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 My wife shared his (unpublished) notes and audio recordings of the the project with me.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

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 ...

Nevertheless he didn't takeover completely - it was still a computer assisted landing.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc

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).

Absolutely.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#History

[2] https://earthsky.org/space/how-do-astronomers-know-the-mass-...

>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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._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.

> 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.

back on those days, the best brains of their generation were not occupied with thinking about how to make people click ads...

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.

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.

> they were thinking about how to effectively kill as much people as possible at a distance.

And rockets that can navigate precisely are a nice side-effect of that.

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.

That is some world class cope there.

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.

That's not actually true.

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.

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

Source: Project Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis

https://history.nasa.gov/Apollomon/Apollo.html

No, they were in gay conversion therapy, or having to walk 3 miles just to use the only colored restroom on the campus.

The best brains of this generation aren't focused on ad clicks, either.

I suspect part of the moon landing failure has to do with the primacy of physics in our technology in that era compared to electronics today.

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.

Related: the term “The Adjacent Possible”. I first heard it here: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-false-d...

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.

It appears that the money spent to ensure a one-off success is far more than the sum of all the costs of the failures of SpaceX.

Source?

I googled the cost of building and firing NASA's big rocket, $50b, and the cost of building and firing Starship, $10m.

That is a highly strange looking URL

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? The Vietnam War was in full swing back then.

I don't have the numbers though.

> 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.

The video feed was HD video too! Alas, only one room in Australia got to see the HD video feed.

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.

> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight [flight?] zone over it.

Moon landing deniers would eat that one up.

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.

There are retroreflectors on the moon you can use to prove we were there.

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!

That's why even in conversations where we're talking abstractly about this stuff, I just pull out my phone and wave it around.

If science doesn't work then what the fuck is this thing?

Does the existence of some object on the moon surface prove that the broadcast was live and that the spaceship successfully returned?

No, but your probability heuristic is catastrophically flawed if, from that, you conclude the landing was faked despite material having been placed up there.

> from that, you conclude

I don't.

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.

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]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085910/

> But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.

You don't have to fly straight over it of course.

By the way what authority does NASA have over the moon? I thought the outer space treaty declares that no country can own things in space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

I'm all for preserving it but I do wonder how they can declare this.

IIRC the landing would have been a failure too without Neil Armstrong's skill as a pilot under pressure

That sounds like a race to Instagram-ify the moon. Nothing sad about preventing that.

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.

The uploader has not made that video available in my country. I wonder if they’re worried about stricter libel laws

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.

Easy fix. Do cgi of the control room.

Who does the CGI?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookout_Mountain_Air_Force_Sta...

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!

Yes, you are the only one.

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.

Too long. Didn't watch. But found https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie/ which I've read a long time ago to be convincing.

Recommended.

As well as https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/ from that same site.