11 ms·

The feats accomplished over half a century ago with the very limited resources of that era are truly astonishing. Today, our technological prowess has advanced

The feats accomplished over half a century ago with the very limited resources of that era are truly astonishing. Today, our technological prowess has advanced exponentially, boasting computers that are magnitudes more powerful. Yet, despite these technological leaps, we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone of landing a human on the moon since those historic missions. A little background: The first moon landing was accomplished by the Apollo 11 mission from NASA, which landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. The computer used for this mission was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). It had approximately 64 kilobytes of memory, with 2048 words of erasable magnetic core memory and 36,864 words of read-only core rope memory. The computer operated at a speed of 1.024 MHz. The software for the AGC was written in assembly language, specifically a language developed by MIT engineers called AGC Assembly. There were a total of six manned U.S. landings (between 1969 and 1972) as a part of the Apollo program.

FredPret 3y ago
The US spent a sizable chunk of it’s GDP on the moon missions
- Fordec 3y ago
  An average of 2.5% per year for 10 years. It would be like spending $575B per year now on a percentage of GDP basis. You can do a lot of things with that money. Now we're talking about missions doing it for a once off $100M. So yes, massive progress has been made.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I think people do not give the shoulders that SpaceX stands on as much credit, some do of course, but the general populace doesn't think that way like those that are space nerds. NASA tried things, ULA tried things, Russia tried things, ESA tried things, and then SpaceX comes along and gets make decisions with all of that historical knowledge. This isn't an indictment on SpaceX, but acknowledging that historical money spent wasn't wasted. Space and rocket R&D is expensive, but it's cheap if you can have it funded by the tax payer. Not having the burden of requiring Congressional approval also avoids the moving at the pace of a herd of turtles.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  Not nearly as much as it spent in military operations. Apollo is a wonder of soft power - The US inspired countless children all over the world with those voyages. In terms of international good will, it was extremely cheap.
  - DoughnutHole 3y ago
    > Not nearly as much as it spent in military operations. The entire space program was a military program wrapped in a very successful propaganda program. It showed off US technological and engineering prowess and showed the US as advancing human culture and progress. It also greatly advanced US rocketry and led to rapid advancements in the design of ICBMs and their countermeasures (see Reagan's "Star Wars" programme). The entire space race was motivated by the belief that losing ground to the Soviet Union in spaceflight meant losing real strategic ground in military capabilities - a belief that was probably correct.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      That's true, but it still inspired many people of the concept of peaceful space exploration. And I think it is still amazing, that despite the war, russian tech and US tech and personal are still cooperating in space today, even though that seems to be fading out.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      The point of soft power is that you do with propaganda and diplomacy (and also building schools and hospitals) what less clever people would do through war. It's also much cheaper than war and gets us to cool places such as the Moon and Mars. It really should be a no-brainer. The only downside is that it takes a lot longer than war.
Keyframe 3y ago
Don't discount feat of humanity sending numerous autonomous and semi-autonomous probes and robots across the space around us. This is what technological advancement enabled us to do instead of more expensive and limited human expeditions. On top of that, we also have permanent human presence in space. Could space be more engaged? Of course.. but it didn't stop with Apollos.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  You could look at the attempt to create AGI as an extension of human exploration. Presumably if we do create AGI it will eventually leave Earth (either because we send it, or because it "wants" to go).
  - adventured 3y ago
    That will happen long before we reach AGI. We'll be sending AI bots out into the universe (off planet) - that are considerably far away from being AGI - within two decades. It's going to take a lot longer than two decades to develop AGI (without fail the tech industry over-estimates progress in the relative near-term and underestimates it more in the longer term).
    - maigret 3y ago
      Wondering how long they would hold, especially because of radiations. Or micro impacts? What about material stability? 100, 1000, 10000 years, more or less?
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Exactly, as a particularly impressive example we have the footage of Perseverance's skycrane powered landing on Mars. An extremely precise maneuver, performed entirely autonomously, which would definitely not have been possible with the technology of Apollo's time, and even now is a bit of a challenge considering all the automated landing failures around the Moon in recent years.
NegativeLatency 3y ago
The AGC also had one of the first virtual machines implemented on it
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Fifty years is either a remarkably long time for the world to have remained dormant with regard to exploring the surface of the Moon, or Apollo was a minor miracle of the 20th Century. James Burke has called the Apollo moon landing the final culmination of the Industrial Age. Or something to that effect. I also like the comment (also James Burke?) that Apollo was as if someone had taken a bit of the 21st Century back in time to the 1960's. Remarkable what national will and extraordinarily deep pockets can produce. I was thinking about this very thing the other day as I was putting together a replica of the KIM-1 (8 bit computer from the 1970's) and considering what a game-changer integrated circuits were ... and I understand the push of the Cold War space program was the major contributing factor to their creation.
- csours 3y ago
