41–50 of 165 posts
Huge congratulations to IM. Landing on the Moon is extremely difficult, despite what playing KSP will condition you to think. For them to successfully land on the Moon is a huge milestone. Now to get people back there... maybe someday.
Is there a good resource to follow all space efforts? I have no idea whats coming down the pipe and I used to
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"Lost the ability" is an odd way of putting it. "Lost the budget" is better. Ideally we wouldn't have to pick and choose, but since I wasn't US Dictator during the 90s, the Hubble Space Telescope + a lot of probes throughout the solar system was probably more impactful for overall scientific discovery than the counterfactual where NASA invested in continued moon landings.
We did lose the capability. Read up on the engineering behind Saturn-V. There are books that go into extensive detail. A lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024. Not to mention that cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then.
The designs are not optimal for modern production approaches.
As an example, a modernized F-1 engine would have far simplified plumbing, much fewer parts, the injector, which contained hundreds of handcrafted and hand-tuned parts to minimize combustion instability would be replaced with one machine crafted part where the instabilities would be properly cancelled out through computer simulation. But, what's the point?
The F-1s were designed because computer control systems of the time were not good enough to control a large number of smaller, more efficient engines. Nowadays such control systems exist, with Falcon Heavy flying 27 engines, and Starship doing 33. The fuel they used is also not really being seen as the future, with medium and heavy lifters shifting towards Methane for its better efficiency, cleaner combustion aiding reuse and being liquid at similar temperatures to oxygen, simplifying the cryo-tank design.
They simply aren't relevant anymore outside of out of touch Congress critters looking for ways to pour more billions into the dead end of SLS.
The other big point is that Saturn V wouldn't even meet the expectations current lunar landers are expected to meet. Both lander proposals are huge, potentially with the habitable volume of the entire ISS. They could, on their own, serve as small long term lunar bases, if it weren't for Orion being unable to spend an extended time in space.
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The best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible.
This comment deserves to be on the front page
Capital allocation.
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The post you're replying to is just pointing out that the quoted amount (they THEY were replying to) is missing the "million" abbreviation on the end. So it looks like the original claim was India did it for US$74.00. ;)
They are extremely resourceful people.
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The public was actually never in favor of the Apollo program except for when we actually landed on the moon. The government was just willing to ignore public sentiment for some reason. And I'm very glad they did.
> public was actually never in favor of the Apollo program except for when we actually landed on the moon Wow, I wasn't aware that the "only point at which the opinion surveys demonstrate that more than 50 percent of the public believed Apollo was worth its expense came in 1969 at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing" [1]. [1] https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/exploding-the-myth...
Huge congratulations to IM. Landing on the Moon is extremely difficult, despite what playing KSP will condition you to think. For them to successfully land on the Moon is a huge milestone. Now to get people back there... maybe someday.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did lose the capability. Read up on the engineering behind Saturn-V. There are books that go into extensive detail. A lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024. Not to mention that cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then.
> lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024 Give me one example. > cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then Inflation adjusted, the Saturn V was a $45bn project [1]. That's a mulitiple of the total capital SpaceX has raised (or been granted). [1] https://apollo11…
That’s using a fraction of their budget.
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Part of it is cost: In the mid sixties, NASA was about five percent of the federal budget. Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous. There were a lot of single points of failure, three astronauts died on the ground, three more were very very narrowly saved over the course of only about ten missions. One of the reasons the program was cut short was the political worry after Apollo 13 of having astronauts…
> Part of it is cost The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communicatio…
Oh, I don't know. I think we've actually made improvements in leaps and bounds over the "lost" tech. Our soundstage, green screen, and post tech has definitely improved /s
I know it's not what you meant, but the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought