We Left The Moon 41 Years Ago Today
41 Years Ago Today Humans Left The Moon
“41 years ago today, 14 December 1972, Lunar Module “Challenger” in lunar orbit before rendezvous with the Apollo 17 Command Module “America”.”
41 Years Ago Today Humans Left The Moon
“41 years ago today, 14 December 1972, Lunar Module “Challenger” in lunar orbit before rendezvous with the Apollo 17 Command Module “America”.”
Very ironic that the Chinese put a working lander and rover on this anniversary. Prolly not by accident.
I think it’s a great message!!
Maybe they are baiting congress to pour more money into SLS and Orion?
The tortoise and the hare
yutu is indeed the hare. But I think we are missing the whole point if we try to return to the Cold War because it gave us a visceral thrill. We should be thinking in more sophisticated terms. Our goal should be for a stable and evolving society in which the US and China can communicate with confidence, resolve differences without suspicion or the threat of military conflict, and in some important areas, including human spaceflight, work in collaboration.
… you mean by messing up our investigations an
playing chicken on the high seas ?
If relations between the US and China go downhill both nations will be the worse for it. Unless we are just bored with the prospect of not being at war for the first time in over a decade, we should be looking for ways to build trust, not hostility. China remains bitter that Japan is unapologetic about perhaps the most brutal military occupation in history. Inviting China to join the ISS program would be at least a small step toward building trust between China and Japan. Ironically most Chinese remember US aid in WWII and forget the Korean War. For the US to take what is still a relatively cordial relationship and actively encourage distrust and hostility through a new rivalry in space is utterly irresponsible and damaging to our own interests.
Vulture
You Miss my point we are the hare, Apollo was the hare us spending vast sums of money to explore was and is the hare. Did you know that chinas moon mission only cost 150 million??? Cheap!! Sustainable!! China is the tortoise that will win the race to SETTLE space unless the hare wises up and runs an even wise pace. It is ALL about cost! Don’t tell me we did this we did that, all that great exploring was done at to high a price!!! Finally Musk has us back to basics, AFORDABLE Launch, we MUST rebuild an affordable Space program, LIKE CHINA!!!
Made in china
I’m for working together but don’t let that be excuse for not having an affordable an Space program.
… and all the more sad and unacceptable !
They don’t do anything by accident. Still who knows, the way schedules fluctuate for launches it’s not certain this was their first choice for date.
From Space.com story this morning:
And there was another touch of space history marked during China’s moon landing.
“Here is a very interesting angle,” said James Rice, science team
member of the Mars Exploration Rover Project and senior scientist at the
Planetary Science Institute. “On this date in 1972, Apollo 17’s Gene
Cernan took the last steps from the moon’s surface as he climbed aboard
the Challenger lunar module.”
Cernan served as mission commander for Apollo 17, which was NASA’s final Apollo moon landing flight by astronauts.
http://www.space.com/23968-…
It makes me sad for my country.
I was a teenager when Apollo 11 landed. I had grown up “knowing” we’d land people on the Moon by “the end of the decade”. So when I heard that we’d have people on Mars by 1981, 12 years away, I believed it. 44 years later and we are told that NASA wants to put people on Mars in the 2030’s – 20 years from now. Instead of the 12 years we expected in 1969 it will now take 64 years. You;re “sad”? I am depressed. I will be 78 years old when this happens. There is something very wrong with this.
On that we agree Keith. I’m the same age you are. My dad and I live in FL. We went to all of the launches…even the unmanned Saturn test flights. I’m at a loss to fully understand how we let this happen.
I started to look through my books from that time. I wish I had the old Weekly Readers. By the time we landed on the Moon it was almost ‘so what’ since I had been thinking about people on the Moon since 1961 when I was 6 years old.
I wish we would send humans to Mars too. I do remember watching Cosmos with Carl Sagan back in 1980 and during one episode he was telling elementary school kids that by the time they were his age(50ish) they’d know if there were planets around other stars.
Wellllll, they found out by age 22!!!!!