  I think a "moonshot" requires some external motivation. I also think that Apollo was EXTREMELY risky by modern standards, and that risk was paid for many times in many ways.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    This is exactly it. At the time, the US believed the USSR/communism was an existential threat to our way of life. Beating the USSR to the moon, beating them in proxy wars, etc was all part of larger effort to ensure capitalism won. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that external motivation evaporated.
- opportune 3y ago
  I wouldn’t call landing on the moon a miracle per se. It was just a priority enough to justify spending huge amounts of money on it. And because we deprioritized scientific showmanship afterwards, our ability to repeat the same feat atrophied a bit (but not entirely). We probably could do a lot of space stuff in the next decade or two if we devoted obscene amounts of resources to it: establishing a lunar base, a bigger LEO base, putting humans on mars, setting up permanent satellites around many celestial bodies in our solar system. It’s just that it would consume so many resources for so long before it benefitted people on Earth - very hard to justify doing it just for the sake of doing it
EarthIsHome 3y ago
> The feats accomplished over half a century ago with the very limited resources of that era are truly astonishing. I'm always amazed by this image of how they accomplished the rendezvous with the ascent stage. Note the poor condition of the aft panels: https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/AS16-122-19533.jpg https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/AS16-122-19533.jpg Absolutely no excuse why we haven't done it since then when they did it with that, and our technology is so much better now.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > Absolutely no excuse why we haven't done it since then Well there is the fact that Apollo had (at its peak) something like 400,000 people working on it and involved a spend of $164bn (in 2021 dollars) [0]. I think we could get back to the moon if we had that sort of commitment. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs
  - booleandilemma 3y ago
    Just imagine what we could accomplish if we were able to mobilize a massive number of people in this age. A 21st century equivalent of the pyramids or the great wall of China. What will our descendants look at and say "I can't believe they built this 2000 years ago!"?
    - blastro 3y ago
      apple silicon? ;)
- joezydeco 3y ago
  We had two highly trained wetware intelligence systems on board Apollo to land that thing successfully. If Apollo 11 was unmanned and that 1202 alarm came up? It probably would have aborted or crashed.
  - tabtab 3y ago
amannm 3y ago
> we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone it's hard to succeed at something you aren't even trying for in the first place. the moon landing was funded during the cold war where ICBM adjacent knowledge was required in the face of an existential threat. it wasn't solely for the benefit of shared global human knowledge/progress or whatever. for the US, there's a lot more to lose than gain in terms of "face" by attempting a victory lap against the rest of the world. executing any sort of manned moon or mars mission won't be taken seriously by the US until there's real political/economic pressure to do so (in the form of maybe China laying down a roadmap to land on mars or something).
- rendx 3y ago
  Actually, I'm glad they didn't. There are finite resources available, and it may be a less popular opinion but I think it can be used in better ways than to explore Moon more.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Actually space is (probably) infinite, so there are potentially infinite ressources avaiable, if we choose to invest in the next step, even if that investment only will pay out in the long run.
    - amannm 3y ago
      he probably just meant resources as in tax dollars
      - tabtab 3y ago
        In the 1970's many thought we'd be mining asteroids by now for precious metals, making commercial missions profitable, or at least financially viable.
        adventured 3y ago
        The particularly informed of humanity are very commonly wrong in their assessments, persistent underestimation, of the speed of change and what actually changes. It's because very few people know how to think effectively. Failures of extrapolation are most often the cause; not understanding how to think properly, tripping into 2D thinking (extrapolating via some magic forward line, thinking that's how things actually work in reality) and bumping into ignorant logic failures over and over again (associating progress on one thing into broad assumptions that everything of course will progress just like that too, when the things and their potential for progress aren't so tightly bound). Because X thing progressed rapidly, of course we'll have flying cars in 30 or 50 years. One of the classic failures of ignorant flat thinking of the 20th century. People should ask more questions.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> Yet, despite these technological leaps, we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone of landing a human on the moon since those historic missions. It's been over 60 years, more than 3 generations, since the first moon landing. Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why? When columbus 'discovered' the americas, it set off dozens or hundreds of ships to explore the americas in the next few decades. When the US navy carried out the first transatlantic flight, it set off dozens of cross-atlantic and cross-oceanic flights within the next decade or two. When the US developed nukes, the soviets, brits, french, chinese, etc developed nukes within a decade or two. When the soviets launched a satellite into space, the US did so within a few weeks. There is this pattern with all major discoveries and technologies. Why is the moon landing so unique? All major nations have tech today that far exceeds what the US had in the 1960s. In orders of magnitude terms, it is beyond comprehension. In purely computational terms, the 1960s US is computational closer to the first human 300,000 years ago than they are to us today. And yet the 1960s US was able to do something that we aren't able to do today. Not only that, why hasn't any other nation ( russia, japan, germany, china, etc ) done so. The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- amannm 3y ago
  It might make more sense when you don't simply view it as demonstration of scientific achievement. Demonstrating dominance in the field of rapidly delivering large payloads, at the press of a button, to anywhere on the surface of the earth (even the damn moon!) likely played/still plays an outsized role in game-theoretic political/military calculations aiming to deter existential threats.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  There was money to be made and multi-month voyages were already normalized. If the moon was made out of some easily extractable and essential mineral and the economics worked out, Standard Oil, Wall Street, and the rest would have been setting up launch pads immediately.
