to film long videos of hours of missions on the moon. And get managed to broadcast it all with analogue RF all the way from the moon to earth. With no digital signal processing, because that wasn't fast enough back then for any real time use. And with surprisingly low noise for an analogue transmission. They made a whole network of receivers on earth to be able to do it. Today all of that would be cheap, but back then it must've been quite the achievement. They also had pretty minimal computational power available compared to newer attempts. But maybe putting a human in control is enough. Google's moon challenge is pretty cool. They actually wanted to give a bonus for taking pictures of the original moon landing site. That could've been really nice. But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago
This was a commercial vector, not some experimental top US priority stuff. It's unfortunate that aboard the commercial craft there was stuff from national space programs, but this was not comparable to NASA's mission. It's just like SpaceX exploding a ton of rockets to further their research instead of obsessing over getting everything perfect on first try. Unfortunately they should have done more mock missions, but there wouldn't have been enough funding I fear
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago
  Even if you knew back in 1970s the exact specification of iPhone camera, you still couldn't manufacture it because improvement in manufacturing is a gradual self dependent process where the new equipment is built by the old equipment, and you can't make sudden jumps in accuracy or minimization because these things depend on weaker versions of themselves.
  - LadyCailin 3y ago
    Related: the term “The Adjacent Possible”. I first heard it here: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-false-dawn-of-the-electric-car https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-false-d...
  - fn-mote 3y ago
    As a counterpoint: NASA has an _extremely_ careful process and their success rate is high. It's expensive, though, and you have to develop an engineering process that supports it. When you're sending a probe to Mars, the trial runs are very expensive. They spend a lot of time making sure that the mission will be successful. I'm skeptical that anywhere near the same level of care is going into the private missions, but I the reason is cost, not that they can't bootstrap themselves up with Earth-environment experimentation. Yes, I'm aware at least one of the Mars probe missions totally failed. I don't think that detracts from the overall point. They weren't screwing up a bunch of missions before they got one right.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      It appears that the money spent to ensure a one-off success is far more than the sum of all the costs of the failures of SpaceX.
      - flangola7 3y ago
mulmen 3y ago
> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it. Seems like a reasonable precaution for a industry that brought us “move fast and break things” and normalized endless bugs as an unavoidable natural law.
bouncycastle 3y ago
back on those days, the best brains of their generation were not occupied with thinking about how to make people click ads...
- George83728 3y ago
  [dead]
- izacus 3y ago
  No, they were thinking about how to effectively kill as much people as possible at a distance. Remember that apollo program (just like soviet one) was an offshoot of military wanting to erase a nation on the other side of the world with efficiency.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    Not really. By the time Apollo came around, erasing the nation on the other side of the world was pretty much a solved problem. 400,000 people were employed on Apollo and they weren't military (well, a few were) and were not thinking about nuclear weapons.
    - izacus 3y ago
      Even Space Shuttle later was driven (and funded) heavily by military applications, a lot of Apollo funding came from wish of improving missile guidance systems as well. You're trying to make a distinction where there is none - it's the same bag of money. Which also why the money quickly dried up when rocket guidance, indeed, became a solved problem. Before Apollo was finished.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > they were thinking about how to effectively kill as much people as possible at a distance. And rockets that can navigate precisely are a nice side-effect of that.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Interestingly I bet the kill thinkers killed fewer than the ad thinkers. Ads make people buy more stuff. More stuff makes people fat and unhealthy and sad and increase the mortality rate.
nirmel 3y ago
Am I the only one who thinks the US didn't actually achieve this achievement, which indeed would have been "insane" if they had? See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxW__ZtZApo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxW__ZtZApo Of course they faked it. It's too damn hard, and they weren't about to risk the lives of astronauts.
- nikanj 3y ago
  The uploader has not made that video available in my country. I wonder if they’re worried about stricter libel laws
- simonh 3y ago
