
Could the Apollo 11 moon landing be duplicated today? ‘Lots of luck with that’ - lisper
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-could-apollo-11-be-repeated-20190714-story.html
======
broth
It's interesting to ponder the feats in technological advancement that were
made in short periods of time in the 20th century. For example, in 1948 when
the transistor was first revealed by Bell Labs to 1969 when mankind landed on
the moon. Around 20 years. That's pretty amazing.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I think that’s the case with most new technology. The first steps are very
fast but then innovation goes much slower. You can see that for example in
computing. PCs made a lot of fast progress until sometime in the 90s and then
things stagnated. The same probably for cell phones. The last five years or
more saw only incremental improvement. Nothing revolutionary.

~~~
gervase
> _PCs made a lot of fast progress until sometime in the 90s and then things
> stagnated._

Transistor densities increased 2 orders of magnitude (~100x) between 1995 and
2005. Integer operations were a little less, maybe 1.5 oom, over the same
period. When you say that PCs stagnated over that period, in what context did
you mean?

~~~
Ididntdothis
They didn’t become much more useful. I mean that in the same sense that a car
from 1950 and a car from today are not that much different. Yes the modern car
is much better but the big jump was to be able to move from one point to
another quickly which was achieved with cars from 1950 or earlier. Same for
cell phones. Having a 3G connection and GPS was a huge step but since then I
don’t see much revolutionary change.

~~~
nostrademons
I get your point, but Amazon, Google, Netflix, zillions of web forums,
Facebook, AirBnB, Craigslist, Google Maps, NextDoor, DoorDash, Google Photos,
all the messaging apps, and many other services all post-date 1995. In terms
of how I live vs. how my parents lived, basically all the major changes are
because of the Internet, and most happened in the last 15 years.

~~~
ssivark
Well, apart from Amazon to some extent (we'll find out in twenty years), none
of the others have fundamentally altered our lifestyles. Eg: Google --
searching the interwebs is a crazy fantastic capability... But most people
aren't really using to live their lives any differently from twenty years ago.

I think YouTube (and possibly Facebook) might be among the only other web
services having significant qualitative impact on people's lives. Maybe
Uber/Lyft for an American audience used to owning cars.

------
fortran77
I, too, wonder if you could build a high-quality team where you're free to
choose the best people available, solely on proven ability to pilot, solve
problems under pressure, and general engineering skills. (Collins was West
Point and Harvard, Buzz Aldrin has a Sci.D. from MIT, Neil Armstrong was an
experienced pilot and degrees from Purdue and USC). And that doesn't begin to
show the skills of the leadership of the ground crew....

------
NeedMoreTea
Wait for the baby boomers to die off. I'll be towards the tail end. :)

Then humanity can go to the Moon, Mars, toroidal space stations, build high
speed rail, maglev, and whatever else might be in the pipeline. Ignoring that
everyone sold off the pipeline.

With luck, my children's generation can rediscover government that isn't quite
so comic book in its generation selfishness. With both left and right
remembering to occasionally doing the things that are right and helps
everyone. Like build housing, create and support public services, develop
infrastructure and big national vanity (Apollo, Concorde, Bullet trains etc)
and science projects.

~~~
JabavuAdams
In 1968, the year before the moon landing, US cities were literally burning.
Martin Luther King was murdered, and so was Bobby Kennedy. In Vietnam, there
was the battle of Khe San

The regression of recent years is disturbing, but the US managed to put humans
on the moon in times when it was much more divided and unabashedly racist than
today. I haven't said anything about greed in general, but remember that the
largesse of those times was leaving out large untouchable chunks of the
population.

~~~
lettergram
Ever consider that part of what got us to the moon was the divided and
bashfully racist setting (perhaps not the racism itself)?

Contrary to your comment, society - in general, was more uniform and ridged.
There were faults, and obvious a repressed 20% or so that were not really even
part of society (blacks, hippies, etc). But the norms, the suits, the ties,
those who made up the vast bulk of society. They were all people from (or
raised during) WWII which had a unifying effect. They were the people who got
stuff done like going to the moon, not the 20% impacting social change. Both
were necessary to achieve growth, one technological, one social.