It amazes how many different planetary missions we’ve had since those ole’ Cosmos days, and how much we’ve learned. Today, I’m excited that we’re back on the moon, it just looks EXACTLY like it did back in the Apollo days – grainy, high contrast pics of colorless rocks and dust.
How long before we see close up pics of Pluto for the first time ever? Or land on a Comet and take a ride around the sun? Wow, next year! Unbelievable.
I remember the time life books that covered future space programs, It showed an image of the Nova lofting humans to Mars
There is something very wrong indeed – but what ? Nobody seems to agree.
NASA being hostage to politics ? Private enterprise not being in charge ? Moon first ? Mars first ? No international collaboration ? ISS being in the way ! What ? And why would we want people on the Mars in the first place – just to fulfill our childhoods dreams ?
It’s a discussion that has not really happened.
I will be 35 then, assuming, you know, actually by 2030. Doesn’t make it less depressing.
Reality is cruel.
I feel exactly that way, but with Launch Vehicles. I remember being in 9th grade reading about the X-33 / VentureStar in the Science section of the Boston Globe. A few years later that was gone, and we were told to be excited about Orbital Space Plane. That went no where, but like clockwerk CEV/Constellation came onto the scene, with the first flight in 2012! Ares I-X gave me home, but before long, that was gone too, and we got SLS with Orion.
That’s why it is hard to not be an SLS believer. About 15 years of plans never being followed through and computer generated art, will to some degree end in the next four years with Orion ETF-1 and SLS-1/EM-1. Finally, we’ll have done something new.
It’s extremely sad. Remember how the “nightmarish” timetable for Ares I was 2014? That timetable is looking pretty good about now.
So I hope when folks slam the SLS as pork (it isn’t.. it’s a direction NASA had chosen for it after over a decade of failure to pick one itself) they keep this in mind. A “Space Shuttle Successor”, as it was once called, is to people who are about 30 years old now, as Mars was to people who were teenagers in the 1960s. I’m pretty confident we’re 4 years out from SLS-1 flying. If you were 4 years out from going to Mars in the early 1980s and had confidence it would be a reality in 4 years, wouldn’t you stick with it?
That’s why the fretting about the SLS’s budgetary impact falls on utterly deaf ears with me. I honestly don’t care about the impact. It will be nearly 20 years of waiting since that original X-33 news article when SLS-1 takes off. That 20 years of little to show besides CG art desperately needs to end.
I still don’t think it’s going to mean much until the ISS drops into the ocean and we finally get some funding freed up in the manned program for other missions. You’ll get the SLS and a capsule to take you up to Low Earth Orbit, and that’s about it until then (plans about an asteroid mission in the 2030s aside).
Our goal for ISS should be to utilize it as a terminal for every reusable launch vehicle concept we can test. BEO should begin in LEO. We need a successor to the Space Shuttle, and Orion is not it, since it is to expensive to ever fly more than a handful of times. As I’ve said before, without SLS we won’t be stuck in LEO, we will be stuck on the ground.
I would be very highly surprised that the ISS is not extended to 2028. After that I believe Bigelow Aerospace will be operational and NASA will just lease space in the future.
That’s honestly fine. Let’s think critically here – why were we really not on Mars in 1982, or 1990, or 2002? It’s because of political decisions made at various points – such as the termination of the Saturn V production line, cancellation of NERVA, cancellation of Apollo missions after 17 – that prevented very broad expansion of general capability (required for any mission beyond LEO) for a more specific kind of capability. The Space Shuttle was a very capable machine for a comparatively narrow set of tasks: great for building a LEO space station, great for experiments in space of all sorts and orbital servicing, great for down mass, but building a Mars transit vehicle on the back of the Space Shuttle was always a dubious proposition. That’s been the 50 year attraction of the big-dumb booster.
The generalist nature of the EELVs kind of underscores this. They launch to Mars, to Geosyncronous orbit, to the outer solar system, to Syn Synchronous orbit. Pretty much their only limit is their maximum payload weight to a destination. It’s a very broad capability.
