The Apollo moon landings were such an insane achievement. They did it in a time where digital processing was in it's infancy and barely existed, minimization technology was undeveloped, many modern materials which are much stronger and lighter weren't invented yet.
And they managed to live broadcast from the moon! Storage was in it's infancy, so even storing a video from the moon was impossible (they would need many reels of film that just wouldn't fit.
Digital cameras weren't invented, you only had analogue cameras. Most of them required film - and can't be developed on the spot, it requires special equipment. So to get video from the moon, the used cathode ray tube cameras - and even the cathode ray tubes of TV news were huge at the time, you can look at pictures, these things used to take a whole truck to carry. But they managed to get a very small cathode ray tube camera there, and to film long videos of hours of missions on the moon.
And get managed to broadcast it all with analogue RF all the way from the moon to earth. With no digital signal processing, because that wasn't fast enough back then for any real time use. And with surprisingly low noise for an analogue transmission. They made a whole network of receivers on earth to be able to do it.
Today all of that would be cheap, but back then it must've been quite the achievement.
They also had pretty minimal computational power available compared to newer attempts. But maybe putting a human in control is enough.
Google's moon challenge is pretty cool. They actually wanted to give a bonus for taking pictures of the original moon landing site. That could've been really nice.
But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.
Folks, NASA's Surveyor program (1966-68) is a better comparison here, not Apollo. It made the first moon landing by the US (after the Russian's Luna 9, 4 months before), and the first landing of the series was successful, though some of the others failed. It was a fully automatic landing, unlike Neil Armstrong's.
It built on lessons learned from the many failures of the Ranger program before it. And the Russians lost 12 landers before their first success.
My late father-in-law was a manager at Hughes working on Surveyor 1. My wife shared his (unpublished) notes and audio recordings of the the project with me. It was an absolutely remarkable achievement. I can confirm that the Hughes team was devastated that Luna 9 got there first, however they actually learned quite a bit from the Luna 9 video feed.
It should also be noted that Luna 9 was a relatively hard landing, not suitable for a crewed spacecraft. Surveyor 1 was the first soft landing, and a prototype for the missions that would follow.
Its important to note that the Moons gravity (and other bodies) isnt a static thing. There are places were its more apparent and places where its less.
In fact we dont even know of the Apollo 11 LM is still in orbit of the moon or not.
Scott Manley's video also has some links in its description for some of the tools NASA uses for more precise gravitational estimations and whatnot. Its pretty cool.
> Its important to note that the Moons gravity (and other bodies) isnt a static thing. There are places were its more apparent and places where its less.
This is true on earth as well, though proportionately less so we don’t notice it as much. But for example the level of the sea is different at different places (I believe the general sea level of the pacific is 2 m higher than that of the Atlantic).
Whats more is that basically all things in the solar system exert influence on one another. For some things its not a huge influence but even if you are orbiting the Moon, Mercury or Jupiter have an influence on that orbit.
Overall its mind blowing to me that at some point, not too long ago, we had people able to figure out things like the mass of some body they could barely see and deduce how it affects other bodies in the system.
even today with something like Planet Nine/Persephone[1]. We cant see it, its 10x the mass of earth, but based on the mass and trajectories of what we CAN see and how they are being influenced, we know something(s) more are still out there.
This is something even KSP doesnt do well. And its one of those deeply humbling facts for me that I am not that smart. No way i could ever figure out things like the mass of a celestial body, even with the tools I have right now in front of me 2]
>Overall its mind blowing to me that at some point, not too long ago, we had people able to figure out things like the mass of some body they could barely see and deduce how it affects other bodies in the system.
I mean, it's mostly math. Before we had an excess of computer power, it was basically plug-n-chug with a room full of grad students. It's not something that any one impressive human just eyeballs and know's "ah, that planet floats in a bathtub" at first glance.
Which isn't to say there weren't scarily capable people! If you want an example of one of the people that for me inspires the type pf awe you're talking about. Bob Farquhar
That man, had to have had either one of the most beautiful mental processes, or horrifying, in that actually running the kind of math he did was preferable to anything else.
Apollo 11 was set to land automatically using the computer when Armstrong took controls at the last minute supposedly to avoid a Boulder Field. It's not really clear that his takeover of the automatic controls was necessary - what is clear is that mankind landing for the first time on another celestial body using automatic computers is probably not cool. ... And NASA was driven and sold to the public as a human interest project ...
> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.
Seems like a reasonable precaution for a industry that brought us “move fast and break things” and normalized endless bugs as an unavoidable natural law.
No, they were thinking about how to effectively kill as much people as possible at a distance.
Remember that apollo program (just like soviet one) was an offshoot of military wanting to erase a nation on the other side of the world with efficiency.
The Mercury and Gemini programs, sure - both of them used ICBM as their boosters. So did the Vostok, Vokshod, and Soyuz programs.
Apollo was very different. The Saturn booster is so much larger and more complicated than any reasonable ICBM would be, it would be gloriously inefficient at that role.
The Apollo program was a cold war thing. But it wasn't a military thing, it was a different kind of competition.
If you take a look at the vintage Rockets of the World poster (https://venngage-wordpress-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/...) you can see how much bigger the N1 and Saturn V (spanning the last two rows), compared to the earlier boosters on the third and fourth rows.