  You’re not the only one, but there don’t seem to be many of you. There’s just way too much evidence it was a real space program and all the counter arguments are weak, flawed or straight up based on absurd misunderstandings and misinterpretation of the evidence. Even aside from the evidence itself it fails the massive conspiracy with no leaks test. Conspiracies leak exponentially with the number of people in the know. SOE worked this all out running operations in occupied Europe. This is why top secret intelligence operations employ incredibly rigorous procedures. Let’s say you have a spy in a foreign country, you make sure only a tiny number of people know the details, preferably low single digits, you layer and compartmentalise everything, you run decoy operations. Even then it’s incredibly hard, the vast majority of operations eventually leak. Only very few of the best run operations with very few people in the know ever last. With the moon landings many hundreds, more like thousands of people would have to know. All of the astronauts and their backups, the model and set makers, the film crews, the mission flight staff, the film and video technical production staff. There were six manned landings, they’d have had to do the whole faking thing over and over again for years. It’s several orders of magnitude bigger than most spy operations, made up of people who aren’t even spies, they’d be mostly civilians with very specific technical skills so you can’t be picky about who you select for it. There is no way this wouldn’t have leaked. Somebody on the inside would have said something to a friend or lover, or got pissed off over something, or changed their political opinions, or got sloppy or just decided to get famous and talk. Especially by now with the Cold War well and truly over. Why wouldn’t they? But no, nothing, not even a hint after fifty years. Ask anybody who knows anything at all about Intelligence operations how plausible that is.
pulvinar 3y ago
Folks, NASA's Surveyor program (1966-68) is a better comparison here, not Apollo. It made the first moon landing by the US (after the Russian's Luna 9, 4 months before), and the first landing of the series was successful, though some of the others failed. It was a fully automatic landing, unlike Neil Armstrong's. It built on lessons learned from the many failures of the Ranger program before it. And the Russians lost 12 landers before their first success.
- nanumbat 3y ago
  My late father-in-law was a manager at Hughes working on Surveyor 1. My wife shared his (unpublished) notes and audio recordings of the the project with me. It was an absolutely remarkable achievement. I can confirm that the Hughes team was devastated that Luna 9 got there first, however they actually learned quite a bit from the Luna 9 video feed. It should also be noted that Luna 9 was a relatively hard landing, not suitable for a crewed spacecraft. Surveyor 1 was the first soft landing, and a prototype for the missions that would follow.
- williamDafoe 3y ago
  Apollo 11 was set to land automatically using the computer when Armstrong took controls at the last minute supposedly to avoid a Boulder Field. It's not really clear that his takeover of the automatic controls was necessary - what is clear is that mankind landing for the first time on another celestial body using automatic computers is probably not cool. ... And NASA was driven and sold to the public as a human interest project ...
  - djmips 3y ago
    Nevertheless he didn't takeover completely - it was still a computer assisted landing.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Its important to note that the Moons gravity (and other bodies) isnt a static thing. There are places were its more apparent and places where its less. In fact we dont even know of the Apollo 11 LM is still in orbit of the moon or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc Scott Manley's video also has some links in its description for some of the tools NASA uses for more precise gravitational estimations and whatnot. Its pretty cool.
scrapcode 3y ago
> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight [flight?] zone over it. Moon landing deniers would eat that one up.
- api 3y ago
  I’m surprised how many people still believe this in spite of photos having been taken of the sites from Lunar orbit by other space programs. It seems to be an article of faith for some though. We could have a space tourism industry with a package to visit the Apollo landing site museum on the Moon and a ton of people still would not believe.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    There are retroreflectors on the moon you can use to prove we were there.
    - MarcoZavala 3y ago
      [dead]
    - funnymony 3y ago
      For such proof to be effective, one has to trust lot of formulas from physics books. (Source of flat-earthery is extreme distrust in everything that is not a first-hand experience. You can’t prove much if your limited exclusively to first hand experience)
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        The thing about the whole flat-earth rabbit hole that's always logically confused me is the epistemology problem. If you deny X, and then you carefully deny anything that could prove X... what do you replace it with? F.ex., I get how someone could disbelieve the current physics of motion. But then how do things move? It can't all just be dice rolls and unexplained magic. If you toss out the way we understand things work... there still has to be a way things work!
MarcoZavala 3y ago
[dead]
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
That sounds like a race to Instagram-ify the moon. Nothing sad about preventing that.
throwaway6734 3y ago
IIRC the landing would have been a failure too without Neil Armstrong's skill as a pilot under pressure
actionfromafar 3y ago
The video feed was HD video too! Alas, only one room in Australia got to see the HD video feed.
wolverine876 3y ago
I think this analysis is misguided, in many ways defining the necessary technology as what we do today, and comparing Apollo program technology with that standard. It's lost in the modern perspective, seeing the world through our egocentric/ethnocentric lens. There are other technologies and other ways to do things. Almost every achievement in human history has been accomplished without these technologies.
wkat4242 3y ago
> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it. You don't have to fly straight over it of course. By the way what authority does NASA have over the moon? I thought the outer space treaty declares that no country can own things in space. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty I'm all for preserving it but I do wonder how they can declare this.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