Today, we have primarily been focusing on the social aspects of society.
Corporations, taking the place of technological growth. Largely, because
society doesn’t want the technological growth from the government, they want
social welfare and “fairness”. Both of which, we honestly seem to have
diminishing returns on at this point.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I think that means that it should be much easier to redo the moon landing
these days. Not only is technology more advanced, but also _the people trying
to design and program this wouldn 't have to wear suits and ties._

~~~
JabavuAdams
The problem is today we have an entrenched and embattled NASA. Just watched
the full Robert Zubrin video that was linked elsewhere in the comments.

NASA hasn't been able to get to the Moon, or Mars, because NASA has been
structurally incapable of deciding to 1) go to a destination, and 2) do only
the things that help to get to that destination. Instead, everyone has to
protect their turf and their technology, the net result being that NASA isn't
allowed to go to the moon or to mars the easy way -- they have to invent a
ridiculously complicated way that keeps all of their constituencies happy and
their pet project funded.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/zNgFb](http://archive.is/zNgFb)

------
tus88
Personally I would rather see more advanced probes/rovers go to Mars and
others than another moon landing.

------
Svekax
"Picture a man or woman of the late 19th century, perhaps your own great-
grandfather or great-great-grandmother, sitting in an ordinary American home
of 1890. And now pitch him forward in an H G Wells machine, not to our time
but about halfway – to that same ordinary American home, circa 1950. Why, the
poor gentleman of 1890 would be astonished. His old home is full of mechanical
contraptions. There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of
food and keeping the milk fresh and cold! There is another shiny device
whirring away and seemingly washing milady's bloomers with no human assistance
whatsoever! Even more amazingly, there is a full orchestra playing somewhere
within his very house. No, wait, it's coming from a tiny box on the
countertop!

The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our
time-traveler glances through the window: A metal conveyance is coming up the
street at an incredible speed – with not a horse in sight. It's enclosed with
doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into the yard, and the
doors open all at once, and two grown-ups and four children all get out - just
like that, as if it's the most natural thing in the world! He notices there is
snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is
lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black
instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a "telephone"? He'd heard
about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them.
But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking
tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country -
and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were
standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And
she says she'll see him tomorrow!

Oh, very funny. They've got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they?
What marvels! In a mere 60 years!

But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner
of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even further into the
future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in
1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!

So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.

And when he dismounts he wonders if he's made a mistake. Because, aside from a
few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: The
layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone... Oh, wait. It's got buttons
instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the
woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem
...larger, and dressed like overgrown children. And the refrigerator has a
magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what
trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.

But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed
in 1950.

Let's pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: The
computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like thing
in the corner, as one would in 1950, you can now watch Uncle Miltie on YouTube
clips from your iPhone. But be honest, aside from that, what's new? Your
horseless carriage operates on the same principles it did a century ago. It's
added a CD player and a few cup holders, but you can't go any faster than you
could 50 years back. As for that great metal bird in the sky, commercial
flight hasn't advanced since the introduction of the 707 in the 1950s. Air
travel went from Wilbur and Orville to bi-planes to flying boats to jetliners
in its first half-century, and then for the next half-century it just sat
there, like a commuter twin-prop parked at Gate 27B at LaGuardia waiting for
the mysteriously absent gate agent to turn up and unlock the jetway.

...

'I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we
cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability. 'Of course, the
standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no
longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I
am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached
its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings –
and has been declining ever since.'

Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe,
but, comparing 1950 to the early 21st century, our time traveler from 1890
might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard
even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the
takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing
in a dusty crater beyond our planet... It half-lingers in collective
consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a 19th century date
farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to
be around here someplace."

\--From Mark Steyn's "After America"

~~~
Fronzie
That missed the semiconductor revolution which brought us GPS, internet and
pocket mainframes.

Weather forecasts have improved tremendously, giving tornado warnings which
are useful. Knowledge is instantly available instead of just hoping that the
local library has a book on the topic.

The house might look the same now as in the 50s, but life has really changed a
lot.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Apollo was a symbol of national unity that hinted at the possibility of
planetary unity. It was an inspiring collective game changer - even if it was
mostly about beating the USSR - and it happened during a time when The Future
was still an undiscovered country.

Up until about the mid-90s, when computers and the Internet started to become
consumer commodities, technology was The Future. When you bought an 8-bit
micro to learn BASIC you weren't buying a nearly-useless blob of circuitry
that crawled along so slowly you could barely do anything with it - you were
buying The Future. It was the same Future that Apollo, Star Trek, electronic
hobby culture, and

Around 2000 - in fact around 9/11 - that Future disappeared and was replaced
by a reversion to idiot tribalism. A few elements continued - notably gender
and identity politics - but the last product that came from The Future was the
iPhone. And that turned out to be a kind of shrink-wrapped version that turned
you into a passive consumer of The Future instead of someone who could help
build it.

Life has changed in that it's now far more backward looking, and there's no
optimistic Future to build and look forward to. The Future is just as likely
to be corporate, brutally oppressive, manipulative, inhumane, systemically
dishonest, psychopathic, disempowering, and dystopian as it is to be a
positive sun-filled utopia full of incredibly bright, competent, and creative
people doing amazing things.

This will probably change again at some point in the future, but humanity
seems to be going through one of its depressive self-destructive phases at the
moment, and it's going to take a while to find that collective sense of
optimism, possibility, and adventure.