Apollo was absolutely a part of a military thing (as I said, an offshoot) as well and it's also a reason why it died before finishing when its military use became questionable.
Well, from that perspective, what isn't a military thing?
The internet is a communication to survive nuclear war. Forklifts and pallets were to simplify military logistics. The highway system is to provide point to point connections without risking losing a railway. Cell phones are kinda private, but a lot of the components came from special hardware for the military.
I'm sure there's lots of neat tech we use everyday that isn't rooted in military funding, I just can't think of any at the moment.
Not really. By the time Apollo came around, erasing the nation on the other side of the world was pretty much a solved problem. 400,000 people were employed on Apollo and they weren't military (well, a few were) and were not thinking about nuclear weapons.
Even Space Shuttle later was driven (and funded) heavily by military applications, a lot of Apollo funding came from wish of improving missile guidance systems as well.
You're trying to make a distinction where there is none - it's the same bag of money. Which also why the money quickly dried up when rocket guidance, indeed, became a solved problem. Before Apollo was finished.
Interestingly I bet the kill thinkers killed fewer than the ad thinkers. Ads make people buy more stuff. More stuff makes people fat and unhealthy and sad and increase the mortality rate.
There is no MAD deterrence to limit advertising: only keeping up with the leader.
Once you've figured out how to efficiently kill most people on the planet, you can decrease investment in the endeavor and just keep a finger hovered over the button.
Apollo wasn't at all a military program - it was about as far from military as you could get, at that time, and still use huge rockets. And would have been a massive waste of money, if it were. There was a military space program, but Apollo was not part of it. It was a national prestige program.
> Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, and worked hard to maintain balance of power and spheres of influence in American/Soviet relations. The Soviet Union's non-military accomplishments in space, therefore, forced Kennedy to respond and to serve notice that the U.S. was every bit as capable in the space arena as the Soviets. Of course, to prove this fact, Kennedy had to be willing to commit national resources to NASA and the civil space program. The Cold War realities of the time, therefore, served as the primary vehicle for an expansion of NASA's activities and for the definition of Project Apollo as the premier civil space effort of the nation. Even more significant, from Kennedy's perspective the Cold War necessitated the expansion of the military space program, especially the development of ICBMs and satellite reconnaissance systems.2
This was a commercial vector, not some experimental top US priority stuff.
It's unfortunate that aboard the commercial craft there was stuff from national space programs, but this was not comparable to NASA's mission. It's just like SpaceX exploding a ton of rockets to further their research instead of obsessing over getting everything perfect on first try. Unfortunately they should have done more mock missions, but there wouldn't have been enough funding I fear
Even if you knew back in 1970s the exact specification of iPhone camera, you still couldn't manufacture it because improvement in manufacturing is a gradual self dependent process where the new equipment is built by the old equipment, and you can't make sudden jumps in accuracy or minimization because these things depend on weaker versions of themselves.
You might have a point about the semiconductors involved (that back in the 70s the engineering ability just wasn't there), but as a counterpoint, almost anything can be manufactured given an unlimited budget, like the moon landing programs had. We even turned lead (well, bismuth) into gold back in the 80s.
Making one of something where the cost is no object is almost always possible. Making millions at a commercially-viable cost is much more challenging.
I always find the "unlimited budget" angle interesting.
The entire Apollo program had a budget of $165.5 billion (in 2021 dollars), over a 10 year program. $16.5 billion per year. It's a big number, but it's absolutely dwarfed by things like a $600bn military.
> The entire Apollo program had a budget of $165.5 billion (in 2021 dollars), over a 10 year program. $16.5 billion per year. It's a big number, but it's absolutely dwarfed by things like a $600bn military.
Apollo was actually pretty close to the same GDP share (2.5% of GDP annually) as the modern defense budget (3.1% of GDP).
Inflation-adjusted numbers ignore that we have more people and more value produced per capita now than in the 1960s.
> Wasn’t the military budget higher back then because of active wars?
Yes, the spending on the Apollo program is pretty close (as share of GDP) to the current military budget, not to the contemporary (1960s) military budget, which ranged from a 7.6-9.4% of GDP.
As a counterpoint: NASA has an _extremely_ careful process and their success rate is high. It's expensive, though, and you have to develop an engineering process that supports it.
When you're sending a probe to Mars, the trial runs are very expensive. They spend a lot of time making sure that the mission will be successful. I'm skeptical that anywhere near the same level of care is going into the private missions, but I the reason is cost, not that they can't bootstrap themselves up with Earth-environment experimentation.
Yes, I'm aware at least one of the Mars probe missions totally failed. I don't think that detracts from the overall point. They weren't screwing up a bunch of missions before they got one right.
I think this analysis is misguided, in many ways defining the necessary technology as what we do today, and comparing Apollo program technology with that standard. It's lost in the modern perspective, seeing the world through our egocentric/ethnocentric lens.
There are other technologies and other ways to do things. Almost every achievement in human history has been accomplished without these technologies.
Most don't make the distinction, but that the Apollo missions succeeded in landing on the Moon is far less doubted as whether the footage was faked.[1]
I’m surprised how many people still believe this in spite of photos having been taken of the sites from Lunar orbit by other space programs.