goodcanadian 3y ago
I, too, am disappointed that manned space exploration sort of just stopped with Apollo, and I have long wondered what could have been, but . . . A quick google tells me that the Apollo program cost about 2.5% of U.S. GDP annually over about 10 years (I remembered 3%, so that is in the ballpark). You can begin to understand why the U.S. government and the public at large decided that the rewards maybe weren't worth the cost. It is still somewhat unclear what benefit we get from spending massive (but relatively much smaller) sums on manned space travel (and to be clear, I wholeheartedly support it regardless).
- tabtab 3y ago
  Manned exploration is expensive and risky. In general the science-per-dollar is much higher for unmanned probes. I won't claim on-premises analyses can't be helpful, but the ability of bots to survey more areas usually offsets that advantage. The real benefit of manned missions is learning how to live in space for future colonies and long-distance travel. Space is not easy on the body, we'll have to figure out how to adapt if we want to spread.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Not everything is about science, and I wish people would stop pretending it was. People like to explore, it’s why the world is covered in them.
    - tabtab 3y ago
      Some try to dress it as science, but when people find the truth, they feel mislead, and want to yank all the funding in frustration. But like I mentioned, it is "body science" and survival lessons.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  After Apollo the US economy wasn't doing so hot in the 1970s and the military already got their ICBMs and spy satellites out of it.
- 3y ago
dylan604 3y ago
A little background: The moon landings were faked in an attempt to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Sadly, I run into more and more younger people that absolutely believe this because there's so much of this on the internet. They happen to follow influencers that hold these types of beliefs, and that becomes their belief. This obviously leads into other discussions about disinformation, but after recently rewatching Insterstellar where Murph gets in trouble for believing in the moon landings, I can see where we are heading in that direction.
- tabtab 3y ago
  The internet is crack to conspiracy nuts. They can always find new half-truth tidbits to reinforce their whackadoodle notions.
- jklinger410 3y ago
  If institutions want to be respected, they need to be respectable. I am more sympathetic to conspiracy theorists, who are trying to make sense of a world that they know they are being lied to about. In some ways complaining about them is doing the bidding of the deep state. Which does absolutely exist.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Again someone that refuses to accept the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. We brought things back from the moon. We've left things on the moon. I have family members that worked on the Apollo missions. I have other acquaintances that pulled the gold wiring through the capsule. You say I'm doing the bidding of the deep state, while all your doing promoting unfounded nonsense gleefully willfully and moronically because you claim to be doing research but are just unable to accept the results because it doesn't fit whatever preconceived notions you have.
    - jklinger410 3y ago
      I'm not arguing for the moon landing being faked specifically, I just think you should be more empathetic when discussing conspiracy theories. It's not just people peddling nonsense for no reason. The reason is very simple: a distrust in institutions.
vkou 3y ago
The resources weren't 'limited' at the time. A staggering portion of our GDP was poured into the space race. Better computers are nice, but most of the problems of going to the Moon don't have much to do with computers. The physics hasn't changed in 60 years.
- bumby 3y ago
  In relative scales, I wouldn't call them 'staggering'. By percentage, they are roughly about what we spend (individually) on Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Dept. of Education, or Dept. of Agriculture today as a percentage of GDP.
jackmott42 3y ago
The rocket engines we had in 1950 are as good as we have today. You can add a little carbon fiber to the ship to make it lighter but 95% of the mass is fuel anyway, so you don't win much. Rockets going to space is a basic physics problem with no post 1950 innovations that give you huge wins. Hence why re-usability to bring costs down is what everyone is focusing on, it is about all you can do. Maybe raptor will prove to be a wee bit better than the best engines of the 1950s but only a bit.
- elevaet 3y ago
  I was surprised to learn (I think this is correct!) that putting boots on the moon was purely a Newtonian physics problem.
anjel 3y ago
The Project Surveyor landings,[1] which preceded manned missions by several years are the more analogous (pun intended) comparison and were done with ever more nascent technology than Apollo. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_program
asdff 3y ago
Am I wrong in thinking the manned missions were not really necessary to be manned? As far as I understand, they put humans at massive risk sending them out like they did with zero emergency recovery plans at all, and probably greatly inflated the cost of the mission owing to having to engineer life support, sufficient radiation shielding, and controls fit for humans. Sure, they were really ICBM programs in sheeps clothing, but the landing modules weren't. The modern rover is so much safer. There's no purpose for humans or really any life to spend any time in outer space, except for vanity. Apollo astronauts would report seeing flashes with their eyes closed. This was due to being bombarded with cosmic radiation that the magnetosphere protects you from on earth. Space is an environment unfit for life that is adapted to specific planetary conditions.
pomian 3y ago
Restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648529 Also I again highly recommend the book Sunburst and Luminary, by Don Eyles. http://sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html http://sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html A very interesting read about the Apollo guidance computer, it's development and testing, it's easy to understand and exciting, even though you know the outcome. There are also very nice referrals to things happening in the world at the time: Viet Nam war, protests, etc.