That, in my mind, is the strongest argument for the SLS. We’ll build it through 2030, and then like EELVs essentially have them forever. If we’re launching rockets to Mars in the 2080s on further evolved SLSs, I’d consider that a good thing. Just as Boeing has built and modified it’s 747 and 737 lines for many decades, and will for many many more, I see SLS and EELVs following the same course. We’ll go through the pain – as we have been the last couple of years – of making this rocket exactly a reality exactly once, and then barring a repeat of the Saturn mistake (one we won’t make again I believe), we’ll have that capability forever. The question then becomes “where do we want to go?”
And if that means waiting until the ISS deorbits… that’s mostly fine. The ISS is a major achievement NASA never properly defended to a public pretty convinced it’s done nothing ambitious since Apollo (which is of course rubbish). In many ways I’d say it’s even a larger achievement than Apollo, if just a different animal. I’d even say the ISS was necessary to do Mars properly and gain the on orbit construction capability that emerged from it.
I like to think of it like this. Apollo was Chapter I, The first 20 years of the Space Shuttle was Chapter II, The Age of the ISS was Chapter III, and with the SLS today, we’re laying the groundwork for Chapter IV. Losing the ability to send Americans to space with shuttle retirement was a small price to pay… was short term pain, with the growth of capability promised later in the decade.
So we’ll be patient with the funding for future missions utilizing the SLS, but lets just make sure the ISS doesn’t orbit past 2020 though. 30 years of that particular project is long enough.
The ones that I liked and saw them die without fanfare was the HL 20 and the HL 42. Two stage to orbit.
Like Keith I was about the same age.
Keith is thinking that people will be placed on Mars in the 2030s. At least if he is thinking that NASA will achieve this, then I guess my question is, why? With a Constellation/Orion capsule approach – flags and footprints? At the cost of several billion $$ a mission and only one mission every few years? Towards what end? This does not lead to infrastructure and habitation. In fact it leads us down a road similar to Apollo, with an inability to financially support for any period of time and a termination soon after the start.
I do not think I will live long enough to see another landing on a new world – at least not by NASA. Maybe Mr. Musk will succeed and begin to build a new economy beyond earth, which, after all, was the goal of the 2004 Vision.
I revel in the thought that I saw things during my lifetime that prior generations had dreamed about. I revel in the thought that I saw the Apollo spacecraft being built and launched into space. I revel in the thought that I worked with many of the veterans and even had a minor hand in some of the follow on activity. But I look upon all that we did as ultimately being a failure to establish a road map to take us to the stars. The current NASA leadership has forsaken this as a goal.
The funds, time and international cooperation spent on Shuttle and ISS is all that was needed to land humans on Mars. Some would say we were not ready technically, didn’t have the understanding of the martian and space environment for a manned Mars project, starting say, in the 70s. Maybe someone can offer a more expert remark on that question.
We could have reached Mars by the late 90s, IMO. Between technical doubts, American politicians incapable of permitting plans over a 20 year span and international cooperation that has developed slowly, the US could not do it.
Now, and its best, the first humans are likely to arrive through international cooperation. We won’t be placing our flag alone. But I say that our Mars exploration shall make the first manned landing a technical venture essentially made in America.
The BBC has an article today that describes Nielson rating type analysis of the Chinese rover landing. They are experiencing the same sharp and brief interest that the Apollo program experienced. Its really difficult to pull in and maintain public interest in these missions. It is fleeting but people today as in the 60s still have more common day concerns to survive and/or to thrive. We expect too much of the public but we do need to continue space exploration as a public trust, as an investment in our future.
The end of an era.
I thought I didn’t care about manned spaceflight as long as I got the robotic missions I wanted, but I guess I do. That was the farthest man has ever been away from Earth.
well, we never really fully got the robotic missions we wanted, either.
