The many planned moon landings of 2023
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
A little background:
The first moon landing was accomplished by the Apollo 11 mission from NASA, which landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.
The computer used for this mission was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). It had approximately 64 kilobytes of memory, with 2048 words of erasable magnetic core memory and 36,864 words of read-only core rope memory. The computer operated at a speed of 1.024 MHz. The software for the AGC was written in assembly language, specifically a language developed by MIT engineers called AGC Assembly.
There were a total of six manned U.S. landings (between 1969 and 1972) as a part of the Apollo program.
You can do a lot of things with that money. Now we're talking about missions doing it for a once off $100M. So yes, massive progress has been made.
Apollo is a wonder of soft power - The US inspired countless children all over the world with those voyages. In terms of international good will, it was extremely cheap.
The entire space program was a military program wrapped in a very successful propaganda program.
It showed off US technological and engineering prowess and showed the US as advancing human culture and progress. It also greatly advanced US rocketry and led to rapid advancements in the design of ICBMs and their countermeasures (see Reagan's "Star Wars" programme). The entire space race was motivated by the belief that losing ground to the Soviet Union in spaceflight meant losing real strategic ground in military capabilities - a belief that was probably correct.
It really should be a no-brainer.
The only downside is that it takes a lot longer than war.
James Burke has called the Apollo moon landing the final culmination of the Industrial Age. Or something to that effect.
I also like the comment (also James Burke?) that Apollo was as if someone had taken a bit of the 21st Century back in time to the 1960's.
Remarkable what national will and extraordinarily deep pockets can produce. I was thinking about this very thing the other day as I was putting together a replica of the KIM-1 (8 bit computer from the 1970's) and considering what a game-changer integrated circuits were ... and I understand the push of the Cold War space program was the major contributing factor to their creation.
I also think that Apollo was EXTREMELY risky by modern standards, and that risk was paid for many times in many ways.
At the time, the US believed the USSR/communism was an existential threat to our way of life.
Beating the USSR to the moon, beating them in proxy wars, etc was all part of larger effort to ensure capitalism won. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that external motivation evaporated.
We probably could do a lot of space stuff in the next decade or two if we devoted obscene amounts of resources to it: establishing a lunar base, a bigger LEO base, putting humans on mars, setting up permanent satellites around many celestial bodies in our solar system. It’s just that it would consume so many resources for so long before it benefitted people on Earth - very hard to justify doing it just for the sake of doing it
Could space be more engaged? Of course.. but it didn't stop with Apollos.
We'll be sending AI bots out into the universe (off planet) - that are considerably far away from being AGI - within two decades. It's going to take a lot longer than two decades to develop AGI (without fail the tech industry over-estimates progress in the relative near-term and underestimates it more in the longer term).
I'm always amazed by this image of how they accomplished the rendezvous with the ascent stage. Note the poor condition of the aft panels:
https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/AS16-122-19533.jpg
Absolutely no excuse why we haven't done it since then when they did it with that, and our technology is so much better now.
Well there is the fact that Apollo had (at its peak) something like 400,000 people working on it and involved a spend of $164bn (in 2021 dollars) [0]. I think we could get back to the moon if we had that sort of commitment.
A 21st century equivalent of the pyramids or the great wall of China.
What will our descendants look at and say "I can't believe they built this 2000 years ago!"?
If Apollo 11 was unmanned and that 1202 alarm came up? It probably would have aborted or crashed.
it's hard to succeed at something you aren't even trying for in the first place. the moon landing was funded during the cold war where ICBM adjacent knowledge was required in the face of an existential threat. it wasn't solely for the benefit of shared global human knowledge/progress or whatever. for the US, there's a lot more to lose than gain in terms of "face" by attempting a victory lap against the rest of the world. executing any sort of manned moon or mars mission won't be taken seriously by the US until there's real political/economic pressure to do so (in the form of maybe China laying down a roadmap to land on mars or something).
Failures of extrapolation are most often the cause; not understanding how to think properly, tripping into 2D thinking (extrapolating via some magic forward line, thinking that's how things actually work in reality) and bumping into ignorant logic failures over and over again (associating progress on one thing into broad assumptions that everything of course will progress just like that too, when the things and their potential for progress aren't so tightly bound).
Because X thing progressed rapidly, of course we'll have flying cars in 30 or 50 years. One of the classic failures of ignorant flat thinking of the 20th century. People should ask more questions.
