> 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.
>> 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.
Rather offtopic, but if that chain isn't convoluted enough for you, check out exactly how they accomplished giant wall monitors in the 1960s:
> "Watching the footage of Neil Armstrong’s first steps”
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.
> 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?
Because Aldrin's video is much clearer, for what reason I don't know, and appears to be the one more often shown AFAICT...and not that anyone will really care in the long run.
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 think there are two sides to risk. Risk tolerance for a given mission is one. Mission tolerance for a given risk is the other.
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.
Ahh, I think I got it. I'll restate it to see if you correct me.
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?
Not at all. It's not about the big picture goal but about the individual missions. There's effectively 0 risk that the big picture goal of getting people to, and ultimately colonizing, Mars will fail. It's a question of when, not if. But the individual missions, especially the early ones, to Mars will involve a high degree of risk.
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.
We've breached countless barriers that, at one point, seemed impossible or insurmountably challenging. Crossing the ocean by boat - later by plane, breaking the sound barrier in human flight, living in 'unlivable' locations on Earth, getting into space, putting a man on the moon, living in space for months at a time, and so on.
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.
We can certainly send someone to Mars. But doing so is "of course a social question" ... and you haven't answered the question of why must do it now.
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.
In the context of overall mission goals, the mission for the misnamed 'autopilot' of Tesla is to be safer than humans.
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.
Today-I-Learned that the Apollo astronauts had to pay for their own bed while going to The Moon. "they earned eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed on the spacecraft"
I don't see anything in there about mileage in the space vehicle, only on the ground. The oldest IRS rate I could find is from 1980: 22¢/mile. So for 205,000 miles the reimbursement would be $45,100. Or $138,724.09 in today's money.
(Yes, I know the mileage isn't reimbursable because government transportation was provided.)
When are developing asteroids? The moon is a neat stepping stone, but the raw quantity of space stuff just sitting in asteroids is where I'm really excited to see us go. We're talking chunks of rare metals in the thousands of tons range. As well as kilometers of iron, nickel, and water for building and supplying ships in space.
I miss the Obama space administration. Instead of shooting for platinum mountains, we're planning to spend 20$ billion to repeat a great fucking Kennedy did decades ago.
Except we're in denial about the cost, so we're not actually planning to spend that much money. So we won't succeed.
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.
India is launching their second moon probe in July, expected to land on Moon by September. China has also ramped up its efforts. US has declared its intentions of landing humans on moon by 2030. I am sure India and China will have similar capabilities till 2030 as well.
Absolutely the best overview I've seen yet of "the Moon situation", with a fully sufficient range of the most salient facts well described-- in addition to plenty of poetic trivia garnish I never knew about. Anybody who isn't anticipating some aspect of this does not fully understand one of the most fundamental human drives.
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.
Kim Stanley Robinson's latest book is Red Moon, and it's set maybe a decade or two after moon colonization has happened. It's not his best work (it's worth reading but I'm not sure if it's worth owning) but he is known for this genre of fiction and it has some pretty interesting observations in it.
According to him at a bookstore appearance he did a few months ago, he did a lot of research. I believe he had substantial discussions with Chinese friends (mostly academics). He also said he did a reading at an event with Liu Cixin.
Unfortunately there is almost no carbon or hydrogen on the moon with the exception of trace amounts in permanently shadowed craters. Self sufficiency is barely possible in those areas which comprise less than 1% of the moon's surface.
As the article says, the moon has water, and that means hydrogen. Regarding carbon, it is an abundant element in the universe, so I would expect there would be a good deal in the minerals.
"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).
ICs are generally small and light - they would be among the last things to make in space. I expect we would start with metals: steel is very important for building, and you need a lot of it, so making that in space gets the rocket equation strongly on your side. Rocket fuel is another one because you can cheat the rocket equation if you don't have to bring all your fuel with you. As manufacturing and space cities progress more and more industry will be brought local.
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.
Von-numan machine style exploration is the major reason to fab anything in space. It doesn't even need to be the latest process or anything super special; it just needs to be reliable and operate within the power budget.
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.
For silicon based things, the moon would make sense for manufacturers. Is there enough solar energy for something like that? Specifically for smelting and refinement? What materials would need to be shipped in for manufacture?
It's more that it's a very sensitive process with a lot of very delicate steps that'll be hard to setup. To get it started there will be some challenges adapting the processes to the lower gravity I'm sure and if it's not being manufactured on the moon transitioning the machines to microgravity is an even larger challenge. It's also just that those are some of the lighter components so building them on earth and launching them for outfitting in space will be ok for a while.
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.
Yeah ultimately they should be made on site. There's a lot of materials that go into them though that may not be procurable on the moon until there's a much larger mining and refinery operation.
For half the month the lunar surface is basically paradise for solar electricity with 1.3 kw/m2 of sunlight 24 hours a day instead of just the 1.0 kw/m2 on Earth's surface for half the day. But the other half of the month is complete darkness except star and Earth light. Unless you're at one of the poles and rig a solar panel to rotate horizontally.
