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 My wife shared his (unpublished) notes and audio recordings of the the project with me.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 ...
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.