This shortages haven’t really materialized. If anything we have far too much oil, not too little, and can keep on burning it for a long long time (and suffering consequences). Minerals for your car batteries? We can have lots by just seabed-mining right next to some sensitive ecosystems. Etc, etc.
But the question is always, how much of that is within our reach.
Currently nothing out of earth on an economical base. So I also see the point we have to set priorities.
But currently there is a big focus on war, rather than climate change etc. and with more crisis, people tend to think even more short term. Space on the other hand can give that long term thinking effect, that can people make consider whether fighting for the limited ressources on earth is the only way. And maybe instead unite forces for benefit of all of mankind (and possibly life itself).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers...
I think, this is what I said:
"But the question is always, how much of that is within our reach."
Currently that is only earth. With some steps up, you can have all the other planets in this system plus the asteroid belt. Step further up and you have lots and lots of other star systems, the cosmological theoretical limits you are citing are not really an issue on the timeframe that matters to us - space tech is and the limits how fast we can make rockets, or find other ways to take a short path.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Moon#Elemental_...
Even today there is very little effort to end poverty or cure cancer but trillions spent on massive manly flexes and the accumulation of every-increasing personal wealth by ever decreasing numbers of individuals. Since we haven't spent the money here on Earth to explore the moon in the last 50 years do we have any proof we have spent it on the better ways instead?
Why would powers 'in power' ever even attempted that? Yes it looks nice on the paper (just before the elections), but if you do primary-school math there are few obvious benefits for the ones on the rich side, and many drawbacks. Drawbacks that electorate notices immediately.
Cheap chinese (or anywhere else) electronics, clothing, heck almost anything. Almost everybody wants that, even posh Swiss folks I interact daily with, which put a lot of emphasis on quality over quantity, save here and there and go for the cheapest stuff available, at cheapest store possible.
If you want to see real effects of cca equality go to places with strong middle class, ie Nordics or Switzerland (where I live). Very different than pyramid bubbles like ie Singapore, at least as per my colleagues feedback. You can afford significantly less than in cheaper neighbors, services cost a small fortune. Yes even Luigi fixing your drain will send you eye-watering bill, he still lives in same expensive society like rest of us and wants to send his kids to same university like you. The cost of stability and semi-equality is not small. I am still up for it due to overall positive effects on society and its future, but not everybody automatically is - focusing just on numbers can easily sway people towards different opinions.
I'd say best efforts I've seen are 'we help you to help yourself', with very variable success, ie large parts of Africa seems to be stuck in some form of vicious circle for decades.
Social spending tends to be the most important budget item across most of the West and cancer is being attacked from all sides, with significant improvements. It is nevertheless a really complicated set of diseases (I recommend "The Emperor of All Maladies", an interesting book on cancer).
If this is "very little", I am not sure what would satisfy you.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
Sadly it would be such a long way no politician is incentivized to get behind it. Also people can be jerks so while you're busy with this someone could just start a war with you.
My issue with this is that it's so nebulous it can be used for practically anything. And that, in turn, makes it an argument of limited value.
“Doing it for side effects” misses the whole point. Like I already said, if you can state the desired side effects, it’s better just to focus on developing them directly. If you can’t specify the desired side effects, it’s not a good goal. It’s just wishful, optimistic thinking and a bad strategy in a resource constrained environment.
Would you take a medication, not for its prescribed goal, but rather for its “potential” (yet undefined) side effects? Wouldn’t you rather just take a different medication that targets the desired outcome directly?
If you’re alluding to the idea of becoming an interplanetary species, I think the counter argument is that any risk that would mitigate would be more easily mitigated by other means. E.g., it would be much, much easier to “fix” the earth climate than terraform Mars. Redirecting an asteroid is potentially a good case, but the nature of the space program is mostly focused on human rated programs which aren’t needed for that.
where did it imply so? that's your conjecture
They mentioned nothing of value inherent to exploring space but they certainly imply the real value is in "turning coal power plants into stranded assets." Space exploration is only a means to that end, not an end unto itself.
Can you point to anything in that statement that implies space exploration is (in your words) the intended direct effect? I think you're layering your own bias/values into their statement rather than taking their statement at face value.
To me there is no question about it, putting all eggs in one basket is always bad and diversification is good and the only reason not to explore space is short sighted thinking ("I personally don't get to reap the results in my lifetime so it is a waste to me"). Environmental issues on the planet also suffer from this.