It seems to be an article of faith for some though. We could have a space tourism industry with a package to visit the Apollo landing site museum on the Moon and a ton of people still would not believe.
For such proof to be effective, one has to trust lot of formulas from physics books.
(Source of flat-earthery is extreme distrust in everything that is not a first-hand experience. You can’t prove much if your limited exclusively to first hand experience)
The thing about the whole flat-earth rabbit hole that's always logically confused me is the epistemology problem.
If you deny X, and then you carefully deny anything that could prove X... what do you replace it with?
F.ex., I get how someone could disbelieve the current physics of motion. But then how do things move? It can't all just be dice rolls and unexplained magic.
If you toss out the way we understand things work... there still has to be a way things work!
The presence of the expected artifacts such as the LEM descent stage, rovers, foot and rover tracks, and science packages all left just where the mission logs said they would be are certainly pretty suggestive.
The alternate explanation would be a hoax so elaborate it involved robotic missions to leave props on the moon on top of a giant disposable rocket launch, satellites to fake the signals, and a huge cutting edge filming effort to fake the broadcasts. At some point it starts to get as hard as just going to the damn moon.
I believe in the evidence that the moon landings happened.
However, as you suggest, even if that evidence were faked to such an elaborate degree could be an even higher technical feat that would be worthy of even greater recognition.
Also, there's the side effect that if you faked a moon landing in the 1960s, you'd be damned sure the other superpower on the planet would have their best and brightest laser-focused on your product.
Convincing fakes usually have misdirection as a big component, because faking something under close expert scrutiny is orders of magnitude more difficult.
No, but your probability heuristic is catastrophically flawed if, from that, you conclude the landing was faked despite material having been placed up there.
Am I the only one who thinks the US didn't actually achieve this achievement, which indeed would have been "insane" if they had?
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxW__ZtZApo
Of course they faked it. It's too damn hard, and they weren't about to risk the lives of astronauts.
You’re not the only one, but there don’t seem to be many of you. There’s just way too much evidence it was a real space program and all the counter arguments are weak, flawed or straight up based on absurd misunderstandings and misinterpretation of the evidence.
Even aside from the evidence itself it fails the massive conspiracy with no leaks test. Conspiracies leak exponentially with the number of people in the know. SOE worked this all out running operations in occupied Europe. This is why top secret intelligence operations employ incredibly rigorous procedures. Let’s say you have a spy in a foreign country, you make sure only a tiny number of people know the details, preferably low single digits, you layer and compartmentalise everything, you run decoy operations. Even then it’s incredibly hard, the vast majority of operations eventually leak. Only very few of the best run operations with very few people in the know ever last.
With the moon landings many hundreds, more like thousands of people would have to know. All of the astronauts and their backups, the model and set makers, the film crews, the mission flight staff, the film and video technical production staff. There were six manned landings, they’d have had to do the whole faking thing over and over again for years.
It’s several orders of magnitude bigger than most spy operations, made up of people who aren’t even spies, they’d be mostly civilians with very specific technical skills so you can’t be picky about who you select for it. There is no way this wouldn’t have leaked. Somebody on the inside would have said something to a friend or lover, or got pissed off over something, or changed their political opinions, or got sloppy or just decided to get famous and talk. Especially by now with the Cold War well and truly over. Why wouldn’t they? But no, nothing, not even a hint after fifty years. Ask anybody who knows anything at all about Intelligence operations how plausible that is.
For brain gymnastics: People who would be in the know are camera man, actors, upward chain of command, final finisher of the set. I could keep it below hundred (pm if you need next fake landing; sun costs extra)
I think you’re lowballing it, but anyway you’re forgetting the enormous rocket* everyone saw take off. It had to go somewhere.
Mission Control had 30 people in the room at a time, and each console had its own engineering room with about a dozen staff, and there were several shifts. Then there were the teams at tracking and communications stations all over the world. That adds hundreds more people at least, possibly thousands. They would all have to know the crew never actually landed on the moon.
*Sorry, silly me, six rockets over a period of three and a half years.
I suppose you could avoid bringing the mission control teams into the conspiracy by feeding them perfectly faked data for the whole of each mission. All you’d need is another huge team of engineers and their support staff to generate all the faked data, and hope the Mission Control teams never saw any discrepancies and figure it out. Problem solved!
You should consider spending less time on youtube viewing conspiracy theories or at least don't bring them here. Apollo 11 left a reflector on the moon that we have used since to accurately measure the distance between the Earth and moon since. A good rule of thumb to avoid promoting poorly sourced material is to never use a youtube video to "prove" anything that doesn't have a more legitimate primary source.
> It's too damn hard, and they weren't about to risk the lives of astronauts.
The same government that exposed its soldiers to nuclear detonations? That did biological weapons testing on its own civilian population?
You're absolutely right, there's no way they would have risked late-life cancer or even a spaceflight explosion on a dozen people who signed waivers of informed consent.
Every single one of us is expendable to our government. If they thought it important, or even just really really wanted to, they'd have killed thousands in the attempt. Anyone who doesn't see that is estranged from reality.