FredPret 3y ago

The US spent a sizable chunk of it’s GDP on the moon missions

Fordec 3y ago
An average of 2.5% per year for 10 years. It would be like spending $575B per year now on a percentage of GDP basis. You can do a lot of things with that money. Now we're talking about missions doing it for a once off $100M. So yes, massive progress has been made.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I think people do not give the shoulders that SpaceX stands on as much credit, some do of course, but the general populace doesn't think that way like those that are space nerds. NASA tried things, ULA tried things, Russia tried things, ESA tried things, and then SpaceX comes along and gets make decisions with all of that historical knowledge. This isn't an indictment on SpaceX, but acknowledging that historical money spent wasn't wasted. Space and rocket R&D is expensive, but it's cheap if you can have it funded by the tax payer. Not having the burden of requiring Congressional approval also avoids the moving at the pace of a herd of turtles.
rbanffy 3y ago
Not nearly as much as it spent in military operations. Apollo is a wonder of soft power - The US inspired countless children all over the world with those voyages. In terms of international good will, it was extremely cheap.
- DoughnutHole 3y ago
  > Not nearly as much as it spent in military operations. The entire space program was a military program wrapped in a very successful propaganda program. It showed off US technological and engineering prowess and showed the US as advancing human culture and progress. It also greatly advanced US rocketry and led to rapid advancements in the design of ICBMs and their countermeasures (see Reagan's "Star Wars" programme). The entire space race was motivated by the belief that losing ground to the Soviet Union in spaceflight meant losing real strategic ground in military capabilities - a belief that was probably correct.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    That's true, but it still inspired many people of the concept of peaceful space exploration. And I think it is still amazing, that despite the war, russian tech and US tech and personal are still cooperating in space today, even though that seems to be fading out.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    The point of soft power is that you do with propaganda and diplomacy (and also building schools and hospitals) what less clever people would do through war. It's also much cheaper than war and gets us to cool places such as the Moon and Mars. It really should be a no-brainer. The only downside is that it takes a lot longer than war.

