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Comment by EarthIsHome | Hacker News Reader

> The feats accomplished over half a century ago with the very limited resources of that era are truly astonishing.

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.

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> Absolutely no excuse why we haven't done it since then

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs

Just imagine what we could accomplish if we were able to mobilize a massive number of people in this age.

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!"?

apple silicon? ;)

We had two highly trained wetware intelligence systems on board Apollo to land that thing successfully.

If Apollo 11 was unmanned and that 1202 alarm came up? It probably would have aborted or crashed.

It may have landed at a steep angle on a boulder, like Viking 1 did. Fortunately, Viking 1 still worked.

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