Frankly, why is it so hard? The article doesn't really show anything outside dust playing role in the very final stage but most landings failed higher above ground. These days we even have lasers to instantly detect distance to the ground that could be incorporated real-time to thruster output. There is almost no atmosphere for friction so basic Newtonian mechanics should be able to make a decent landing. Orbital mechanics is also out of the question near the ground. Why is this still an unsolved problem?
AFAIK there have only been two attempts by private companies.
SpaceIL's crash in 2019 seems to have been caused by a premature engine shutdown due to a faulty IMU [1].
iSpace's attempt seemed to go well until the very end, when contact with the lander was lost. Their status update from April 26 suggests that also their engine may have shut down prematurely: "engineers monitored the estimated remaining propellant reached at the lower threshold and shortly afterward the descent speed rapidly increased" [2].
If this turns out to be the case, the ultimate culprit may be faulty altimetry.
> These days we even have lasers to instantly detect distance to the ground that could be incorporated real-time to thruster output.
Yes, but lasers don't work well through dust clouds, and throttling rocket engines is hard. You can't smoothly reduce thrust all the way to 0; even with a sophisticated design, there is a cutoff at something like 20% [3]. So you need to plan ahead, shut down the engine before touchdown and hope that you don't end up hitting a stray boulder - which is all it might take to tip over and bury your antennas in regolith.
How many complex machines (or complex anything) are going to work first time?
Most things require an iterative loop of testing, fixing and refinement.
The trouble with landing on another planet (with different gravity, atmospheric density, etc) is that there's no real way before you get there, therefore first attempts are extremely likely to fail.
> There is almost no atmosphere for friction so basic Newtonian mechanics should be able to make a decent landing
Actually, I think that is the one of the biggest challenges. No atmosphere to slow you down means you have to rely entirely on rockets to slow down from orbital speeds to zero.
Fully autonomous landing in unknown surfaces is still pretty difficult. Still, the Moon should be more forgiving than the Earth - no wind, lower gravity...
No atmosphere - need to brake all of the velocity difference with engines & can't use aerodynamic surfaces or parachutes.
On a body with atmosphere you can essentially just drop a payload up to some maximum size with a proper heat shield and a parashute and it will end up (somewhere) on the surface in one piece.
On an atmosphere less body you essentially need to run precisely controlled flight all the way to touchdown.
A thin atmosphere like mars can make it worse. The actual amount of braking you get is a bit unpredictable, and the size of the aerodynamic surfaces you need to make a significant impact can use up quite a bit of your mass budget (example: despite the size of the Perseverance/Curiosity parachutes, they still needed a sky-crane for final touchdown).
Indeed, Mars is a bit of an annoying edge case here. Still the atmosphere really helps in other regards, such as for orbit circulation for probes via aerobraking. And can be used for aerocapture in the future as well.
Given the Mars gravity I still wonder if no atmosphere would still make it worse vs the thin that it has.
But also, here on earth you go to your backyard and try your landing as many times as you want. While with the moon you have simulations and models of various fidelity.
> Only three entities have successfully soft-landed on the Moon — the government-funded space agencies of China, the Soviet Union and the United States. And only China has done it since the 1970s and on its first attempt.
This sounds as if the journalist tries to downplay the fact that NASA managed to do it a) first, and b) actually landed humans on the moon, not just unmanned vehicles. The only thing which makes it less impressive is the enormous budget of the Apollo program.
NASA didn't do it first, the USSR did. And the only reason they didn't land people on the moon first too is because their country was falling apart and they reduced investment in their space program.
It took 12 attempts to land a robot on the moon for the USSR. Their heavy booster program was in shambles. They literally never developed anything close to as powerful as Saturn V (5m pounds of thrust). They would be lucky not to crash 12 human vehicles on the moon. Leading for the first 5 miles of a marathon doesn't make you the winner!
In the space race's case, they were leading in literally all practical and utilitarian aspects during the entire race, then they won the race, called it quits, and then the USA moved the goalposts and crossed them.
"Called it quits, and then the USA moved the goalposts"
For an informal international pissing match, you're assuming some pretty formal rules. The point was nearly entirely to show off how much more impressive one country was over another. The USSR was winning until they weren't, sure, but then the USA started winning until the USSR literally died.
I didn't know the USA wasn't the first to land on the moon with something other than humans. I do kinda agree with the person above you that it does sound like they were simply better, only we'd never know because the USA made this last achievement into the only thing that's retold and rehashed. It speaks the most to the imagination to roam another world, but in the grand scheme of things...
I had never even heard of unmanned, automated landers making it to the moon before humans! They had some computers and I happened to have picked up that they've sent things into orbit, but predetermined engine burns (with time to apply corrections from the ground) in a vacuum with nothing around you is quite a different level of achievement.
I don't care as much about the history so much as the science and future, but I am a space nerd so I'm actually rather surprised that I never knew this. The USA manages its public image about as carefully as China I feel like, the advantage being that they're often genuinely on the good side (no concentration camps for a minority group tends to help, for instance) but by no means selfless, impartial, or genuine. (The best example of public image management may be immigration desire stats. You'd be foolish to immigrate from a poor place to the USA when you can immigrate somewhere with higher social mobility as well as security, but the number of people in such a situation that wish to immigrate to a place like Denmark is tiny by comparison. The American dream, it's called, not the Danish dream. It's a huge, well-managed PR campaign to look to the USA as a leader, shoving competitors' achievements under the rug.)
