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A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

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Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#121

Post by DangitBobby »

blueprint wrote: post #57
melling wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we go again... Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back. I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today. “ Someone dying is dev…

I wouldnt worry about those who dont understand why we must immediately become spacefaring. They're obviously on the "wrong side" of history as environmental pressure will make unarguable.

I'm more in the "humans are much less competent than you seem to think" camp. No amount of needing to get off the planet is going to make us able to live on Mars (or a similarly unfriendly planet). It's entirely possible that you will find yourself on the wrong side of history, where any publicly funded endeavor that didn't go directly or indirectly towards saving our current planet will be retroactively seen as futile and a gigantic waste of resources and brain power.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#122

Post by gravypod »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #66
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good chunk of Apollo knowledge isn't very useful for various reasons. 1) The tribal knowledge to even implement Apollo era technology is pretty much gone 2) Apollo flight hardware doesn't exist, probably couldn't even be manufactured without extremely expensive tooling and build up to recreate outdated hardware. 3) Lots of Apollo era designs don't exist on paper. The F1 engine doesn't really even have a standard de…

Would you mind elaborating on that first point?

I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who worked a lot with magnetometers. A magnetometer is literally just a coil of wire around a solid core. How complex could that be to document? Well he mentioned that there was one alloy that they used for pretty much all of the high precision fluxgate magnetometers were constructed from one alloy. The person/team/company that had made this alloy had went belly up and while they published the contents for the alloy they did not publish the exact steps for how they made this alloy. Because of this some research teams had stockpiled some of this material and it had apparently gave them a bit of an edge. We were "lucky" that my coworker knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in Canada who also had some of this who could build us a magnetometer for our use case as he had some.

This is the best article I could find about this: https://www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst.net/8/227/2019/g...

This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits. For metallurgy it's like trying to write down your family's double chocolate chip cookie recipe except your chocolate chips are atoms, your oven's temperature varies +-500C, and all of your ingredients can spoil when mixed in the wrong order, cooled at the wrong rate, heated at the wrong rate, aren't mixed with trace elements of other ingredients that came in your ingredients, etc.

I have no experience with this but I've heard this also applies to chemistry glass blowers: https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/news/20150127/nearly-lost-ar...

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#123

Post by njarboe »

melling wrote: post #54
njarboe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone dying is devastating if you have a connection to that person. People die every second and if everyone was devastated by every death then the world would grind to a halt. The first people going into deep space dying would be devastating to billions because billions of people will feel a personal connection to the person dying. This is a grave thing causing so much pain, but hopefully space travel can become a…

Yes, that was covered six years ago too. The Alaskan fishery example is a modern comparison. We retired the Space Shuttle because it was too dangerous. One accident every hundred flights. We live in a different world than we did hundreds of years ago. One accident will require a review board and many expensive changes. Flights will be grounded. The point that I really want you to get is this: “In 100 years, more huma…

Could be true, but if we wait too long I think people would just stop trying to do it. Rocket technology basically was stuck with 1960's technology and ideas until Elon Musk decided he wanted to build a human colony on Mars. Now we have rockets that are re-usable and soon a likely $100/kg to orbit lift capability.

After crew dragon, SpaceX is decoupling from NASA and won't be beholden the their review their board. The NASA astronauts can continue to head up to the ISS on crew dragon while others can head off into the solar system in the Starship without them.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#124

Post by yongjik »

taneq wrote: post #117
melling wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we go again... Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back. I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today. “ Someone dying is dev…

> "Someone dying is devastating." But it's not. We're more than happy to throw human lives at most things. Any sufficiently large civilian project (much less anything military) will have a greater-than-zero expected death toll from accidents, on-the-job medical issues, etc. And arguably this is the right way to make the omelette (although we've definitely improved in the past few decades: https://www.forconstructionp…

I think the difference is that most other things have a point other than having a human being in the scene. So if we're building an airport, a crane collapses, and workers die, we mourn and move on. (And hopefully find out what went wrong so that we don't repeat the same mistake.) And the final constructed airport has its uses, so in a morbid way, their deaths were not in vain.

On the other hand, there's no other point in human space exploration: almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper. So the point is literally to have a human being there, and having the human die there is not just a risk, it negates the entire premise of the project.

No one will plan an Olympic opening ceremony with a non-negligible chance of someone dying on stage. Why? Because the entire purpose of the Olympic is to show off your country, and if someone dies while half of the world is watching, you have failed your project. Same thing.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#125

Post by [deleted] »

gravypod wrote: post #122
mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on that first point?

I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who worked a lot with magnetometers. A magnetometer is literally just a coil of wire around a solid core. How complex could that be to document? Well he mentioned that there was one alloy that they used for pretty much all of the high precision fluxgate magnetomete…

[deleted]

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#126

Post by CydeWeys »

StillBored wrote: post #83
sandworm101 wrote: post #35

No chance. This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024. Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to…

Yawn, space is dangerous. We would all still be living in trees with this attitude. I don't believe that we can actually design a system that is safe like this, so yes it needs a lot of testing and iterative improvement. In the meantime, we need to use it to launch equipment and a few brave souls that understand the risks. Actually to add to that, I think putting timescales in front of something like this as a tenden…

The public has no appetite for dead astronauts. It's simply not workable to be so cavalier with astronaut lives, even if the astronauts themselves are willing.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#127

Post by ngcc_hk »

azernik wrote: post #71
Aloha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who did it are dead or dying, the tribal knowledge wasn't written down.

From my Jewish perspective, I think of it as oral tradition vs written tradition (like the pre-Mishnaic distinction between the Written Law and the Oral Law).

It is still surprise to me the switch to woman based Jewish identity and the importance of oral tradition in your culture. Also shocked when Dead Sea Scroll come out, I only knew then the Jewish bible oldest is only 1000 years old.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#128

Post by WalterBright »

onionisafruit wrote: post #60
Someone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, combine ”NASA says contracts to build a lunar lander could be awarded in late February or March.” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#History . For the LM, the contract was awarded in September 1962, and first flight (unmanned) was in January, 1968. So, even Apollo’s aggressive schedule needed more time to first flight than what NASA would have now between awarding the contract and landing hu…

Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.

I have a friend who ordered the mechanical drawings for a P-51, intending to make P-51 assemblies. In investigating this, he talked to some P-51 experts who told him that the drawings were nearly useless.

The real specification of the airplane was the tools and jigs created to make and assemble the parts. Those are long gone. The mechanical drawings were made after the fact to satisfy some DoD requirement.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#129

Post by ngcc_hk »

onionisafruit wrote: post #60
Someone wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, combine ”NASA says contracts to build a lunar lander could be awarded in late February or March.” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#History . For the LM, the contract was awarded in September 1962, and first flight (unmanned) was in January, 1968. So, even Apollo’s aggressive schedule needed more time to first flight than what NASA would have now between awarding the contract and landing hu…

Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.

Organisation memory perhaps is a better word though not tribal / cultural memory.

You can’t write everything done and for an ongoing concern you always have people around.

In fact one of the problem is these Organization memory is sometimes in the way and you do not know why or even that exist.

But here is about the absence, as it is not an on-going concern.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#130

Post by wnevets »

sandworm101 wrote: post #35

No chance. This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024. Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to…

That is because its a purely politically statement.

NASA's budget and mission is largely kabuki theater. Remember when Bush Jr [0] said we were going to have a moon base and land a human on mars during his reelection year?

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.space/index.h...

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