This was a commercial vector, not some experimental top US priority stuff. It's unfortunate that aboard the commercial craft there was stuff from national space programs, but this was not comparable to NASA's mission. It's just like SpaceX exploding a ton of rockets to further their research instead of obsessing over getting everything perfect on first try. Unfortunately they should have done more mock missions, but there wouldn't have been enough funding I fear

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
machina_ex_deus 3y ago
Even if you knew back in 1970s the exact specification of iPhone camera, you still couldn't manufacture it because improvement in manufacturing is a gradual self dependent process where the new equipment is built by the old equipment, and you can't make sudden jumps in accuracy or minimization because these things depend on weaker versions of themselves.
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  Related: the term “The Adjacent Possible”. I first heard it here: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-false-dawn-of-the-electric-car https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-false-d...
- fn-mote 3y ago
  As a counterpoint: NASA has an _extremely_ careful process and their success rate is high. It's expensive, though, and you have to develop an engineering process that supports it. When you're sending a probe to Mars, the trial runs are very expensive. They spend a lot of time making sure that the mission will be successful. I'm skeptical that anywhere near the same level of care is going into the private missions, but I the reason is cost, not that they can't bootstrap themselves up with Earth-environment experimentation. Yes, I'm aware at least one of the Mars probe missions totally failed. I don't think that detracts from the overall point. They weren't screwing up a bunch of missions before they got one right.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    It appears that the money spent to ensure a one-off success is far more than the sum of all the costs of the failures of SpaceX.
    - flangola7 3y ago

mulmen 3y ago

> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it. Seems like a reasonable precaution for a industry that brought us “move fast and break things” and normalized endless bugs as an unavoidable natural law.

bouncycastle 3y ago

back on those days, the best brains of their generation were not occupied with thinking about how to make people click ads...

George83728 3y ago
[dead]
izacus 3y ago
No, they were thinking about how to effectively kill as much people as possible at a distance. Remember that apollo program (just like soviet one) was an offshoot of military wanting to erase a nation on the other side of the world with efficiency.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Not really. By the time Apollo came around, erasing the nation on the other side of the world was pretty much a solved problem. 400,000 people were employed on Apollo and they weren't military (well, a few were) and were not thinking about nuclear weapons.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Even Space Shuttle later was driven (and funded) heavily by military applications, a lot of Apollo funding came from wish of improving missile guidance systems as well. You're trying to make a distinction where there is none - it's the same bag of money. Which also why the money quickly dried up when rocket guidance, indeed, became a solved problem. Before Apollo was finished.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > they were thinking about how to effectively kill as much people as possible at a distance. And rockets that can navigate precisely are a nice side-effect of that.
- prepend 3y ago
  Interestingly I bet the kill thinkers killed fewer than the ad thinkers. Ads make people buy more stuff. More stuff makes people fat and unhealthy and sad and increase the mortality rate.

nirmel 3y ago

Am I the only one who thinks the US didn't actually achieve this achievement, which indeed would have been "insane" if they had? See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxW__ZtZApo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxW__ZtZApo Of course they faked it. It's too damn hard, and they weren't about to risk the lives of astronauts.

nikanj 3y ago
The uploader has not made that video available in my country. I wonder if they’re worried about stricter libel laws
simonh 3y ago
You’re not the only one, but there don’t seem to be many of you. There’s just way too much evidence it was a real space program and all the counter arguments are weak, flawed or straight up based on absurd misunderstandings and misinterpretation of the evidence. Even aside from the evidence itself it fails the massive conspiracy with no leaks test. Conspiracies leak exponentially with the number of people in the know. SOE worked this all out running operations in occupied Europe. This is why top secret intelligence operations employ incredibly rigorous procedures. Let’s say you have a spy in a foreign country, you make sure only a tiny number of people know the details, preferably low single digits, you layer and compartmentalise everything, you run decoy operations. Even then it’s incredibly hard, the vast majority of operations eventually leak. Only very few of the best run operations with very few people in the know ever last. With the moon landings many hundreds, more like thousands of people would have to know. All of the astronauts and their backups, the model and set makers, the film crews, the mission flight staff, the film and video technical production staff. There were six manned landings, they’d have had to do the whole faking thing over and over again for years. It’s several orders of magnitude bigger than most spy operations, made up of people who aren’t even spies, they’d be mostly civilians with very specific technical skills so you can’t be picky about who you select for it. There is no way this wouldn’t have leaked. Somebody on the inside would have said something to a friend or lover, or got pissed off over something, or changed their political opinions, or got sloppy or just decided to get famous and talk. Especially by now with the Cold War well and truly over. Why wouldn’t they? But no, nothing, not even a hint after fifty years. Ask anybody who knows anything at all about Intelligence operations how plausible that is.