And at least with current tech, the ARM programs show its too resource intensive to make sense in that regard. In other words, if there are other short-to-medium term problems that are competing for that funding (ie reality), there isn’t really a good case to be made that it’s a good way to spend constrained resources
I think there's a case to be made that exploration is an end of itself (this is the case made in the movie Interstellar) but that seems to be different that the point the OP made and that you're arguing with resources etc.
If “nothing is an end in itself” it certainly implies “everything is a means to some other end.”
The hardest part of any progress is the social engineering.
I’m usually pretty much against the “The ends justify the means” philosophy. It’s just too easy to rationalize doing bad things as a way to a potentially good result.
I don’t think the profit motive needs to always be aligned, but the value system does. In this case, the US valued “beating” the USSR for existential reasons. Whether it was profitable or not didn’t factor into the equation much.
There's a radical school of thinking of which I don't agree 100%, which is that the Space Shuttle program was a Cold War remnant stuck in a sunk cost fallacy, and set back space exploration for decades since it was extremely expensive and completely limited to LEO and siphoned funds that could've been used for more efficient rockets and modular stations beyond LEO.
You need to cite this.
While NASA's own history ("The Space Shuttle Decision", pub. no. SP-4221) describes the way in which the STS design was rescued from cancellation through Air Force-requested modifications to support satellite-capture missions which after Challenger never materialized, I have never seen any reference in any source to support the idea that the Shuttle was designed to serve as an orbital bombardment system in direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Why do you think Outer Space Treaty will matter in event of a hot war between two nuclear superpowers? NPT was signed a year earlier and it has been continuously violated by signatory powers to this day.
On the latter point you have your causation backward. The intent of treaties like the Outer Space Treaty was to reduce the likelihood of a hot war by interdicting the use of technologies that would destabilize the strategic balance.
It's fair to say that a promise not to risk escalation isn't the same as not risking escalation. But having made the promise used to count for something, too. Now? Especially with all the reciprocal geopolitical damnfoolishness going on in Eastern Europe, who the hell knows?
That said, Russia has telescopes, and the X-37B by all reports isn't as stealthy as its designers would like it to be. While the absurdity of US (and Russian!) military planners is always hard to overestimate, I'd still be surprised to learn anyone seriously expected to successfully steal a march this way.
AFAIK the shuttle was intended to be a "tow truck" for satellites, able to launch and service them in low Earth orbit. Many of those satellites were for spying and espionage.
If you're arguing there's some need for faster response than a nuclear sub launch, launching nuclear cruise missiles from B2 bombers makes far more sense than lugging warheads up to low orbit. We have more B2s than we ever had shuttles.
But it just does not make sense vs. submarines as a launch platform. Three or four shuttles worth of weapons is nothing compared to a single Ohio class nuclear sub (20 missiles alone, and there are 18 of those subs in the US Navy).
You are not getting it. You simply are not getting it. That's okay though, conventional thinking is overly predominant after all and it's okay that you can't escape from it.
Also, treaties mean jack shit. Both countries pledged ultimate elimination of nuclear armament in NPT and look at where we are now? Do you think any treaty will matter if a hot nuclear war breaks out between two nuclear powers? Pure naïveté is what you have.
If the US wanted to station nukes in orbit, they wouldn't do something as dumb as putting them up using a crew. They'd do what any sane person would do and put them on an uncrewed nuclear rated vehicle (ie the Delta/Atlas rockets). It would be way cheaper, and most importantly, would get around the concern of risking the crew.
If the concern was only launching them when tensions are high, the US has a 'rapid launch availability' program for launch providers to be paid to be always available for emergency launches. The Shuttle was essentially incapable of a similar rapid availability due to how delicate it was.
On top of all that, what exactly do you think a ~30 minute early nuke launch (compared against ICBMs) would accomplish against the only two targets the US has been in any position of potentially going to nuclear war against? The number of nukes (optimistically ~14) that a Shuttle could carry can't take out Russia or China's retaliation framework on its own.
It's been over 60 years, more than 3 generations, since the first moon landing. Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
When columbus 'discovered' the americas, it set off dozens or hundreds of ships to explore the americas in the next few decades. When the US navy carried out the first transatlantic flight, it set off dozens of cross-atlantic and cross-oceanic flights within the next decade or two. When the US developed nukes, the soviets, brits, french, chinese, etc developed nukes within a decade or two. When the soviets launched a satellite into space, the US did so within a few weeks. There is this pattern with all major discoveries and technologies.
