Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think the Moon landing footage as broadcast to the public were definitely faked with the help of Stanley Kubrick; it's functionally indistinguishable from the real thing because he insisted that it all be filmed on location.
Yeah, that's what the people who actually managed to do it said too- though if they had their doubts it's not like they would have really been permitted to air them at that point. It's not like we don't understand the physics of landing on other celestial bodies, given we throw stuff at them all the time (the Moon, Mars, and on occasion others too)- but the vast majority (all?) of the institutional secret sauce when it comes to engineering manned spaceflight with nothing but a slide rule and mid-20th-century materials science is 6 feet under now. And that goes for the Soviets just as well as it does the Americans; at least the Soviets didn't really stop cranking out Progresses.
And really, Artemis seems to me to suffer from F-35itis given they're both peacetime craft; there's a lot more bullshit they want/need the computers to automatically deal with now. "Just hit it with a hammer" and "turn it off, then back on again" was fine for Apollo (the fact that the people they sent tended to be test pilots meant they expected training to take up a lot of the slack)- and the telemetry they had was, I suspect, relatively minimal. But that's not fine for Artemis, built to a tighter budget with pilots that don't have the 20 years flying prototype fighter jets to fix anything too technical that goes wrong up there. And considering that they had to re-invent literally everything I'd say the project is coming along about as quickly as one would expect.
The national security objective was achieved, and they managed to pull it off the first try. If your project isn't getting renewed and you know it, but the fuel and development costs are already paid for, why not go for victory laps?
Oh well, at least you can shoot the laser at it and determine that there's definitely something there from the reflectors they left behind.
More options
Context Copy link