The Race to Develop the Moon
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
As I understand it, the problem wasn't the video feed, it was the re-transmission for the global TV audience. The original video was then lost. Quoting from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1200161/Apol... :
> Nasa believed they might contain electronic information that was down linked to a radio telescope in Australia from the moon and which could be converted into much sharper pictures of the landing than those broadcast on the day.
> 'The question is why didn’t someone see these 45 tapes as something special. Boy, do we wish they’d done that,' Nafzger said.
> The grainy images that the world saw in 1969 came from a TV camera pointed at a giant wall monitor at mission control, of a live feed from pictures sent by satellite from Australia to California and relayed by landline to Houston.
Article: "Mahoney believes that, because the space industry was a government-sanctioned monopoly for decades, there was no room for risk, or for competition; the fear of failure dominated."
How true is that, really? That is, how many astronauts will (eg.) SpaceX kill by accepting a higher risk level than NASA? Because NASA certainly had room for risk.
That famous footage (literally, in both senses of the word) was of Aldrin’s first steps: Armstrong had already exited the LEM, made his famous statement, and then used a camera to film Aldrin’s descent and steps.
Furthermore, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11 we can read:
> Climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong pulled a D-ring to deploy the modular equipment stowage assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle's side and activate the TV camera.[120][8]
> Apollo 11 used slow-scan television (TV) incompatible with broadcast TV, so it was displayed on a special monitor and a conventional TV camera viewed this monitor, significantly reducing the quality of the picture.[121] The signal was received at Goldstone in the United States, but with better fidelity by Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra in Australia. Minutes later the feed was switched to the more sensitive Parkes radio telescope in Australia.[122] Despite some technical and weather difficulties, ghostly black and white images of the first lunar EVA were received and broadcast to at least 600 million people on Earth.[122] Copies of this video in broadcast format were saved and are widely available, but recordings of the original slow scan source transmission from the lunar surface were likely destroyed during routine magnetic tape re-use at NASA.[121]
Why do you think it's Aldrin's descent which is more famous?
But I was completely messed up in one important regard: the iconic color shots were almost all of Aldrin as the handheld cameras (in 11 at least) were still cameras only and almost all those shots were taken by Armstrong for some reason.
I can accept your statement about which is more popular. Your observations are more informed than mine. Thanks!
The article explains the reason for why almost all shots were of Aldrin.
What I mean there is I doubt that SpaceX will be a less safe option than NASA, Roscosmos by proxy, for getting crew to the ISS. But SpaceX's big picture plan is to get people, regular people, to Mars. And that is something I think would never happen with NASA would never even consider taking on because the risks involved will be extremely high. NASA tried sending a civilian to space exactly one time - Christa McAuliffe. She was to be the first of many. The mission was the tenth, and final, flight of The Challenger. She died. NASA said it would be a few years before they followed up on their plans to send a journalist and other civilians into space. That was 30 years ago.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
The SpaceX long-term goal is cheap and safe space travel to Mars. The risk is very high that this goal will fail. NASA won't accept this sort of mission because it's very likely to be a waste of money which could be used for other NASA goals (eg, robotic probes).
Though looking at it, it implies that NASA is being fiscally responsible, but the other 1/2 of the Mahoney is the 'government-sanctioned monopoly', so my interpretation cannot be what is meant. (I can think of other reasons, like not wanting to upset the funding system.)
Still, I think it's close enough that it clears up my confusion. Thanks!
EDIT: But if people do die on a SpaceX mission, will that count as a mission failure, and will SpaceX be able to continue?
Moreover, while the car industry certainly produces safer cars than ever before, a huge number of deaths are auto related, so there's already some general acceptance that people will die.
I think a better example is Virgin Galactic, where several people have died (one on a flight, three on the ground explosion), while the project mission continues. Then again, VG still isn't flying commercial flights.
I don't know how to interpret that in terms of NASA's proposed non-risk-taking.
Getting to low earth orbit, by contrast, is trivial. In spite of this we've sent fewer than 600 people to LEO, and have lost at least 30 astronauts in the process of it [1]. 5% of our astronauts have lost their lives just getting to and from low earth orbit! This is already pushing the edge of NASA's risk tolerance, which goes a long ways towards explaining why NASA hasn't sent a man beyond LEO in 47 years.
And missions to Mars are substantially more complex and risky than getting to and from LEO. No matter how safe we try to make things, people will die in the process of what ultimately will be the colonization of Mars. This means it's a mission that NASA is unable to take on, as they have become intolerant of risk. But at the same time it's a mission that must be executed. And for this it's a very good thing that we're managing to move beyond dependence upon government agencies for progress in space.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
But one important factor here is that well before we accomplished any of these, it became evident that we eventually would. And that's because the technologies involved were no longer fantasy. What I mean here is that for a person in the 18th century putting a man into space was fantasy. We could foresee it as maybe being possible, but it might also be that the technologies to achieve such might simply never be able to be developed. By contrast, by the earlier part of 20th century century it became clear that such an achievement not only could, but would happen - sooner or later. The technologies necessary were no longer fantasy. And so all that remained was bearing the costs and pushing forward.