pulvinar 3y ago

Folks, NASA's Surveyor program (1966-68) is a better comparison here, not Apollo. It made the first moon landing by the US (after the Russian's Luna 9, 4 months before), and the first landing of the series was successful, though some of the others failed. It was a fully automatic landing, unlike Neil Armstrong's. It built on lessons learned from the many failures of the Ranger program before it. And the Russians lost 12 landers before their first success.

nanumbat 3y ago
My late father-in-law was a manager at Hughes working on Surveyor 1. My wife shared his (unpublished) notes and audio recordings of the the project with me. It was an absolutely remarkable achievement. I can confirm that the Hughes team was devastated that Luna 9 got there first, however they actually learned quite a bit from the Luna 9 video feed. It should also be noted that Luna 9 was a relatively hard landing, not suitable for a crewed spacecraft. Surveyor 1 was the first soft landing, and a prototype for the missions that would follow.
williamDafoe 3y ago
Apollo 11 was set to land automatically using the computer when Armstrong took controls at the last minute supposedly to avoid a Boulder Field. It's not really clear that his takeover of the automatic controls was necessary - what is clear is that mankind landing for the first time on another celestial body using automatic computers is probably not cool. ... And NASA was driven and sold to the public as a human interest project ...
- djmips 3y ago
  Nevertheless he didn't takeover completely - it was still a computer assisted landing.
croutonwagon 3y ago
Its important to note that the Moons gravity (and other bodies) isnt a static thing. There are places were its more apparent and places where its less. In fact we dont even know of the Apollo 11 LM is still in orbit of the moon or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc Scott Manley's video also has some links in its description for some of the tools NASA uses for more precise gravitational estimations and whatnot. Its pretty cool.

scrapcode 3y ago

> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight [flight?] zone over it. Moon landing deniers would eat that one up.

api 3y ago
I’m surprised how many people still believe this in spite of photos having been taken of the sites from Lunar orbit by other space programs. It seems to be an article of faith for some though. We could have a space tourism industry with a package to visit the Apollo landing site museum on the Moon and a ton of people still would not believe.
- hinkley 3y ago
  There are retroreflectors on the moon you can use to prove we were there.
  - MarcoZavala 3y ago
    [dead]
  - funnymony 3y ago
    For such proof to be effective, one has to trust lot of formulas from physics books. (Source of flat-earthery is extreme distrust in everything that is not a first-hand experience. You can’t prove much if your limited exclusively to first hand experience)
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      The thing about the whole flat-earth rabbit hole that's always logically confused me is the epistemology problem. If you deny X, and then you carefully deny anything that could prove X... what do you replace it with? F.ex., I get how someone could disbelieve the current physics of motion. But then how do things move? It can't all just be dice rolls and unexplained magic. If you toss out the way we understand things work... there still has to be a way things work!

MarcoZavala 3y ago

[dead]

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

That sounds like a race to Instagram-ify the moon. Nothing sad about preventing that.

throwaway6734 3y ago

IIRC the landing would have been a failure too without Neil Armstrong's skill as a pilot under pressure

actionfromafar 3y ago

The video feed was HD video too! Alas, only one room in Australia got to see the HD video feed.

wolverine876 3y ago

I think this analysis is misguided, in many ways defining the necessary technology as what we do today, and comparing Apollo program technology with that standard. It's lost in the modern perspective, seeing the world through our egocentric/ethnocentric lens. There are other technologies and other ways to do things. Almost every achievement in human history has been accomplished without these technologies.

wkat4242 3y ago

> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it. You don't have to fly straight over it of course. By the way what authority does NASA have over the moon? I thought the outer space treaty declares that no country can own things in space. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty I'm all for preserving it but I do wonder how they can declare this.