Keyframe 3y ago

Don't discount feat of humanity sending numerous autonomous and semi-autonomous probes and robots across the space around us. This is what technological advancement enabled us to do instead of more expensive and limited human expeditions. On top of that, we also have permanent human presence in space. Could space be more engaged? Of course.. but it didn't stop with Apollos.

EvanAnderson 3y ago
You could look at the attempt to create AGI as an extension of human exploration. Presumably if we do create AGI it will eventually leave Earth (either because we send it, or because it "wants" to go).
- adventured 3y ago
  That will happen long before we reach AGI. We'll be sending AI bots out into the universe (off planet) - that are considerably far away from being AGI - within two decades. It's going to take a lot longer than two decades to develop AGI (without fail the tech industry over-estimates progress in the relative near-term and underestimates it more in the longer term).
  - maigret 3y ago
    Wondering how long they would hold, especially because of radiations. Or micro impacts? What about material stability? 100, 1000, 10000 years, more or less?
dotnet00 3y ago
Exactly, as a particularly impressive example we have the footage of Perseverance's skycrane powered landing on Mars. An extremely precise maneuver, performed entirely autonomously, which would definitely not have been possible with the technology of Apollo's time, and even now is a bit of a challenge considering all the automated landing failures around the Moon in recent years.

NegativeLatency 3y ago

The AGC also had one of the first virtual machines implemented on it

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Fifty years is either a remarkably long time for the world to have remained dormant with regard to exploring the surface of the Moon, or Apollo was a minor miracle of the 20th Century. James Burke has called the Apollo moon landing the final culmination of the Industrial Age. Or something to that effect. I also like the comment (also James Burke?) that Apollo was as if someone had taken a bit of the 21st Century back in time to the 1960's. Remarkable what national will and extraordinarily deep pockets can produce. I was thinking about this very thing the other day as I was putting together a replica of the KIM-1 (8 bit computer from the 1970's) and considering what a game-changer integrated circuits were ... and I understand the push of the Cold War space program was the major contributing factor to their creation.

csours 3y ago
I think a "moonshot" requires some external motivation. I also think that Apollo was EXTREMELY risky by modern standards, and that risk was paid for many times in many ways.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  This is exactly it. At the time, the US believed the USSR/communism was an existential threat to our way of life. Beating the USSR to the moon, beating them in proxy wars, etc was all part of larger effort to ensure capitalism won. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that external motivation evaporated.
opportune 3y ago
I wouldn’t call landing on the moon a miracle per se. It was just a priority enough to justify spending huge amounts of money on it. And because we deprioritized scientific showmanship afterwards, our ability to repeat the same feat atrophied a bit (but not entirely). We probably could do a lot of space stuff in the next decade or two if we devoted obscene amounts of resources to it: establishing a lunar base, a bigger LEO base, putting humans on mars, setting up permanent satellites around many celestial bodies in our solar system. It’s just that it would consume so many resources for so long before it benefitted people on Earth - very hard to justify doing it just for the sake of doing it

EarthIsHome 3y ago

> The feats accomplished over half a century ago with the very limited resources of that era are truly astonishing. I'm always amazed by this image of how they accomplished the rendezvous with the ascent stage. Note the poor condition of the aft panels: https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/AS16-122-19533.jpg https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/AS16-122-19533.jpg Absolutely no excuse why we haven't done it since then when they did it with that, and our technology is so much better now.