Why is the moon landing so unique? All major nations have tech today that far exceeds what the US had in the 1960s. In orders of magnitude terms, it is beyond comprehension. In purely computational terms, the 1960s US is computational closer to the first human 300,000 years ago than they are to us today. And yet the 1960s US was able to do something that we aren't able to do today. Not only that, why hasn't any other nation ( russia, japan, germany, china, etc ) done so. The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?
Now that such an absurd restriction has been lifted and we have at least 2 large refuelable vehicles under development, perhaps in a few decades we will see some value to having some industry on the Moon.
Promises of material wealth and resources created an economic and political incentive
>transatlantic
Extremely cheap - and having been demonstrated as possible encouraged many fame seekers or flight enthusiasts to recreate the feat
>Nukes
Obvious reasons - not to lose geopolitical leverage
>satellites
Both in development at the same time. Also there is a real technological benefit in the ability to launch controlled orbital antennas which was obvious even to lowly radio engineers
The obvious answer as to why no one ever did it the second time is that it was never done the first time and that space is, in fact, fake. For the sake of argument (assuming space is real) it would probably be too costly for any other nation for no material/tangible benefit. USSR surely could have done it, but the risk of losing the crew and experiencing bad PR probably outweighed the potential benefit of being the first loser. Even a perfect series of missions wouldn’t have helped them with the very serious problems they were dealing with on the ground. They knew they could get their precious space rocks cheaply and with less risk just by waiting a while. China (more specifically the CCP), on the other hand, could very seriously use a moon landing right about now.
Other countries have been to the moon -- Russia and China even landed vehicles and brought them back[1]. What they did not do is send people. Only the wealthiest countries in the world can afford to do space exploration, and they have better things to spend that money on than sending astronauts on sightseeing tours.
> Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
"Technology" is not a uniform thing. Computers are many, many orders of magnitude better than they were in the 1960s. Rockets have not improved nearly as much. It currently costs thousands of dollars per kilogram to get a payload to low earth orbit. If you want to send a ~70 kg human with hundreds of kg of support equipment into space, they had better have something to do that's worth at least a million dollars. That's way too expensive for almost any kind of human work, which is why the target market for commercial human spaceflight is "bored rich people" rather than "people with something useful to do".
For a longer answer on why human space travel (and especially colonization) probably isn't going to happen the way we'd like, see Charles Stross's essay "The High Frontier, Redux".[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#S...
[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
A quick google tells me that the Apollo program cost about 2.5% of U.S. GDP annually over about 10 years (I remembered 3%, so that is in the ballpark). You can begin to understand why the U.S. government and the public at large decided that the rewards maybe weren't worth the cost. It is still somewhat unclear what benefit we get from spending massive (but relatively much smaller) sums on manned space travel (and to be clear, I wholeheartedly support it regardless).
Also, the life support systems needed to keep us alive are heavy and complicated. Robots don't need them.
The two sides of this question were already perfectly argued 54 years ago.
German Rocket Engineer Helmut Gröttrup (who didn't want to leave his family to join Operation Paperclip and was then instead forced by the Soviets to work for them in Russia until he managed to get back to West Germany) said in 1969 (Wikipedia):
> In an interview on the occasion of the US moon landing in July 1969, Gröttrup criticized the high costs of manned spaceflight and confronted Wernher von Braun with the thesis that automated space probes can achieve the same scientific data with an effort of only 10 or 20 percent of the costs and that the money should be better spent on other purposes. Von Braun justified manned spaceflight with the argument that "it would help humanity achieve immortality".
Sadly, I run into more and more younger people that absolutely believe this because there's so much of this on the internet. They happen to follow influencers that hold these types of beliefs, and that becomes their belief. This obviously leads into other discussions about disinformation, but after recently rewatching Insterstellar where Murph gets in trouble for believing in the moon landings, I can see where we are heading in that direction.
I am more sympathetic to conspiracy theorists, who are trying to make sense of a world that they know they are being lied to about.
In some ways complaining about them is doing the bidding of the deep state. Which does absolutely exist.
You say I'm doing the bidding of the deep state, while all your doing promoting unfounded nonsense gleefully willfully and moronically because you claim to be doing research but are just unable to accept the results because it doesn't fit whatever preconceived notions you have.