------
fuzzfactor
"I'll take Lunar Landings for a thousand, Alex"

Alex: "The answer is; 'First Word Spoken From The Surface Of The Moon'"

------
armada651
Unlike in the 60s these days it's far easier to just stage the moon landing
rather than actually going there.

~~~
kabdib
Maybe -- but you'd have a lot of people trying to listen in on radio
communications (voice, telemetry) and those signals had better come from a
plausible direction. That's for starters.

I also wonder how common privately held telescopes and radar equipment is,
stuff that could detect a spacecraft on the way to the moon. It seems
practically impossible to spot an actual landing with a telescope, but you
could probably determine if something about the right size had acclerated out
of Earth orbit and was heading to the moon. Window of hours, probably.

It'd be expensive to fake all this with enough fidelity to foil analysis tools
that exist today (much less tools that will be available over the next few
decades). It's probably cheaper to actually land on the moon again :-)

~~~
simonh
I didn’t my see how it could have been faked back then, for the same reasons.
Three radio telescopes were officially assigned to receive the video
transmissions for the mission, but it was an unencrypted signal on a published
frequency.

The Russians could certainly track the vehicle on radar, at least on the boost
there and return trajectory, and pick up any of its signals. Jodderal Bank in
the UK certainly did. There’s no way they could reasonably have fooled the
entire global optical and radio astronomy community plus the Russians.

That’s all aside from the fact the limitations of video technology at the time
would have made faking the video impossible because the tape tech to record a
transmission that long didn’t exist for almost another decade. Or the fact
thousands of people would have had to be in on the scam, many of them not even
American.

Also since then, multiple Lunar observation missions have photographed the
equipment and even the dust trails left by the lunar rovers. The Chinese would
also certainly know by now, with their recent high resolution surveys and
landings on the moon.

~~~
kaendfinger
Disclaimer: Not a moon landing denier or anything of that sort, I’ve just
educated myself on why people think this.

My understanding is that people believe that they did indeed launch a rocket
but that the landing on the moon was faked. Some claim they were in orbit
around the earth the whole time, some others claim they went around the moon
but staged the landing. There are even some who believe that we did land on
the moon but there was a tape that was staged in the event of an accident. The
level of moon landing denial varies by each and every person.

~~~
inflatableDodo
> The level of moon landing denial varies by each and every person.

My two personal favourites being the people who believe we didn't go to the
moon _and_ get all our technology from aliens, and the truly amazing Krishna
version;

> _" The Vedic account of our planetary system is already researched,
> concluded, and perfect. The Vedas state that the moon is 800,000 miles
> farther from the earth than the sun. Therefore, even if we accept the modern
> calculation of 93 million miles as the distance from the earth to the sun,
> how could the “astronauts” have traveled to the moon–a distance of almost 94
> million miles–in only 91 hours (the alleged elapsed time of the Apollo 11
> moon trip)? This would require an average speed of more than one million
> miles per hour for the spacecraft, a patently impossible feat by even the
> space scientists’ calculations.

>Another important reason why the manned moon landing must be a hoax is that,
according to the Vedas, each planet has its particular standard of living and
atmosphere, and no one can transfer from one planet to another without
becoming properly qualified. This means that if someone wants to go to Mars,
for instance, he has to give up his present gross material body and acquire
another one suitable for life on that particular planet. Vedic knowledge
teaches that the living being doesn’t die with the death of the body, but that
he is an eternal spirit soul. As Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita, “As
the embodied soul continually passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to
old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death” (Bhagavad-gita,
2.13). At the time of death the human being transfers to another material body
according to the desires he cultivated and the work he performed during his
lifetime. Therefore, since the moon has a particular standard of life and
atmosphere, if one wants to travel there he has to adapt his material body to
the conditions of that planet."_

[https://krishna.org/man-on-the-moon-a-colossal-hoax-that-
cos...](https://krishna.org/man-on-the-moon-a-colossal-hoax-that-cost-
billions-of-dollars/)

------
Causality1
>He is overseeing a plan to return to the moon by 2024

Problem being there's no more reason to do it now than there was then.
Everything you can do on the moon you can do better in earth orbit. Every
reason I get quoted for building a permanent presence on the moon requires
technology that's decades away at best. The moon is just a distraction from
the real challenge: Mars. We're too unmotivated and uncommitted to shoot for
Mars so we're going to go jump around on the dead rock next door and pretend
that means anything at all.

~~~
baggy_trough
Is there any more reason to go to Mars than to go to the Moon?

~~~
duckymcduckface
It's easier to settle: more gravity, more atmospheric pressure, more resources
and we haven't been there yet. Plenty of reasons to go to the moon as well but
nothing that could inspire a generation like a Mars mission could.

~~~
BurningFrog
I think the Moon is vastly easier to settle since Earth is just a few days
away, as opposed to 1-2 years.

That beats every other consideration, ease-wise.

~~~
kart23
Meteorites will be a serious problem. Theres no atmosphere on the moon, which
means everything gets through.

~~~
BurningFrog
Does the super this Martian atmosphere do a much better job? I suppose it
handles the sand grain sized ones at least, and they might be 99% of the
problem. IDK.

Either way, I think any full time habitats will have to be underground ob both
Moon and Mars because of the radiation.

