We were able to land on moon in 1969. How come are we not able to do it again 50 years later with all the technological progress?
Because we never did it in the first place.
A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
211–220 of 237 posts
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why does the public get an opinion on an individual’s life when they know the risks? To me that’s the height of hubris and is something that needs to get corrected if we’re to move forward.
Because the public is paying for it.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Add the extra methods to the Supplemental Material then. Science is nothing without reproducibility
Unfortunatelt in my experience, science is nothing without tenure and writing easily reproducible research is not what gets you tenure. Writing many papers with many citations is.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
We launch people on rockets every year to the ISS.
Launching people into space is one thing, but to land them on the moon and get them back safely is infinately harder. 2024? Not going to happen, it's impossible.
Unlikely just from the weight of bureaucracy, but I'm not sure about it being impossible. It took 8 years the first time, and that was in the 1960s. Surely with such technological advances, previous learned knowledge and some gumption it could be done.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#215NASA's best bet is to bite the bullet, scrap the SLS already, and help pay for SpaceX's development. SpaceX has a publicly announced rocket design that is capable of getting men to the Moon and back. They are working on it for themselves. They are looking for every source of funding that they can get. They already are planning suborbital flights this summer, and already are looking for it to be human rated by NASA. T…
Why isn't Trump talking to Elon Musk? Because he has NASA. NASA has a proven record of human and machine space exploration. It put men in space 60 years ago. It put men on the moon and returned them all safely before Musk was born. Despite its second mover advantage, SpaceX has never put a human in space and the only celestial body it has managed to land on is earth. Granted, SpaceX is good at cheaply delivering Tang…
NASA is doing the same things as SpaceX at a tremendously inflated cost. NASA has also managed to kill something like 20 astronauts - it's hard to say that's a "proven" record.
The anti-Musk bias and astroturfing is getting really boring.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are right, but there is something wrong if we can't handle an astronaut or two for scientific progress yet are more than happy to throw bodies into the middle-east. So I question whether or not it matters what the public thinks in this area. Maybe they can just do the work without making it a spectacle. Then an astronaut dies, it makes news for a bit, and the distracted populace moves on in a week.
Manned space flight (especially to the moon) is a stunt. Much easier and less risky to sent robots. Used to be the goal of the stunt was to stand up to the Soviets. Now it would be for... what? Even less. Definitely not worth lives.
This is a common recurring argument I see regarding human flight.
You say it's worthless for humans to leave Earth. I believe, in the long term, it is critical. And I agree it is a bit of a "stunt" in that exploration has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. It inspires new generations of scientists, and ideally provides a sense of shared national/global pride.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is obviously false. Any technology that could allow humans to live anywhere but on earth (the moon, Mars, space stations, generation ship, you name it) would be infinitely more applicable on an environmentally devastated earth up to any degree of devastation. Living on Mars would be much harder than living on the earth after an all-out nuclear war with the worse effects of global warming present, in the aftermat…
We have more resources than we know what to do with. Negative to zero interest rates all over the place. The problems on Earth are not being solved or worked on due to political problems not resource limitations. Plus total current space related expenditures are probably 0.05% of global GDP. Global GDP is ~$85 trillion would mean a space spend of $42.5 billion. Sounds about right.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manned space flight (especially to the moon) is a stunt. Much easier and less risky to sent robots. Used to be the goal of the stunt was to stand up to the Soviets. Now it would be for... what? Even less. Definitely not worth lives.
This is a common recurring argument I see regarding human flight. You say it's worthless for humans to leave Earth. I believe, in the long term, it is critical. And I agree it is a bit of a "stunt" in that exploration has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. It inspires new generations of scientists, and ideally provides a sense of shared national/global pride.
> You say it's worthless for humans to leave Earth
Woah, I didn't say that. But I agree with the rest of your comment.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And we've known this for a very long time - some of the SR-71 jigs were intentionally destroyed after the planes were built which was typical for secret projects. If we wanted to build more we'd essentially have to start over.
Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.
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…
> 3) Lots of Apollo era designs don't exist on paper. The F1 engine doesn't really even have a standard design, since every iteration was changed to be "better" by throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticked.
I believe the F-1 specifically does have full CAD models now after a reverse engineering effort, though in general your point still stands. They attempted to restart J-2 production for Ares, but ran into so many complications that the J-2X was basically a clean-sheet design