Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lunar Flyby

nasa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 262 posts

Re: Lunar Flyby

#111

Post by dylan604 »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #101
thegrim33 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> is exactly why the US is stuck with SpaceX For the last 20 years NASA has intentionally run their Commercial Crew Program, which has the stated goal of developing/fostering/funding the development of commercial providers for launch vehicles. They, by plan they explicitly laid out and implemented, decided to rely on American commercial providers. And that's what they got. And in doing so, the program ended up produ…

SpaceX is an amazing success story, both as a commercial story, and as a story of government-industry cooperation. NASA should be proud and commended for fostering SpaceX. The question is why does SpaceX stand alone? Why did ULA stagnate? Why can't NG make SRBs that don't have nozzles that fall off? Why can't Betchel build a launch tower on time? What is it about government contracts in these other areas that led to…

> Why did ULA stagnate?

ULA is the old guard made from Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX is the snappy upstart moving fast and breaking things. Having the freedom to fail with experiments is a totally different methodology from any failure seen as very bad. SpaceX has never been involved in loss of life. If they ever have that happen, I'd imagine they'd be forced to stop moving as fast and quit breaking things.

Re: Lunar Flyby

#112

Post by dylan604 »

dboreham wrote: post #30
sph wrote: post #9

I shared some of these pictures with family members that hadn’t even heard of Artemis, and one asked if the blue thing was Mars. I am shook.

I'd be genuinely curious to see a list of the things they had heard of, since Artemis has been in the news constantly for a month. E.g. have they just not heard of anything (consume no news), or are they in some news silo that excludes rockets, and if so what other things does it include? We may be missing something important that we've never heard of!

It just goes to show how normal space flight is compared to the Apollo era. All the way up to Apollo 11, people stopped what they were doing to watch. Apollo 13 grabbed some attention with the near disaster. The first Shuttle missions were watched, but people quickly lost interest. Even this going back to the moon was nothing new to the average person. When people claim it was all over the news seems like someone in an echo chamber. It might have been in your news feeds, but I doubt it was as predominate as you might think. If your "news" feed is nothing but influencers and celebrities, then NASA probably never even interrupts their feeds

Re: Lunar Flyby

#113

Post by dylan604 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #75
neverkn0wsb357 wrote: post #69

I wish they would’ve flown by and taken a picture of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site. I think it would’ve been a super cool throwback to the history of lunar exploration; maybe it’s just me but I think it would’ve been really exciting. It would basically be the like visiting a UNESCO (moon?) heritage site.

They would have needed a hell of a lot more camera for that, right? Even the best DSLR with the best lens is going to have a lot of trouble resolving something that small at over 4000 miles.

That's a detail a lot of people miss. Apollo missions orbited at ~150 miles above the moon while Artemis II fly-by was much further away. That was by design to specifically give them the wider view to see things missed by Apollo's closer orbits

Re: Lunar Flyby

#114

Post by dylan604 »

CookieTonsure wrote: post #71
neverkn0wsb357 wrote: post #69

I wish they would’ve flown by and taken a picture of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site. I think it would’ve been a super cool throwback to the history of lunar exploration; maybe it’s just me but I think it would’ve been really exciting. It would basically be the like visiting a UNESCO (moon?) heritage site.

The main point of the voyage was to see the far side, and also to report on previously-unseen portions of the Moon that hadn't really had human coverage in the past. Since all the Apollo landings were on the near-side of the Moon, they were in fact less accessible to this crew. My disappointment lay chiefly in their L.O.S. periods, because in 2026 why does Earth lack operational satellites that could relay comms from…

> because in 2026 why does Earth lack operational satellites that could relay comms from the other side?

The moon is not an easy body to orbit. Keeping something in orbit around the moon requires a lot of station keeping which requires a lot of fuel. Once that fuel runs out, the orbit will not be stable. People have talked about trying an Earth-Moon L2 point, but that's not as stable as Sun-Earth L2 where things like JWST are located.

Re: Lunar Flyby

#115

Post by dylan604 »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #107

I've been thoroughly disappointed in NASA's handling of "public relations" part of the mission every significant achievement point became a publicity stunt of lowest quality, with forced line reads and little practicality I'm eagerly awaiting future engineering challenges and science results - but I'd want NASA to concentrate on that first, and farce show-making second

At one point, they were telling NASA that they didn't have the right words or enough superlatives. I kept waiting for them to quote Contact with "should have sent a poet"

Re: Lunar Flyby

#116

Post by wishfish »

maccam912 wrote: post #84
wishfish wrote: post #34

Zoomed into several of the lunar surface photos and noticed some of the very small impact craters are in a regularly spaced straight line. Looks to me as if a meteorite came in at a shallow angle and basically skipped across the surface. Leaving dimpled craters as it bounced. Looks very similar to rocks skipping on a pond. Am I correct or is there another explanation for these?

If I am understanding correctly you are seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_chain which are craters caused by debris blasted out when another crater is formed.

Thank you! Glad to see there's a Wikipedia article about it. And good to learn the formal name for this formation: "catena" (plural "catenae").

Re: Lunar Flyby

#118

Post by farmerbb »

_august wrote: post #4

Are full size/larger images available somewhere? 1920x1280px seems low. Edit: Found 'em: https://images.nasa.gov/search?page=1&media=image&yearStart=...

It looks like changing the `~large` in the image filename to `~orig` gets you the full size versions.

Re: Lunar Flyby

#120

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Jblx2 wrote: post #16
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also we spend that much every 4 days we're in Iran, and that's only ONE of our neo-colonialist irons in the fire, as it were. If you want to make the US financially solvent, cut defense. Defense LAPS every other budget category. Whether you want to take the conservative position on why that is (our allies freeload on our defense spending) or the Progressive one (the U.S. is an empire in decline and every major empire…

>Defense LAPS every other budget category. I suppose it matters how you lump things, but for federal spending: - $678 B, Social Security - $478 B, Medicare - $425 B, Net Interest - $419 B, Health - $412 B, National Defense - $320 B, Income Security - $184 B, Veterans Benefits and Services - $75 B, Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services - $53 B, Transportation - $43 B, Administration of Justice - $15 B,…

Note there would be no veterans benefits and services without a military, so effectively the total for defense is 412 PLUS 184 = $596B, more than anything except SS.

Also note that most people consider social security to be an entirely different kind of government spending than anything else in that list.

Post reply on HN