And we've now long since passed the same point for Mars. We can, and will, put men on Mars - sooner or later. And this is what I was referring to by 0 risk of failure - technical failures, as in some insurmountable roadblock that simply makes further progress impossible. Colonization is of course a social question, which is going to inherently be much more subjective than a technical one. But I find it not only difficult, but impossible, to imagine any scenario where humans, all, somehow decide to simply stay on a single planet. And if we assume that humans will leave Earth, Mars is arguably the most logical first permanent destination. Mineral rich, water rich, atmosphere with CO2 (sabatier reaction for methane + water), large land mass, reasonable gravity, reasonable temperature extremes, near identical day-night cycle, etc. Big downsides are extremely low atmospheric pressure which is of course unbreathable, as well as high radiation exposure.
You've used the same rhetorical constructions that I've read in books written before I was born. They also argued that then was the time. Why were they wrong, and you are right?
Oh, and those proposing undersea cities made many of the same arguments.
I'll point out that "living in 'unlivable' locations on Earth" can be done with neolithic technology, so that's a rather odd one to list. Crossing the ocean by boat" through stages was something the ancient Polynesians did without metal.
And 'breaking the sound barrier in human flight' hasn't yet proven to be economically feasible for general passenger services.
As for "more subjective than a technical one" ... there's a major problem of how to create a self-sustaining ecosystem, much less one where the people who live in it have enough time to train the next generation to run the ecosystem.
Rather offtopic, but if that chain isn't convoluted enough for you, check out exactly how they accomplished giant wall monitors in the 1960s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor
[edit: this guy's presentation about them is fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-BvMcqEc98 ]
(Yes, I know the mileage isn't reimbursable because government transportation was provided.)
Except we're in denial about the cost, so we're not actually planning to spend that much money. So we won't succeed.
Honk honk, indeed.
We can be cynical without resorting to the clown Pepe meme. While hiding it behind a type of dogwhistle can be attractive, I'm sure there are many other people outside of one community that can relate to your sentiment here.
Everyone who has an iota of interest should read this, I plan to share it widely. I also highly recommend the Apollo 11 documentary to anyone who hasn't seen it.
I’m curious how much research he did on China’s internal politics; hard for me to know how much was based in reality.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117741/nasa-clps-progr...
"Know" ? According to Wiki, "scientists have conjectured since the 1960s that water ice could survive in cold, permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's poles." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water
That article is full of qualifiers. Considering how much thorough science is found in WP ... and the -strong desire- many feel to verify this as fact ... where's the beef?
We "know" Mars has methane, too.
Suppose there really is water. In what quantities? Where? (If they don't land near it ... transport?) Who is going to -bet their life on it- ??
I've never found a definitive source for this "know". I'm all eyes.
For use on earth probably but there's also a lot of unexplored potential surface and near surface resources on the moon where going deeper and deeper into the earth is quite expensive and dangerous in it's own right.
For use in space especially consumables like water it makes a lot of sense to find them in space as much as possible because the rocket equation is a royal pain in the ass from the ground. Starting in space drastically increases the amount of mass we could move around. Eventually we could build the bulk of the structure in space and only lift up hard to manufacture stuff like life support and computer systems to install in space (and eventually, hopefully, be able to build everything off earth but there's a LOT of industrial base to build up before things like ICs can be manufactured off world).
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.htm...
https://books.google.com/books?id=M6Fkx1hxfw8C&pg=PA190&lpg=...
> Establishment of a lunar base will degrade the lunar vacuum. The time scale for distribution of exhaust gas across the surface of the moon is much less than the excape lifetime of the gas in the lunar atmosphere, and thus exhaust gas can be approximated as uniformly spread across the surface. A 20 person exploration base will contribute an amount of waste gas on the same order of magnitude as the daytime "natural" atmosphere. A 250 person "industrial" facility would be likely to contribute considerably more due to waste gas from various production processes such as lunar oxygen production and mining of helium 3 from the lunar regolith. This could degrade the lunar ambient to levels on the order of 3 nanotorr, replacing the mostly non-reactive gasses hydrogen, helium, and neon with more reactive gasses containing carbon and oxygen. This vacuum is still good enough to perform many important vacuum processes, such as plasma-deposition of amorphous silicon for solar cells, but processes such as molecular beam epitaxy or locating a intersecting beam accelerator on the moon will require additional vacuum pumping. In any case, though, pumping to ultrahigh vacuum will be much easier on the moon than on Earth.
Also there's a lot of chemicals used in chip manufacturing that we probably can't get on the moon at least at first in addition to just getting the silicon pure enough and the other doping elements.
I'm not sure about the energy requirements but it should be doable.
This is good for industrial processes you can start and stop over the course of a month but life support needs lots of batteries, about 10 times the weight of the solar panels.