I don't agree with the race framing either, but I was replying to a comment that used it so I leaned into it.
My point is not who won and who lost, it's that the USA has basically erased the USSR's achievements through its PR campaign and framing it as a race to put people on the moon, instead of the USs effort to catch up to the way more advanced USSR.
You could argue that was moving the goalposts, since at that point the Soviets were (significantly?) ahead of the Americans, but the Soviets had just put Gagarin briefly in orbit. It seems hard to say that there had been that much of a "race" to that point?
Yes, they declared their intent, but there was never an official "race".
Matter of fact is that the US was behind the USSR in terms of technology. Kennedy declared a symbolic goal that was extremely risky and served little scientific purpose, and then accomplished that. That's the moving of goalposts. It was never a race to put a man on the moon, it was a rapidly developing scientific field, and the USSR was ahead of the US until their country started falling apart.
And now, because of that symbolic goal and a successful PR campaign, people don't know the USSR's achievements. The commenter above didn't know the USSR was the first to land on the moon and just claimed it was the US. That's the part that irks me.
"moved the goalposts and crossed them" seems like an unusual way to describe an enterprise (yes, this is a deliberate Star Trek pun) that provides an endless supply of next steps, or "new goalposts" if you prefer. There's no milestone you reach and gain the ability to declare the game over, or at least not one we've identified yet. The fact that the Soviet Union was first with some early steps is a pretty big credit to them, the fact that they were overtaken later on by the US is a point in the Americans' favor.
That's the thing, they weren't "the first with some early steps", they were way ahead of the US on literally every single measure that matters. The only thing the US managed to do first was land people on the moon, which is mostly a symbolic gesture.
However, because of a decades long PR campaign, people think the US "won" and don't even realize all of the USSR's achievements. That's the rewriting of history that I'm referring to. I'm happy to acknowledge NASA's achievements, as long as it's not at the expense of others.
If we want to go back to the moon, or better, to Mars, I think after I turn 70, I would absolutely volunteer to take a high risk test mission off planet, and potentially to Mars. Sure, it would be very nice to have a way back, but not necessary. When you finally get here, name a mountain after me or something.
The N1 rocket was intended to be similar but how far along it really was to completion seems questionable to me. I’m not a rocket scientist, but my understanding is the first stage was not statically tested and the complete rocket failed in the first stage on each of its four tests - one of which caused a gigantic explosion in the launch complex visible from over 20 miles away. If anyone with deeper rocket history expertise can weigh in I’d be interested to know how feasible an average historian would consider the successful completion of the N1 if it had continued to be funded.
Summary: Khrushchev wanted the moon for cheap, lunar rockets weren't useful for ICBM research, the transition to Brezhnev threw a wrench into the program.
Summary: infighting, N1 had too many rockets and not enough quality control, exhaustion on the team, and Soviet electronics were way behind U.S. electronics.
>the only reason they didn't land people on the moon first too is because their country was falling apart
My interpretation of the history of the USSR space program is that they more often than not went the hard way and used remote controlled/preprogrammed vehicles not because it was easier but because it was hard (sorry). I fail to see how landing people on the moon is a bigger achievement than if it was done by remote control in a time with, well, hardly any computer power at all. In my opinion this is part of the rewrite of the history of the space race to an alternative version where the goal was actually landing a man on the moon and not a moving goal post that changed every time something new was achieved.
I don't disagree with you, the goalposts were always being moved by the country that lost the last stage, usually the USA.
I also think there's a case to be made that, given their history of success and expertise, they could have also landed a man on the moon first if things had gone differently.
> And the only reason they didn't land people on the moon first too is because their country was falling apart and they reduced investment in their space program.
This is most definitely not the case in the late 60s. The Soviets very much wanted to land on the moon up until the Apollo landing.
Lots of tendancies are part of human behavior. So is cooperation, eusocial behavior, etc etc etc. NASA relied on the cooperation of many, many people, and the funding of everyone in the US.
The sentence is just a factual statement. 3 agencies have done it. That is fact.
The sentence did mention china has done it on the first attempt which is also factual and relevant to context. The article is about moon landings and associated failures.
As for the Apollo program everyone knows about it. There's no point in regurgitating obvious facts.
It's only relevant to context if it also includes the context in which the event occurred: China's first attempt is not a notable achievement in the same way the first successful landing after many failures is. I really hate these sinophiles' attempts to elevate China into some super-awesome, super-intelligent master race.
There is a...contingent...of people here and in other social media venues who seem quite set on elevating the achievements of their chosen group (China, in this case) with exaggerated, unmerited praise, and simultaneously poo-pooing the (usually equally or even more notable) achievements of others.
It's not just with China; it happens in other areas, too, usually focused on eastern nations or private enterprise (e.g., classical/ancient period mathematicians from India, SpaceX, etc.). I don't know if it's overcompensation for westerners' historically casual and sometimes active diminishing/ignoring these accomplishments or what, but it comes off as a tasteless attempt to assert superiority where none exists. And I'm just kinda tired of seeing it.
>I really hate these sinophiles' attempts to elevate China into some super-awesome, super-intelligent master race.
Please don't do this. You are seeing things in the text that isn't there and you seem to do the same just the other way around. It reads anti-chinese / racist.