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.
That's why most missions are going to be focused around the poles at first until something other that solar is brought to the moon (like nuclear, be it fusion or fission).
That's not how the moon works. There's no "dark side", only a "far side" that always faces away from the earth. It's just that a moon day lasts ~28.5 earth days.
Not that it makes a difference, but I like to investigate things.
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.
In a place with lab quality vacuum instead of an atmosphere, at that distance from the sun, I suspect you could use direct focused sunlight for smelting. Not sure if that would be more practical than electric furnaces, though. It would be more efficient, but the setup is less flexible.
My understanding is that the Moon's atmosphere is so tiny, it's a lab quality vacuum. I got this from reading stuff from hard SF author Ben Bova. This might be a bit outdated, however.
> 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.
Probably yes. There's a few things the moon has going for it:
- 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.
I read an obscure futurist book years ago in which a pretty cool picture of concrete steps toward becoming a stellar civilization were laid out.
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.
I've heard that the real resource is the heavy hydrogen contained in the first millimeters of the crust as a result of the bombardment of solar winds. If we could use it for fusion power, the heavy hydrogen contained on the moon would power the world nearly forever.
I believe you are thinking of light helium (helium-3), not heavy hydrogen. Everything I've read about mining on the moon mentions it.
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.
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.
That seems like a lot of work to get deuterium and tritium on Earth. If mining them from the moon is really the cheapest option, I am even less optimistic about fusion.
It's a lot of work to set up the operation (any extraterrestrial endeavor is) but once there it should be possible to launch canisters of fusion fuel back to earth cheaply using some of that fuel for power, a railgun, and the fact that the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth.
Could easily be cheaper than sifting through huge quantities of seawater for the right isotopes.
The article mentions a 12-minute landing video, but naive Googling doesn't turn anything up except a bunch of much shorter videos (less than 3 minutes). Does anyone have a link to the full thing?
Why do I get the feeling the first people to make it too the moon in the 21'st century are going to be the first people to make first contact with an alien civilization?
Establishing a moon base seems far more pragmatic than one on Mars. It's a lot easier to debug problems there so a Mars mission would be much more likely to be a success.
All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon
These writers just can't help themselves. It's part of their hive-mind checklist.
This is a New Yorker article, so it has a literary bent in terms of details and descriptions typical of long-form publication. That is what New Yorker subscribers want. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism
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 have time to read about some unusual subject purely for enjoyment, it's hard to beat the New Yorker. I still remember a truly wonderful pair of articles years ago about a road-trip across Russia (written by Ian Frazier?). They allowed me to experience a place I'll never visit, and I enjoyed the trip.
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 don't believe parent comment is saying that the description is too literary, or not scientific enough.
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.
It's a lengthy article and that's your takeaway? Seems rather tangential, doesn't it? I wouldn't have even noticed the remark if you hadn't pointed it out.
In communications that's typically referred to as an aside. It would be a bit of information the author wants the reader to be aware of (for any number of reasons including context of either the subject or the author's perspective), but doesn't want to make the focus of the messaging. It's a common device in writing.
I implied it was tangential (and consequentially implied: counterproductive) to inflate the relevance of an aside.
This is a new form of white supremacy, where the article author goes out of their way to mention the white race in association with accomplishments. I find the trend to be extremely creepy.
To be fair the author was the one who mentioned it first. I tend to agree with the GP here. The lack diversity cred of a bunch of dudes 60yr ago is not really worth mentioning. It has no bearing on the content of the article and only serves as a distraction from the main subject. Considering who the author[0] is I don't think this was an attempt to "point out the accomplishments of the white race" or something like that.
I was also agreeing with the GP. The author of the article is the one exhibiting white supremacist behavior by mentioning it in the article when it's unnecessary.
Lacing white supremacy with sentiments of guilt or condemnation doesn't make it any less an example of white supremacy. Perhaps the least interesting thing about the people who went to the moon is the color of their skin. Only racists care what color their skin was. Old school white supremacists say it's great that they were white, new school white supremacists are upset that the whites did so well (are/were supreme). Both are racist, and we'd be better off moving past them.
What the hell? You are reading so much into a single sentence and skipping the entire context surrounding it. According to the article the moon landing was just a political stunt that did not result in any progress toward space exploration. In fact it actually marks the end of human space travel. The fact that only a single country went to the moon is not impressive. It is damning. Space has become uninteresting and no one wants to go there.
If you want to understand why there will never be a Moon base on the Moon, all you have to do is to take a look at any photo of the Moon itself - without atmosphere the planet is being been bombarded so often that you would have to go underground. Deep underground. Too deep underground!
Sure, if you're only trying to protect against meteroids and radiation. But there's a whole lot of craters deeper than 2m on the moon. If you're trying to protect against the impacts that produced them, you do in fact have to be a long way down.
(Nitpick: those impactors are also meteorites, just big ones; the numbers in the paper I linked numbers are based on probabilities over time of an impactor large enough to get through shielding.)
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.
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.