KineticLensman 3y ago
> Absolutely no excuse why we haven't done it since then Well there is the fact that Apollo had (at its peak) something like 400,000 people working on it and involved a spend of $164bn (in 2021 dollars) [0]. I think we could get back to the moon if we had that sort of commitment. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs
- booleandilemma 3y ago
  Just imagine what we could accomplish if we were able to mobilize a massive number of people in this age. A 21st century equivalent of the pyramids or the great wall of China. What will our descendants look at and say "I can't believe they built this 2000 years ago!"?
  - blastro 3y ago
    apple silicon? ;)
joezydeco 3y ago
We had two highly trained wetware intelligence systems on board Apollo to land that thing successfully. If Apollo 11 was unmanned and that 1202 alarm came up? It probably would have aborted or crashed.
- tabtab 3y ago

amannm 3y ago

> we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone it's hard to succeed at something you aren't even trying for in the first place. the moon landing was funded during the cold war where ICBM adjacent knowledge was required in the face of an existential threat. it wasn't solely for the benefit of shared global human knowledge/progress or whatever. for the US, there's a lot more to lose than gain in terms of "face" by attempting a victory lap against the rest of the world. executing any sort of manned moon or mars mission won't be taken seriously by the US until there's real political/economic pressure to do so (in the form of maybe China laying down a roadmap to land on mars or something).

rendx 3y ago
Actually, I'm glad they didn't. There are finite resources available, and it may be a less popular opinion but I think it can be used in better ways than to explore Moon more.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Actually space is (probably) infinite, so there are potentially infinite ressources avaiable, if we choose to invest in the next step, even if that investment only will pay out in the long run.
  - amannm 3y ago
    he probably just meant resources as in tax dollars
    - tabtab 3y ago
      In the 1970's many thought we'd be mining asteroids by now for precious metals, making commercial missions profitable, or at least financially viable.
      - adventured 3y ago
        The particularly informed of humanity are very commonly wrong in their assessments, persistent underestimation, of the speed of change and what actually changes. It's because very few people know how to think effectively. Failures of extrapolation are most often the cause; not understanding how to think properly, tripping into 2D thinking (extrapolating via some magic forward line, thinking that's how things actually work in reality) and bumping into ignorant logic failures over and over again (associating progress on one thing into broad assumptions that everything of course will progress just like that too, when the things and their potential for progress aren't so tightly bound). Because X thing progressed rapidly, of course we'll have flying cars in 30 or 50 years. One of the classic failures of ignorant flat thinking of the 20th century. People should ask more questions.

goodbyesf 3y ago

> Yet, despite these technological leaps, we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone of landing a human on the moon since those historic missions. It's been over 60 years, more than 3 generations, since the first moon landing. Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why? When columbus 'discovered' the americas, it set off dozens or hundreds of ships to explore the americas in the next few decades. When the US navy carried out the first transatlantic flight, it set off dozens of cross-atlantic and cross-oceanic flights within the next decade or two. When the US developed nukes, the soviets, brits, french, chinese, etc developed nukes within a decade or two. When the soviets launched a satellite into space, the US did so within a few weeks. There is this pattern with all major discoveries and technologies. Why is the moon landing so unique? All major nations have tech today that far exceeds what the US had in the 1960s. In orders of magnitude terms, it is beyond comprehension. In purely computational terms, the 1960s US is computational closer to the first human 300,000 years ago than they are to us today. And yet the 1960s US was able to do something that we aren't able to do today. Not only that, why hasn't any other nation ( russia, japan, germany, china, etc ) done so. The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
amannm 3y ago
It might make more sense when you don't simply view it as demonstration of scientific achievement. Demonstrating dominance in the field of rapidly delivering large payloads, at the press of a button, to anywhere on the surface of the earth (even the damn moon!) likely played/still plays an outsized role in game-theoretic political/military calculations aiming to deter existential threats.
jonhohle 3y ago
There was money to be made and multi-month voyages were already normalized. If the moon was made out of some easily extractable and essential mineral and the economics worked out, Standard Oil, Wall Street, and the rest would have been setting up launch pads immediately.

goodcanadian 3y ago

I, too, am disappointed that manned space exploration sort of just stopped with Apollo, and I have long wondered what could have been, but . . . A quick google tells me that the Apollo program cost about 2.5% of U.S. GDP annually over about 10 years (I remembered 3%, so that is in the ballpark). You can begin to understand why the U.S. government and the public at large decided that the rewards maybe weren't worth the cost. It is still somewhat unclear what benefit we get from spending massive (but relatively much smaller) sums on manned space travel (and to be clear, I wholeheartedly support it regardless).