There are two reasons to point "on the first try" and leave out all the other context (in particular, the giant body of work done by other space agencies and engineering technologies, especially the US's, that China built on): 1) to artificially elevate China's achievement; 2) out of ignorance. I suppose an assumption of ignorance might be considered more charitable somehow, since at least it implies the author could learn something.
I'm often suspicious of china's motives, but I didn't see any sinophilia in the posts they're replying to. You did say "perceived" though, but it's a fine line. Some crazy people also see "Jews" in every aspect of money and government and it eventually turns into hate.
Why is it so hard? Plume-surface interaction plays a major role during the landing sequence. Most projects "test,test and more test" like the ones mentioned in the article, but they clearly have no idea how unforgiving the environment is. When the vehicle gets closer to the surface, the engine exhaust gets redirected upwards, accelerating regolith to ~ 1km/s speeds. Any sensitive hardware that is hit can easily be taken out. Additionally, the closer the vehicle gets to the surface the more difficulty landing sensors will have in looking through the induced regolith cloud.[0] NASA has been studying the problem through experimental and computational campaigns for a long time, but just recently has put significant resources into understanding PSI on extreme environments.
Also see the most recent first SpaceX Starship launch attempt. Widely accepted current theories about likely failure mode root cause involve exactly this sort of thrust ground interaction kicking up debris.
I am a huge proponent of sending robots first, to build safer landing and launch structures, possibly also bases or better places to situate bases.
There are many projects looking into building landing pads before any large vehicles, from both private and government. [0] is one I know. Interesting approaches but I have not seen anything yet that can withstand human class landers. These also pose significantly higher risks if the pads break up.
> early indications suggest that this week’s ispace failure could have been caused by the lander running out of propellant just before it touched down
I practiced a lot with the Lunar Lander game in the 1970s. The trick is to let it fall until the last second, then hit the thrusters full blast to hit 0V as it hits the surface.
Burn too soon, and you run out of propellant and crash.
You can still apt install that game, I think the package name might be something like moon-lander. I play this regularly and keep a file for games that don't have highscore storage (like Dino "no Internet" game as well, also so you can compare across different computers). Can confirm this is the best strategy and also the hardest option.
Interesting that the SpaceX rockets have the same behaviour when landing. I read somewhere that was because they have no throttle control and are on/off, but I'm no authority.
They have throttle, but not enough throttle range. Merlin is a 845 kN engine that can throttle down to 338 kN. When the rocket is mostly empty, that's too much thrust to hover. So they have a very short window to start the landing burn, and also not enough fuel to abort and try again.
Given the constraints, it's surprising they don't lose more rockets during the landing phase.
The key reason is that an extra second of time spent hovering or close it is another second of resisting gravity, which takes fuel, so the most efficient hypothetical ‘burn’ is one big bang ‘hoverslam’ right at the end and 0 seconds spent fighting gravity
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket does have throttle control, but at minimum thrust the thrust-to-weight ratio is still greater than 1, which means they have to hit 0m/s at exactly 0 feet of altitude or they start going up again. I’d imagine they time their ‘hoverslam’ to take 2x minimum thrust (or some other multiplier) and then adjust up or down through the manoeuvre.
Many of us have an overly simplistic view of orbital mechanics that fall well short of how it works in the real world. Take the example of India's failed Vikram lander [1]:
> The official said that predicting orbits below 50 km is very tricky and usually they are estimated with an accuracy of plus/minus 1 km. If the lander`s predicted height was at 30 km, the actual orbit height may remain anywhere between 29 to 31 km.
> Similar will be the error in horizontal direction. Such errors occur as local gravity varies widely due to large variation of density of mountains and plains.
Newton's gravity equations deal with bodies like the Moon as having uniform mass. That's not he case and it matters.
Fun fact: China's Three Gorges Dam slowed down the Earth's rotation by 0.06 microseconds per day [2]. That's actually not a big deal because the rotation has variance all of its own from tides, weather, etc.
So even if you had a density map of the Moon you'd still have to account for variance added by rotational variation.
> Newton's gravity equations deal with bodies like the Moon as having uniform mass.
Let’s not make a joke of ourselves. Newton’s gravity equations deal perfectly well with non uniform masses. You just need to integrate properly.
But all of this is beside the point. Obviously you are not going to land open loop. You need sensors which tell you where you are and how fast you are going.
> China's Three Gorges Dam slowed down the Earth's rotation by 0.06 microseconds per day [2]. That's actually not a big deal because the rotation has variance all of its own from tides, weather, etc
I'm confused, how is the mean changing less impactful due to relatively high variance? If the was no variance at all, would .06us be a disaster?
It may be a disaster, but if we manage to live with variance that are higher than 0.06 microseconds per day, we should manage this small change in an average.
Like most things in rocketry, it would be straightforward if you had plenty of fuel. It would be comparable to landing a helicopter, although you'd need more stabilization.
Fuel-limited, you have to come in too fast, decelerate too hard, pick a landing site too quickly, and can't go around and try again. When the Apollo landers touched down, they had fifteen to thirty seconds of fuel left.
Space-X boosters returning to the takeoff site have even worse constraints.
