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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

#171

Post by JulianMorrison »

mattrp wrote: post #140
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…

Not to mention SLS which is just nonsense at this point. As well as the numerous delays on the demo missions to the ISS. This feels to me like an ultimatum to NASA... move the ball forward or get out of the game. I get the sense there is real fear we could lose the idea of ‘space’ if we don’t start showing some progress. As it stands now there isn’t a platform for the moon and there’s not going to be a platform by 20…

NASA is going to end up being the label on the shipping crate. They don't have a funding model sufficiently detached from political actors trying to sell the sizzle and uninterested in somebody else's steak.

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

#172

Post by hootbootscoot »

afterburner wrote: post #163
ehnto wrote: post #139

Earlier 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.

Surely a courageous stable genius like Trump will be the first to volunteer. I think that it would be a lovely use of taxpayer funds to pay for the journey there. I'm less inclined to fund his return voyage, but surely he can crowdfund that from his massive support base er cult. It's surely growing in size, what with his purges and all.

(pro tip: purge AFTER you consolidate power and win the war.)

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

#173

Post by nnq »

CydeWeys wrote: post #126
StillBored wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...then you should be thankful that you finally have people in charge that don't give a f about "what the public has appetite for"! And you can count on new-media's collaboration to change their tastes! There's clear advantages to US's current political tendencies, at least play those advantages to the max while you still can, and use this to force & catalyze science and technology progress that will benefit the entire human race ...before political tides change again and progress on this becomes harder again.

We all know that in human history "two wrongs CAN make a right" if the cards are well played.

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

#174

Post by hootbootscoot »

matt-attack wrote: post #133
CydeWeys wrote: post #126

Earlier 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.

the self-referential irony here is astounding, my fellow member of the public showing your opinion.

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

#175

Post by sandworm101 »

fsloth wrote: post #144
2dollars27cents wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this is a valid point, but I think it is overemphasized. Much of that tribal knowledge would have been very esoteric and focused on technologies that are no longer critical. for example, fabricating magnetic core memory. I'm sure some of the required skill is gone, but we don't need to use that memory technology anymore.

I think the computer aspects are not the most difficult part of the tech stack when dealing with space flight.

Tell that to Boeing. Thier last flight didn't make it to the space station because of two computer errors. Had that happened over the moon, people likely would have died.

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

#176

Post by robryan »

blahblahblogger wrote: post #100
aschobel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will change this spring which isn’t too far away. > Elon Musk’s SpaceX simulated a successful emergency landing on Sunday in a dramatic test of a crucial abort system on an unmanned astronaut capsule, a big step its mission to fly NASA astronauts for the first time as soon as this spring. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-exploration-spacex/...

Uh huh, that article is from 2017 and also says this: > Nearly 45 years after NASA astronauts last embarked on a lunar mission, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has announced his company's plans to send two private citizens on a flight around the moon in 2018.

The decided it wasn't worth the effort to do all the additional work to man rate falcon heavy when it would probably be hardly used as they have shifted focus to their bigger starship rocket.

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

#177

Post by hootbootscoot »

trothamel wrote: post #137
noelsusman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can a human in a spacesuit accomplish on the moon that a machine can't? It's a genuine question, though I'll admit my initial answer is not much.

The human-driven rover on Apollo 17 drove 35.9 KM in the three days Apollo 17 spent on the moon. Lunkhod 2 went 39 KM, but it took from January to June 1973 to do so. When the distance from Earth increases, machines become slower. Opportunity drove 45 KM, but it took 14 years.

nothing Tesla autopilot can't handle... (less pedestrians on the moon than even a city in arizona!)

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

#178

Post by marvin »

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…

> 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

This is a big problem. Storage and distribution is free. Why be limited by the number of pages in a physical journal?

Science really needs some proper upheaval, mainly related to the "publish or perish" doctrine.

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

#179

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ardy42 wrote: post #119
teh_infallible wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

> Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?” No. Figuring out how to accurately describe something in writing is hard, and then there are all the details you have to leave out to make the document readable, some of which may be more important than you realized. Every project relies on tribal knowledge, and much of that…

Technical documents don't have to be readable, they have to be comprehensible (and preferably quite comprehensive too).

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

#180

Post by TeMPOraL »

marvin wrote: post #178
gravypod wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

> 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 This is a big problem. Storage and distribution is free. Why be limited by the number of pages in a physical journal? Science really needs some proper upheaval, mainly related to the "publish or perish" doctrine.

It's not just that. The problem is similar to one known in tech companies. There's lots of operations knowledge that exists only in internal e-mail archives (or God forbid, Slack archives), random scripts on someone's work machine, or that's passed around verbally from employee to employee. People don't have enough time or sense to document this and then maintain the documentation (and like with backups, you don't know if a process is truly documented until you try to recreate it just from that documentation).

Then somebody leaves and suddenly work grinds down to a halt for a week, because people try to recreate a small but crucial piece of lost tribal knowledge.

Now imagine that, but across more serious domains like metallurgy or jet engine design, and imagine trying to recover that knowledge after the company no longer exists and most employees are either retired or dead.

In this there's a sense that "unused muscles atrophy" applies to technology. As a human race, we currently do not have the capability to put a man on the moon. We had it once, but it's gone now.

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