Agreed. We’ve done some impressive missions over the past ten years, with 22 attempted robotic missions in the 2000s, out of which 12 were done by the US. But that’s dwarfed by what we were doing in the 1960s in terms of robotic missions, where there were 77 attempted robotic missions (36 of them by NASA).
Rubbing it in ? Maybe that is exactly what is needed.
I was 5 when Apollo 11 landed. My family worked for Aerojet in support of America’s Manned space program. I remember my friends & I all thought we’d be Astronauts when we grew up. I look up at the Moon and tell her and myself; “We’re comn’ Darlin’, we’re comin’ “.
To Brett; If you only cared about robotic mission & to heck with manned flights; don’t you worry at some point those who seek to eliminate manned space flight will come after your robots???
I’m actually not in favor of canceling the manned program precisely because of that. If you cancel the manned programs, then NASA’s budget is going to plummet and it will have much less political heft in Congress.
Most likely that means that overall NASA exploration – including robotic missions – would face massive cutbacks, although I don’t think it would die completely (the European Space Agency continues to survive despite doing just robotic missions).
Actually, the pork premuim will be stripped from the NASA budget as the agency makes the transition to utilizing domestic commercial companies for access to LEO
There is a petition from a 6 year old at “we the people” (white house website) where he request that NASA budget should be double. Not sure if that will happen if we reach 100 thousand signatures, but should spark a conversation. At least it should shame our leaders that a 6 year old has more vision than them.
Bloated, pork driven Federal Agency NASA blew $20 billion on it’s miserably failed Constellation….
While innovative, efficient, spirited private enterprise SpaceX produced vastly superior boosters/capsules for only $500 million…
Govt/Nasa is the problem, not the solution.
SAVUPORO said: “There is something very wrong indeed – but what ?”
Its pretty straightforward.
We developed and flew Shuttle and then attention should have been refocused towards improving on it and expanding beyond the system’s capabilities. Shuttle-C, Orbital Tugs…a more robust Orbiter. Instead attention was paid to “operating”. The “operators” made operation as expensive as they could. That soaked up all the money.
ISS is no different. It cost us $2-3 billion per year to develop over 20+ years and now its costing $3 billion+ just to maintain the status quo with no development going on. Yes, there is something wrong with this picture. You have a bunch of NASA leaders all of whom came from operations, all of whom forgot that it was not about operating but about expanding upon and extending capabilities-they never did that. NASA federal operation is corrupt; they are not expending dollars wisely and they are making zero progress.
Maybe there is hope for the commercial operators. They will have incentive to either do better or to fail, as NASA has already done.
“We are used to things improving every year; we are used to having a better cell phone next year than this year; a better lap top. We are even used to some basic things, like we expect more from your car in next year’s model than last year’s model. But this is not the case in space; reliability and cost – those are the fundamental parameters of transportation – have not improved.” – Elon Musk
The problem is the pork premium that congress has applied to everything NASA. Transportation needs to be in the commercial sector where the inncentives are different.
Well said!
The pork is a part of it, no doubt, but from what I can see, I see an awful lot of people working who really are not producing.
I am firmly convinced that if the top echelon of leadership had a story to tell about what we need to be doing and why it makes sense and how different Congressional districts will be on the receiving end-because, afterall, all of the NASA money is spent here on earth and in the US, then the job of the space leadership (NASA and contractors) is to tell that story. So far I have not heard a logical story from NASA or contractor leadership.
When I look at the stories that are told by management I am struck about how so much of it revolves around operations.
For instance what I see and hear about Orion is the high speed and temperature of reentry. Great, but its been done before many times and the heat shield technology is not new. And while they are trying to hype the flight that might take place in another year, what I do not hear is how Orion is a logical element of some future spaceflight infrastructure. Why is that?
For instance the recent NASA book about the Space Shuttle, is mainly about Shuttle operations during the height of the Shuttle program. So little is about the design, development, and systems functionality. So little is about how, from the outset, Shuttle and Station were designed to complement one another. So little is about how Shuttle and Station were intended as the first elements of a LEO infrastructure.
