Just compare the years this show takes place and compare it to today. Today yet another rocket exploded on take off. They can't even get rockets off the ground at NASA. Don't get me started about the social situation.
shareHave you ever seen The Right Stuff? The latter half of the film tells the story of the Mercury astronauts as well. At one point they're is a montage of rockets exploding either in the launch pad or just after take off before the first one is ready for a manned mission. Every new rocket will go through it's trouble spots. I don't think SpaceX has had rocket explode before this(not counting the attempted controlled landings).
Honorary Knight of Arendelle
Half-Blood #18 and Son of Poseidon, Son of Adam, Gryffindor 7th year
Uh, SpaceX is a private company. They're not NASA.
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"I'm gonna find 2 waitresses here and pull me a Fredo."---Trent, Swingers
I'll sum up whats wrong with America :
There was a time we looked at the Moon and said "We will set foot there within 10 years."
Today we look at all the wonder around us and say "You didn't build that."
*beep*
shareI have a friend who worked at NASA for 15 years who says the people they have today couldn't get to the moon. He says there is not nearly the intelligence there (at NASA) today
shareOh, that's crap. The Apollo program had mountains of money thrown at it, and in most cases the technological challenges were solved by teams of solid engineers, not individual geniuses. NASA is starved for budget, not intelligence.
Besides, compared to the late 60's, it would be relatively simple to mount another moon mission today. You could do it with COTS aerospace technology, using the ISS as a staging/assembly point. You do it the way that Von Braun imagined, launching modules of a Moon transit/lander vehicle to the station and assembling it there. Piece of cake.
Write a big enough check and we could have a long-term moon base in operation within ten years. It's not like Apollo, where they had to invent rafts of new technologies as they went along. 90% of the tech need to to go back to the moon already exists.
Well - I think it all still exists. It's not like the blueprints have been thrown away. If somebody wanted to pony up the money, a reasonably competent defense contractor could simply use the 1969-era specs to build a Saturn V, command module and LEM.
Of course, if you didn't want just blindly to use the old specs, any dummy could improve the onboard electronics equipment. People with some expertise could build a better version of the physical equipment using post-Apollo technological advances, such as composites, batteries, fuel cells, etc. Indeed, NASA's SLS booster, now in development, should in a few years - in its most powerful configuration - be more powerful than the Saturn V. And, as mentioned, existing equipment could be employed to go with an assemble-in-orbit approach that would be more flexible and allow you to send a much larger vehicle out of low earth orbit without putting all your eggs on a single enormous booster.
What NASA is capable of now vs. early 1962 (which is where we've got to in episode 3 of the series) isn't even close. The last mission on the show put a single guy in orbit for five hours. As of today, Scott Kelly has been in orbit for over three months on his way to a year (okay, we've lately been using Russian rockets, but let's not dwell on that). There are robots on Mars, and a probe is about to fly past Pluto and send us photos.
What is true about the OP's post, though, is that the rate of advancement and the ambition - in manned spaceflight - isn't anything like it was in the 1960s. Between 1961 and 1969, we went from no human having ever been in orbit to men walking on the moon. In the (almost) 56 years since the first moon landing, we've put a lot of people into orbit for a lot of hours, but nobody's gone any further "out there" (or even as close to as far) since Apollo 17 in 1972.
There's a significant difference, at least in mileage. If the earth were the size of a basketball, the international space station - and all the shuttle missions - got about 1/20th of an inch above it. The moon mission flew four feet away. Or, say the earth were a sphere as wide as a football field - 100 yards high (about 30 stories, and about the height of the Saturn V). The space shuttle gets about 9-1/2 feet off the surface of the sphere. The moon is almost 1-3/4 miles away.
But the rate of technology advancement outside of manned aerospace, in particular in the fields of computing and materials science, since Apollo has been phenomenal. Good ol' private industry has kept chugging along, inventing a lot of good kit that would be repurposed to building a trans-lunar transit vehicle, lofted modularly on current LEO boosters and assembled at the ISS. I bet you Boeing Aerospace would be willing to write NASA a fixed-cost to build one, although it wouldn't be cheap.
No, even though NASA (and the EU and the Russians) have been doing manned spaceflight on a pittance the last forty years, we have been building up masses of experience in long-term spaceflight and our international technology base is vastly greater than it was in the Apollo days. We can go back to the moon without cloning another generation of Apollo engineers°, it's just a matter of writing a big enough check. Hell, we could scale the same effort out to a manned landing mission to Mars, positing some reasonable breakthroughs in ion drive technology.
°I grant that we may have to import or develop a new ethos of innovative engineering from outside the current aerospace industry base in order to go back to the moon. Years ago, I was tasked with a group of Lockheed engineers who were transitioning from working on SDI to building the control systems for one of the first iterations of the ISS. A bigger bunch of hidebound lunkheads I've never met. I wouldn't ride on a teeter-totter built by those guys. But as Musk and the other private spaceflight corps have shown, you can recapture that Apollo innovation working outside of the established system.
Well, I live 10 miles away from Kennedy Space Center.
First, it was not NASA it was Space X.
Second, maybe if our economy hadn't gone to *beep* during Bush (not trying to start a political war) then NASA wouldn't have had to lay off hundreds of employees. It killed the economy around here for awhile but it's finally improving with Space X.
Third, I'd like to see you try to do what those geniuses do. Don't be disrespectful, it's not easy.
Things go wrong, this isn't the first time a shuttle or rocket has exploded. The smallest problems can arise and cause an explosion.
And SpaceX has almost perfected the first heavy-launch reusable first stage booster, something that no government-backed space program has managed to do. It will be a remarkable achievement when they get the landing process bugs ironed out.
shareI admit we are way, way, way back on the technology front today. As a kid in the 60s, we were told that by 2015 we'd have bases on the moon, cancer would be cured, and there would be no more hungry or poor people. And I do think as a whole people are ruder and more self-centered today, and that common sense seems to have fallen by the wayside. There are too many lawsuits and too many people abrogating responsibility.
However, we had people who had no opportunities before (people of color especially) that have them now. Women don't have to sit still and be beat up by their husbands because they're afraid of divorce. They don't have to be chained to a kitchen and home if they don't want to. They can be in the military or the space program or business, they can be business executives. They are free to have no children, or be married and have a family, and don't have to hide their sexuality. This goes for men, too. Guys in my childhood were shamed for crying, or loving their children, or just simply for not being the football-rooting, stiff-upper-lipped, rah-rah manly man. My husband's the cook in the house; he enjoys it (and damn, you don't want to eat my cooking because I have no interest in it at all), and when he says he cooks today people weren't half as shocked as they were back in the 1980s when we first met.
We're humans. We goof. A lot. I don't think the human condition will ever be perfect, because there will always be critics, bullies, boasters, and maniacs. But the rest of us will just have to do our best to rise above it.
I'm a huge space fanatic. That being said, it breaks my heart to genuinely believe we will never go back to the moon. In the 60's the country as a whole, for the most part, at least initially, was behind meeting the goal. I think Kennedy being assassinated had a lot to do with that. They wanted to see it thru for him. Had he lived, I think they would have slowed the progress way down.
Now, the country will NEVER get united in anything. An all out attack against us wouldn't even unite the country. If Pearl Harbor happened today, we would lose because half the country would NOT want to go to war. An epic event like going back to the moon or to Mars will NEVER get enough support from the majority of the population to be accomplished.
"Well my name is Jim, but most people call me.....Jim."