Earth gives you a stupidly wide margin of error, where the Moon gives you none (and Mars very little) - because of its dense atmosphere. Landing on a world with an atmosphere means there is a passive force that tries to get you stop (relative to the surrounding medium). So, as long as you survive the hell of reentry, you can help yourself with lifting surfaces and parachutes. In contrast, on the Moon, you have to zero out your velocity at exactly the right moment. Do it too late? Crash. Do it too early? Crash. Run out of fuel just a little bit too fast? Crash.
It's less unreasonable than you think. The Ranger 1 spacecraft attempted to land a payload with an impactor before the US had figured out how to land more carefully.
Dumb laser distance measurement should solve that easily for you. You can literally use some very basic math with thruster output based on your downward distance/speed.
Sure. The problem is delta-v. If you zero out too late, you crash, but if you zero our too soon, you'll likely run out of fuel and either crash or won't be able to take off or otherwise complete the full mission.
Managing delta-v is half of what makes a Moon landing require precision. An atmosphere can let you ignore this half to a degree (depending on specifics of vehicle/mission).
With 1/10 gravity dust also goes quite a lot higher. That's on top of lack of atmosphere letting dust float higher. Not to mention, there's going to be a lot more dust to kick up.
Anyway, the easiest way to get a feel for these things is to play some Kerbal Space Program. Try doing some moon flights. You'll quickly realize that the part of the mission that feels easiest on the home planet (landing) also feels the hardest on atmosphere-less bodies, and vice versa (e.g. taking off, or slowing for landing).
Earth is pretty easy to do if you do it the simplest way, via atmospheric braking all the way down. You have to have a heat shield and parachutes, but if you have the equipment the atmospheric braking doesn't require any fancy calculations besides getting the entrance angle right (so you don't bounce off into space or burn up by going too steep).
Mars is probably the worst of both worlds, you have a thin atmosphere that is a nuisance but not very good for braking.
On the other hand, there's no atmosphere on the Moon to speak of, so you actually have to slow down using propulsion against the gravity for a soft landing. Heat from the atmospheric entry when getting back to the Earth is certainly a concern but the atmosphere also takes care of the vast majority of slowing the descent (or ~all of it, if you count the use of parachutes at the end).
6 landing attempts, all successful, late 60s technology:
mission launch land days since last
successful landing
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Apollo 11 July 16, 1969 July 20, 1969 -
Apollo 12 November 14, 1969 November 24, 1969 126
Apollo 14 January 31, 1971 February 9, 1971 431
Apollo 15 July 26, 1971 August 7, 1971 272
Apollo 16 April 16, 1972 April 27, 1972 347
Apollo 17 December 7, 1972 December 19, 1972 316
Those were supported by a 400k people workforce, a basically unlimited budget, and the political and moral support of the most powerful nation on Earth.
I'm not trying to discount Apollo here, I myself can barely comprehend their achievement at their time. But the magnitude of the effort was much much larger than this one mission.
And let's not forget Grissom, White and Chaffee. NASA was _not_ on a successful path pre Apollo 1, as shown by the post-disaster analysis reports. Speculating here, but most likely we would not have gone to the Moon had Apollo 1 not happened.
Yeah but 1) that ignores the failed unmanned attempts that came before these, 2) these were all manned. I could see it being “easier” to land when you are manually adjusting your descent than when you are entirely relying on sensors and preprogrammed behavior. (Apollo 11 literally would have crashed if Armstrong hadn’t veered off course to find a smoother landing site)
All with a much bigger budget & many more people working on it.
Oh and it wasn't all success. Apollo 13 was a near miss. Apollo 1 had fatalities. Several other apollo missions has near misses. It was a very high risk operation.
It seems a bit disingenuous to omit Apollo 13, which failed on the way to the moon. The fact that it failed well before the landing attempt, speaks to the difficulty of even getting to the point where you can consider a landing.
That's your opinion. I don't consider it "disingenuous", rather focusing on the act of getting a manned lander from orbit down to the surface of the moon. 6 tries, 6 successes.
That's completely fair, it's definitely just opinion as to what to include. Getting to lunar orbit can reasonably be considered a separate challenge to landing, so it might make sense to separate them.
In that case though, I think Apollo 10 should at least be mentioned in some capacity, as it was a dress rehearsal that came within 16km of the lunar surface, and tested much of the lander's systems. Not listed as a failure or success, just mentioned, as it's a very relevant test.
> this would easily put the conspiracy theories to bed
no, you are dealing with people who nit pick data, rejecting anything that does not support their position as falsified.
Attempts at reasoning are in my experience often met with emotion and ad hominem responses (e.g. the classic comparison to species of Ovis). Logic does not apply here.
The whole thing is not as clear-cut as you are portraying it here. Furthermore, not even the best-equipped amateur astronomer can verify it. And also:
"Therefore either all retroreflectors have degraded such that their return signals fit to the scattered return from the lunar soil or the measurements were indeed taken to the lunar surface only."
>the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to land there, they crashed spacecraft after spacecraft before each finally succeeded in 1966. The government space agencies were able to learn from each landing attempt.
Roger.
>Today, by contrast, private companies are expected to repeat these successes, without government resources and without lessons gleaned from many failed and successful missions
Misplaced expectations.
They're going to need more crashes.
>the folks in the background look like they're holding back tears.