The focus is on how Shuttle was used for payload deployments early in its life and for the ISS assembly. Relatively small portions focused on hardware development-mainly things like the engines-probably written by MSFC.
Make no mistake about it, an official NASA book like that reflects NASA leadership ideas. Maybe they forgot how they got the Shuttle? Maybe they forgot that further development was not only possible but called for? Maybe they forgot that NASA started as a DDT&E organization and not as an operations organization equivalent to the USAF or USN? Maybe they forgot that Shuttle reflected the height of NASA and US HSF DDT&E?
If they don’t re-establish DDT&E in American HSF, then we have little future improvement to look for. It will be like watching another Sojourner rover landing-exciting stuff for 20 years ago but not the excitement of Spirit or Opportunity, ten years ago, and certainly not the excitement of last year’s Curiosity landing.
The only potential improvement we will have to look forward to in HSF will be what is done by outside organizations like Musk’s Space-X.
>”So little is about the design, development, and systems functionality. “
There are lots of good discussion on design of ISS but unless you were personally involved, it seems difficult to find these discussions (i.e. pressure bulkheads, types of docking mechanisms, HVAC, food storage, selection of AC or DC for lighting, or whatever…). Yes, I know The Internet has all kinds of good stuff but finding the good stuff instead of the puff pieces is difficult. If one knows where to look but then they already know the subject.
Brian, it is not about producing. It is about work force maintaince. With the space shuttle, after the design and development, you needed a standing army for servicing it. Each shuttle had it’s own battalion of workers. The engines would get rebuilt, the tiles maticulously gone over etc.
Now that workforce was costing about 200 million a month or 2.4 billion a year. The SLS.MPCV are disposable. Which means the workforce will be cut if it ever comes online. It was the same as the Constellation program. 12 billion spent for vaporware and nothing produced. It is not about producing anything. It is about keeping 12 engineers active to turn each nut and bolt until the next new development project starts.
Several people here have hit on what I think is a key issue, but they all phrase it differently. Rather than “why?” I would ask “to do what, exactly?”.
• Back to the Moon: to do what, exactly?
• Humans to Mars: to do what, exactly?
• Extend the ISS to 20XX: to do what, exactly?
• Capture and retrieve an asteroid: to do what, exactly?
• Establish a gateway at L2: to do what, exactly?
• etc…
And those are just some of the HSF issues; there are a lot of other program types being debated with the same lack of stated purpose and detail.
If we could show, as a ratio, the amount of work and debate that has been put into how we might get somewhere, as opposed to why we should go there and exactly what we’ll do — and how — if we get there, I think it would be a real eye opener.
We talk far more about LVs than spacecraft, more about spacecraft than landers. We talk about destinations, but not a whole lot about the where and why of landing sites, with the exception of water and ice locations. It seems like the farther we get from the launch pad the less thought out anybody’s proposals are. There are a lot of places off Earth I’d love to see mankind go to, but not just because it would be cool to do it. There have to be reasons — practical reasons, not philosophical ideas — to go to these places. How can we really judge if a program is desirable, or if the stated price tag is reasonable and worthwhile, if we don’t have a detailed game plan of exactly what we intend to do at our destination, and why, and what it will give us, and what the follow-on plans and potentials are, etc.?
These details are necessary in order to evolve meaningful opinions and make informed decisions. And you don’t get those kinds of details in 3-paragraph blogs or cut & paste Powerpoint slides. They take a lot of thought and a lot of work to present. For many years we’ve been getting proposals, road maps, studies, all kinds of lengthy reports by various names, and all with one thing in common — they are at best abstracts or summaries, with no details. And more often than not, the rationale for a given proposal boils down to being some person’s or group’s pet choice, when they can get away with it, that they had already decided on before even beginning the task. As much as I respect Mr. Augustine, even the reviews and studies he led I feel suffer from this kind of bias.