It's not just people peddling nonsense for no reason. The reason is very simple: a distrust in institutions.
There’s a huge difference between healthy skepticism and questioning authority to believing George Bush is one of the Lizzard People and JFK is coming back to Dallas. Fake moon landing is right there in gone round the bend territory.
If only everyone diverted their attention to that direction, rather than blame the individuals, maybe we would have the political pressure to make them change.
The real proof is that the Russians had every incentive to call out a fake, and they didn't. And that can only mean one thing .......
......
...... The Russians were in on it!
Better computers are nice, but most of the problems of going to the Moon don't have much to do with computers. The physics hasn't changed in 60 years.
Rockets going to space is a basic physics problem with no post 1950 innovations that give you huge wins. Hence why re-usability to bring costs down is what everyone is focusing on, it is about all you can do. Maybe raptor will prove to be a wee bit better than the best engines of the 1950s but only a bit.
The modern rover is so much safer. There's no purpose for humans or really any life to spend any time in outer space, except for vanity. Apollo astronauts would report seeing flashes with their eyes closed. This was due to being bombarded with cosmic radiation that the magnetosphere protects you from on earth. Space is an environment unfit for life that is adapted to specific planetary conditions.
Also I again highly recommend the book Sunburst and Luminary, by Don Eyles. http://sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html
A very interesting read about the Apollo guidance computer, it's development and testing, it's easy to understand and exciting, even though you know the outcome. There are also very nice referrals to things happening in the world at the time: Viet Nam war, protests, etc.
In the industry, this is called "TRL 1".
A lot of that wealth since has been distributed around the globe, or poured into industry, medicare or social security. With that global wealth distribution, incredible medical advances have been made, and we have blown past the UN millennium goals. It's all a matter of priorities. Gill Scott Haron had this funny critique of Apollo program. https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
With that said, not all priorities are chosen well in my opinion. The vast economic capacity required for a program like a moon landing have since been sequestered by shareholders benefiting from the returns of selling consumer data, building guided missiles, and seeking rents on privatized access to healthcare.
Imagine if that organized planning carried forward into the golden age that followed when half the world was still in smoking ruin. Instead we see all that intellectual and production capacity squandered off into the free market system, where we now have the reality we see today, basically the 1970s with internet as far as actual standards of living go when you scrape off the layer of consumerist tech on top, instead of perhaps more of the expectations we set upon ourselves in the mid century. Things like access to limitless clean energy through atomic power. Supersonic transport. The ability to actually build out new and modern infrastructure, at scale, on time, without decades of litigation and political footballing. But sure, the new iphone that can't sit flat on a table really is nice too.
Imagine if that organized planning carried forward
If you only focus on the positives of how ridiculous American war production became it seems great, but return to reality and it becomes clear that it wouldn't have been sustainable in the long term considering how people were having to compromise with rationing of basic goods like fuel, sugar, meat, metal, paper etc.
are we still at the stage where we don't know about a crater rim that is 3KM high on the moon? I would assume that by now, imaging satellites have captured information like this?
(/s)
The control room was sweating when the landing deadline passed beyond the expected margin of error and they were still flying.
Lesson: always leave a margin of error, especially on the first mission. Armstrong's calmness and clear thinking under duress paid off.
It switched between a virtual rendering of the mission ( think game ) and a group of people watching the same simulation. Not once was there actual camera footage ever.
When things went south, the simulation was halted of course. I guess the programmers didn't account for that eventuality.
I mean, an explosion would have been nice ...
I know every gram of extra mass has to justify being there, and that bandwidth is an expensive commodity, but, for an experimental vehicle (and every version 1 is experimental) I would really like to have a couple down-facing and side-facing wide-angle cameras streaming the descent. Having that, even a manual override is possible (2-second lag is a pain, but better than having no good idea of what happened and a lost vehicle with a payload).
Maybe the lander expected to be at a different place that didn't have the rim of a crater in its path.
But it's ok. We can hate on the SLS in the meantime and also hate on NASA accomplishing it's missions.
Starship meanwhile costs you nothing, and the "Fix" for the launchpad isn't a bandaid, it was planned before the old pad failed because they knew the old pad was failed, and if it works, it will be an order of magnitude cheaper than SLS.
Might not work though! Good thing it doesn't cost taxpayers anything.
But yes. SLS is hideously expensive and severely limits our ability to leave the Earth.