tabtab 3y ago
Manned exploration is expensive and risky. In general the science-per-dollar is much higher for unmanned probes. I won't claim on-premises analyses can't be helpful, but the ability of bots to survey more areas usually offsets that advantage. The real benefit of manned missions is learning how to live in space for future colonies and long-distance travel. Space is not easy on the body, we'll have to figure out how to adapt if we want to spread.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Not everything is about science, and I wish people would stop pretending it was. People like to explore, it’s why the world is covered in them.
  - tabtab 3y ago
    Some try to dress it as science, but when people find the truth, they feel mislead, and want to yank all the funding in frustration. But like I mentioned, it is "body science" and survival lessons.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
After Apollo the US economy wasn't doing so hot in the 1970s and the military already got their ICBMs and spy satellites out of it.
3y ago

dylan604 3y ago

A little background: The moon landings were faked in an attempt to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Sadly, I run into more and more younger people that absolutely believe this because there's so much of this on the internet. They happen to follow influencers that hold these types of beliefs, and that becomes their belief. This obviously leads into other discussions about disinformation, but after recently rewatching Insterstellar where Murph gets in trouble for believing in the moon landings, I can see where we are heading in that direction.

tabtab 3y ago
The internet is crack to conspiracy nuts. They can always find new half-truth tidbits to reinforce their whackadoodle notions.
jklinger410 3y ago
If institutions want to be respected, they need to be respectable. I am more sympathetic to conspiracy theorists, who are trying to make sense of a world that they know they are being lied to about. In some ways complaining about them is doing the bidding of the deep state. Which does absolutely exist.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Again someone that refuses to accept the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. We brought things back from the moon. We've left things on the moon. I have family members that worked on the Apollo missions. I have other acquaintances that pulled the gold wiring through the capsule. You say I'm doing the bidding of the deep state, while all your doing promoting unfounded nonsense gleefully willfully and moronically because you claim to be doing research but are just unable to accept the results because it doesn't fit whatever preconceived notions you have.
  - jklinger410 3y ago
    I'm not arguing for the moon landing being faked specifically, I just think you should be more empathetic when discussing conspiracy theories. It's not just people peddling nonsense for no reason. The reason is very simple: a distrust in institutions.

vkou 3y ago

The resources weren't 'limited' at the time. A staggering portion of our GDP was poured into the space race. Better computers are nice, but most of the problems of going to the Moon don't have much to do with computers. The physics hasn't changed in 60 years.

bumby 3y ago
In relative scales, I wouldn't call them 'staggering'. By percentage, they are roughly about what we spend (individually) on Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Dept. of Education, or Dept. of Agriculture today as a percentage of GDP.

jackmott42 3y ago

The rocket engines we had in 1950 are as good as we have today. You can add a little carbon fiber to the ship to make it lighter but 95% of the mass is fuel anyway, so you don't win much. Rockets going to space is a basic physics problem with no post 1950 innovations that give you huge wins. Hence why re-usability to bring costs down is what everyone is focusing on, it is about all you can do. Maybe raptor will prove to be a wee bit better than the best engines of the 1950s but only a bit.

elevaet 3y ago
I was surprised to learn (I think this is correct!) that putting boots on the moon was purely a Newtonian physics problem.

anjel 3y ago

The Project Surveyor landings,[1] which preceded manned missions by several years are the more analogous (pun intended) comparison and were done with ever more nascent technology than Apollo. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_program

asdff 3y ago

Am I wrong in thinking the manned missions were not really necessary to be manned? As far as I understand, they put humans at massive risk sending them out like they did with zero emergency recovery plans at all, and probably greatly inflated the cost of the mission owing to having to engineer life support, sufficient radiation shielding, and controls fit for humans. Sure, they were really ICBM programs in sheeps clothing, but the landing modules weren't. The modern rover is so much safer. There's no purpose for humans or really any life to spend any time in outer space, except for vanity. Apollo astronauts would report seeing flashes with their eyes closed. This was due to being bombarded with cosmic radiation that the magnetosphere protects you from on earth. Space is an environment unfit for life that is adapted to specific planetary conditions.

pomian 3y ago

Restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648529 Also I again highly recommend the book Sunburst and Luminary, by Don Eyles. http://sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html http://sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html A very interesting read about the Apollo guidance computer, it's development and testing, it's easy to understand and exciting, even though you know the outcome. There are also very nice referrals to things happening in the world at the time: Viet Nam war, protests, etc.