Anyhow, enough of my blathering. I wouldn’t hop in the car and drive to a particular store unless I had a definite reason for going there, something that I needed to get or do there, and made sure ahead of time that I knew what I needed to do once I arrived and had with me everything that I needed to do it. Scaled up, the same logic applies to the Moon. Mars, or anywhere else off Earth. I’m happy to listen to, and think about, anybody’s plans for a space mission to just about anywhere — if they spell out: to do what, exactly.
>>they are at best abstracts or summaries, with no details
The thesis is – you cant plan the future, down to the details. In modern world, by the time you finish that detailed plan, the assumptions will have changed and the rest of the world moved on.
So you have to have overall driving principles, but and you have to have an outline of the plan, but no battle plan “survives the contact with the enemy”.
Several years ago, a bunch of western space advocacy groups came together and after laying aside their differences about destinations, means to get there etc, they came to a common shared goal – space settlement.
Unfortunately, that goal is not the stated driving reason behind the western space policies and agendas of civil space agencies.
Instead, you get vague exploration , vastly overpriced science, inspiration etc. as pretty lame justifications.
A goal, by itself, is not enough, even if everyone could suddenly agree on a goal. Even the most perfectly worded goal won’t allow us answer basic questions like: 1) what will we get out of this?; and 2) is it actually possible? Without a certain level of implementation detail (not down to the nuts and bolts) we can’t even begin to come up with either a price tag or a time frame that have any basis in reality.
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
No argument on that score. That’s why a good implementation plan includes preplanned tactics for foreseeable contingencies and “slack and slush” for the unforeseeables.
“ the assumptions will have changed and the rest of the world moved on.“
True enough, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do any detailed planning just because you can’t get it all perfect. It’s a question of picking the right level of detail for each module of a program. Too much detail is bound to end up not reflecting reality, over and over, but too little detail (or none at all!) gives you absolutely no way to succeed, and makes it impossible to sell your mission proposal to people who are used to evaluating proper science and technology programs and proposals — and these are the people who advise the decision-makers when it comes to the viability of civil space missions.
We haven’t done anything in 40 years because we don’t have a consensus. Every time we start down a path someone new gets put in charge and the path changes. For example, many posters on this forum think SLS/Orion is a bad idea and should be canceled. Their reasons may be very good and I might even agree with them. However, there are going to be compelling reasons for whatever follow on project is started in its place to be canceled and replaced with something else.
The people who complain about a lack of consensus are really saying “I don’t like what we are doing now and want things to be done my way.” I’m as guilty of that as anybody.
The question that needs to be asked is why don’t we have a consensus? I believe that the reason is that the affordable objectives aren’t interesting to most people. The one goal that has any hope of inspiring people is to land people on Mars. Doing so with a public funded program is going to be extremely difficult because the price tag for even a plant the flag mission is going to be way too high.
Why can’t commercial enterprise take over? The simple answer is there doesn’t seem to be any way to get any return on their investment. You going to have to promise $120 billion return to raise the $40 billion is will probably cost.
The only human space activity that seems to have a chance of getting a return is asteroid mining and the latest proposal was laughed off the stage.
One only has to look at NASA cost estimates to do such things to realize why it has not happened yet. Here is the title of a news article from 2005:
NASA estimates $104 billion for return to moon
Griffin defends cost amid Katrina rebuilding: ‘We don’t cancel the Navy’
By Tariq Malik, updated 9/19/2005 8:23:55 PM ET, found on: nbcnews.com
The real problem which needs to be attacked is the high cost of access to space. Given its high costs, SLS isn’t the answer, it’s the problem. It truly is a “rocket to nowhere”.
The problem is big govt Nasa bloat, waste, greed, incompetence…. Federal Agency Nasa has blown $500 billion taxpayer dollars since Apollo… without getting a single American beyond low earth orbit, leaving itself incompetent/incapable of crewing or even resupplying our own space station…
nasa is just as incompetent as other Federal Agencies… don’t blame Congress or taxpayers… blame big govt..
You can’t ‘fix’ our Fed Govt or Nasa… you can only minimize them, to reduce what they can steal, screw up, bankrupt.