Symmetry has made many comments about the Moon, and they are consistent with the comment made here, and in alignment with my understanding of the physics.
For examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959884 says "the only viable colonization sites on the moon are the north and south poles, where you can get solar power continuously." and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997459#15002984 "The Moon rotates once every month and Mars once every 24 hours. If you're using solar panels it's a big deal making it though the lunar night, you'll need lots of batteries, maybe 25 times the weight of your panels. ... There are the Peaks of Eternal Light on the south pole of the moon where this isn't an issue and you can just keep pointing your solar panels at different parts of the horizon all month." These were made 4 and 2 years ago, respectively.
I expect the main reason to target ICs is so you can deal with loss of earth type disasters. This depends of course, if zero-g is an advantage for making ICs production will move quickly. If space needs a lot of things that ICs are a byproduct of they might do it, for example a lot of solar panels would be needed in space, if there is an easy change to make ICs on the same lines of course they do it. Of course my knowledge of IC manufacturing limited, my guess is the above doesn't apply but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong.
Imagine if we surveyed the asteroid belt and sent robots to likely areas to mine for resources. Then returned them on kinetic delivery trajectories that were designed to accelerate the moon's orbital velocity (tidal effects or something else are probably slowing it down slowly over time? I forget the details) and keep it balanced.
We'd probably want water, metals, and anything useful for chemical reactions sustaining life, industrial production, or high-density single use fuel. Hydrogen and Oxygen could be obtained from ice via electrolysis, which solar power could provide during the day.
That's a big if: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot...
I don't expect to see a practical fusion reactor on Earth within my lifetime, much less on the moon. Just imagine the cost of building a Tokamak there.
Could easily be cheaper than sifting through huge quantities of seawater for the right isotopes.
Heavy hydrogen, deuterium, is (relatively) abundant on earth and can be harvested from seawater. Heavier hydrogen, tritium, is quite rare, on earth its produced by bombarding lithium. It has a half life of 12 years so it wouldn't be accumulate to useful amounts on the moon. It does decay into helium-3 which is stable, that's why it does accumulate.
Fusion with helium-3 takes place at a much higher temperature than deuterium / tritium (DT) fusion, that makes the confinement problem more difficult than the much more studied DT pathway to fusion power generation. One advantage is the possibility of direct conversion to electricity.
All this is discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3
- it's in a vacuum
- it has low gravity
- abundant solar energy without the uncertainty of weather
So many different kinds of industrial manufacturing processes are hampered by the presence of oxygen/air; in a vacuum you could make super pure alloys. Low gravity means you can use smaller, less powerful machinery to do the same work. The solar thing is kinda self-explanatory.
A big point was that there are lots of oxidized metals on the moon. With enough heat, you can drive off the oxygen, giving you metal for construction and air to breathe.
What's really in deficit there is hydrogen, which you can bring up (although we've now found water there so maybe need less of that?). The rest can be found in the asteroid belt (turns out some asteroids are made out of something resembling tar - plenty of carbon and nitrogen).
The delta V to get off the moon is less than earth, and the lack of atmosphere means less drag to deal with, so smaller rockets and bigger payloads. Also with the lack of atmosphere, rail launch facilities are possible without killing passengers. If you can construct the payloads on the moon or in its orbit, that's less pollution and more objects in higher orbits.
Unless you meant the 21st century? Since the only people to walk on the moon in the 20th were americans.
reminded me of
"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
These writers just can't help themselves. It's part of their hive-mind checklist.
I think that's the GP's point. It adds nothing relevant to the article but the author still mentions it for reasons which the GP is speculating about.
I implied it was tangential (and consequentially implied: counterproductive) to inflate the relevance of an aside.
Edit: clarifying I mean the article author
The moon landing program ran concurrently with civil rights conflict on the ground.
For straight-to-the-science, Wikipedia or other publications are better.
There is a publication for most major preferences. I used to love the detail of The New Yorker when i was single and had lots of time (former paper subscriber here, and current consumer via Audm.)
If I just want information, I'll go to Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc., search for some keywords, skim it, and close the tab. Writing can be used for many purposes.
I think he's saying that the article takes unnecessary pains to signal, "These people weren't 'on our side' culturally". Unsophisticated, un-woke, "problematic", etc. Parent is correct that his has become a checklist trope over the past few years.
https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.htm...
Giant impacts are relatively rare - in the ~13 years of NASA's monitoring program, the largest impactor seen on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon left a 15m (inner diameter) crater [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.6458.pdf], and most have been orders of magnitude smaller.
Remember - the Moon has no active tectonics, no atmospheric weathering, and no water or other liquid evaporation/condensation cycle. The craters you see are an aggregate over billions of years, including some periods of much higher levels of random debris than currently (e.g. the Late Heavy Bombardment, which left most of the truly stupendous craters). In any given human lifetime spent on the Moon, you're unlikely to even be within visible distance of an impactor that can go through 2m of regolith.