This was not in the background when NASA astronauts were tragically lost before they got to the moon the first time.
I expect anyone to repeat these failures until they have enough lessons learned themselves.
On the one hand we have people lauding SpaceX/Musk as super geniuses able to achieve great feats without the supposed waste and largesse of the government, and on the other we have the same group wringing their hands when expectations are set based on their gushing praise.
"Naturally", it can take so much time to accomplish something working with nature, time is one of the most likely natural forces to cause expectations to exceed accomplishments or even possibilities.
The whole world was heartbroken as awareness was universally raised about remaining risks even after such extensive and successful efforts had intentionally and brilliantly greatly reduced the possibilities.
Lurking risks still exist and unforseen failure modes remain as defined.
> Even if a lander makes it to the vicinity of the Moon, it still has to navigate its way down to the surface with no global-positioning satellites for guidance
Was/is such a constellation ever planned? If not, why - due to the difficulty orbiting the moon?
The US government is working on PNT (position, navigation, and timing), communications, awareness (tracking objects, the beginnings of 'space traffic control' (my term), etc.) and much more via multiple agencies, in order to 'domesticate' (my word) cislunar space, defined as from geosynchronous orbit out past the Moon. The best starting point I know of:
The Artemis program's infrastructure is expected (per some plans, at least) to be the foundation of permanent communication and PNT. The US Space Force is also working on 'Space Situtional Awareness'.
Cruise missiles have an incredibly good terrain following navigation software - I don't think it's hard to navigate without GPS people get fat dumb and lazy because of GPS...
I think people forget how much US national effort was dedicated to the space race. These guy's did incredibly well, even with modern advances for the money they are working with.
That...but also the generation which had (so to speak) stepped up and won WWII was running the show. Their skills at, experience with, and dedication to giga-scale technological development programs and bleeding-edge aerospace missions made an enormous difference.
You're overestimating an older generation and underestimating the impact of what you can do with unlimited money, and 400K people working on one problem.
Agreed. The Apollo project was 2-3% of GDP at the time, compared to some modern projects:
- Second Avenue Subway at a projected total cost across all phases of $17B vs. the GDP of NYC at $1T = 1.7%
- Berlin Brandenburg Airport at a final cost of €7B vs. the GDP of the city of Berlin and the federal state of Brandenburg combined at €228B = 3%
- California High Speed Rail at a current estimate of $128B for the full LA-SF system vs. the GDP of California at $3.6T = 3.5%
And all of these examples understate the problem, since the GDP was lower when the projects began, the costs may continue to rise as the projects progress, and outside (national-level) funding assistance is also used. So there is at least some merit to the idea that we just can't build as well as we used to.
> So there is at least some merit to the idea that we just can't build as well as we used to.
We could, there is nothing preventing the US or Europe to return to 1970s taxation for companies and the filthy rich. The reason why we can't build like back then is to a very large part the erosion of the tax base to pay for it.
The data does not support your claim. US government expenditure as a fraction of the GDP was lower in the 70s (30-35%) than it is now (35-40%). The government revenue, about the same (around 30%). So the tax base is roughly the same relative to economic output, and spending slightly higher, with the difference made up for by deficits.
The Transcontinental Railroad was built in the 1860s and the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, both when government expenditure as well as taxation at all levels were a single-digit percent of GDP. I suppose by your logic we would be a galaxy-faring species if only we were able to tax the likes of Bezos and Musk?
Note how willing they were to risk life and limb in training exercises, and Armstrong's comments on how important the skills gained there were to their actual mission success.
An unwelcoming view glared at Armstrong. Where the orbital maps indicated a smooth plain, there was instead a vast crater field and collections of truck-sized boulders. Flying manually and low on fuel, Armstrong leveled off and searched for a smooth spot.
The budget, for one. It was 2-3% of the GDP at the time. These commercial efforts have nothing remotely close to that. Also failure was seen as a bigger deal for all involved (due to the soviet threat). So, they'd rather waterfall the hell out of that program rather than fail and do things iteratively. I'm sure these commercial projects will eventually succeed. But it takes time.
To better represent how big of an effort it was. A non-trivial part of the economy was dedicated to get that project working. I think that is a better representation of the effort.
And they managed to live broadcast from the moon! Storage was in it's infancy, so even storing a video from the moon was impossible (they would need many reels of film that just wouldn't fit.
Digital cameras weren't invented, you only had analogue cameras. Most of them required film - and can't be developed on the spot, it requires special equipment. So to get video from the moon, the used cathode ray tube cameras - and even the cathode ray tubes of TV news were huge at the time, you can look at pictures, these things used to take a whole truck to carry. But they managed to get a very small cathode ray tube camera there, and to film long videos of hours of missions on the moon.
And get managed to broadcast it all with analogue RF all the way from the moon to earth. With no digital signal processing, because that wasn't fast enough back then for any real time use. And with surprisingly low noise for an analogue transmission. They made a whole network of receivers on earth to be able to do it.
Today all of that would be cheap, but back then it must've been quite the achievement.
They also had pretty minimal computational power available compared to newer attempts. But maybe putting a human in control is enough.
Google's moon challenge is pretty cool. They actually wanted to give a bonus for taking pictures of the original moon landing site. That could've been really nice.
But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.