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> It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now. It has been for the last 65 years. ;)
It's now within reach for a medium sized corporation, largely ignored by humankind. That's huge progress!
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What is the point? Are we comparing coconuts and apples?
Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
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There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
Not that anyone’s offering me the choice of course but I’m happy to leave it to the robots. Lunar dust gives me the creeps. Imagine stepping outside into a world where absolutely everything is coated in dark gray copy toner that gets ingrained into all that touches it. I don’t think I could do it due to the anxiety.
Here are the pictures it has taken so far: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031... There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.
Having too much karma points... ;-)
"At the end of its operations, Blue Ghost will stay put, destined to remain on the moon’s surface indefinitely." Is that a euphemism for "Humans are leaving rubbish to pollute another part of the universe?"
> Is that a euphemism for "Humans are leaving rubbish to pollute another part of the universe?" Yes, in the same sense that the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Parthenon are rubbish
On another note, I'm currently reading "Sunburst and Luminary An Apollo Memoir" from Don Eyles, which is a great read that makes you realize the feat it really was at the time.
My main interrogation now (and I've not yet looked anywhere for elements of answer) is why is it so difficult to reproduce with the current tech and scientfic advances ? Is bloatware involved or is the scope really different ?
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It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
we get a taste of this light when out in the countryside when it's a full moon. Very bright but cold light. Full, hard shadows. Just black and white. No diffraction, no softness. It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.
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Water in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth. With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.
I wonder what a structure of metal(aluminum?) would look like after hundreds of thousands of 14-day 450F cycles. How many cycles would it take to turn into a mound? Would a coherent mound still count as "existing?"
https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/technical-fa...
>Aluminum does not have a distinct fatigue or endurance limit, so its S-N graph curves down from the upper left to the right and continues to curve down lower and lower toward the lower right corner of the graph. This illustrates that it will eventually fail even from low stress applications, given enough of them.
Steel/titanium, if its fatigue tolerance is in the temperature range, would last much longer if not near indefinably until it came to impacts.
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you are talking about stills. still don't know what the actual tech difference is.
Here's what Apollo used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_photography Here's what Firefly uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_photography Hopefully you can see that from a raw tech level, there's practically no overlap between those things at all. The technology has moved on _completely_.
Awe inspiring stuff.
Here are the pictures it has taken so far: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031... There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.
The videos are amazing https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54353240540/in/al...