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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

Space is _incredibly_ hard.

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.

has any of the recent attempts to the moon given us footage of the lunar lander and other machinery that was left behind from the prior missions?

this would easily put the conspiracy theories to bed

> has any of the recent attempts to the moon given us footage of the lunar lander and other machinery that was left behind from the prior missions?

Yes, e.g. LRO launched in 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter)

> 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 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from 2009 sent back pictures, yes.

It clearly didn't put the conspiracy theories to bed.

You can see the stuff left behind from earth, especially the retro reflectors.

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."

https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.05863

Yes

And No to the second question.

the big elephant in the room.

Which? Apollo 13?

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