Hey Cambo...what is, in your opinion, the strongest piece of "evidence" that lead you to believe in the hoax nonsense? Just one please..the one that you think is the absolute strongest and the most solid
It has to be the fact that not one other country has attempted to send humans out into deep space, not even a trip around the moon and back.
Manned spaceflight ain't cheap. Manned spaceflight beyond Earth orbit is even more ain't cheap. The Apollo program cost over $280 billion in 2019 dollars, and at its peak received like 4% total federal budget. Not many countries are in a position to devote that much of their resources to an effort that, frankly, has little direct payoff.
There is currently no practical benefit in sending people to the Moon. None. There is no ROI that makes the effort worth the cost. You get some prestige, you show off your repurposed ICBMs to your geopolitical adversaries, but that's pretty much it. Like the man said, we did it because it was hard, but having done it, there's no real good reason to do it again.
Unmanned missions, sure, everyone is sending unmanned probes to the Moon. We've sent a number of orbiters, China's landed two probes on the surface (including a rover), Israel attempted to land a small probe (which failed, unfortunately), India's sent an orbiter to the Moon. There's
plenty of activity on the unmanned side because you don't need to build a monster rocket to do it.
Years back, the Americans were planning to do this very thing until Obama said to hell with that, let’s go to Mars. Then Trump came along and said no, let’s keep it simple and do the moon thing again, but NASA said we aren’t ready yet. I was hoping that Trump would rumble their little game and give their arses a good kicking, but it’s looking like he’s just another puppet in a long line of puppets, at the beck and call of the real people running the show.
We're not going to get into the whole history of the Constellation and then SLS debacles, except to say that SLS has never had a real mission. There was no exploration program that required SLS be built in the first place - the Mars and asteroid redirect missions were desperate
post hoc justifications to hide the fact that SLS is little more than a welfare program to keep the old Shuttle workforce employed and give several NASA offices something to do. The
primary purpose of SLS is to funnel federal dollars to the districts of several powerful Congressmen - actually launching something is a nice side benefit, but not necessary.
If anything positive comes out of this *********** of an administration, it's that Trump hired Brindenstine to run NASA, and that Brindenstine is lighting a fire under the SLS program to get the goddamned thing flying already. To his credit, he's decoupled the vehicle from the Artemis program - if SLS can't be made ready by 2024, he'll look at commercial vehicles to do the job instead. SpaceX hopes to have their orbital Spaceship prototypes flying later this year, and may be in a position to send one to the Moon in the next couple of years.
Until recently, why has no other country at least thought about doing it just the once?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$. As in, too goddamned much of.
The Russians gave up because they were apparently incapable of designing a rocket that was up to the task and their special FX were naff, but It was a piece of cake for the Americans back then, and even after the alleged near tragedy of Apollo 13, they went ahead with another four missions. Why did they keep going back there every few months, when the job of beating the Russians had already been accomplished? NASA say they travelled to and from the moon nine times in less than four years, and all they did was bring back more moon rocks.
It was anything
but a piece of cake - it took years, many millions of dollars, and several lives to get to the surface of the Moon. It was a Herculean engineering effort that almost didn't work. There were glitches and anomalies on every flight, some severe. 11 overshot its landing site and had the 1202 program alarms, 12 got struck by lightning on launch and almost had to abort, 13 had an engine shut down during launch and then had the O2 tank blow up, 14 almost aborted the landing due to a piece of loose solder floating around behind a control panel, on and on and on. It wasn't
easy. It only worked because literally thousands of very smart and very dedicated people devoted a good chunk of their lives to
make it work.
A reflector went up with Apollo 11, so why the need for more reflectors?
Redundancy. If the first reflector got knocked over or covered by dust from liftoff, they'd know to place subsequent reflectors further away.
The camera conveniently broke on Apollo 12, probably because Kubrick had pissed off to start work on A Clockwork Orange and then we had the Apollo 13 near disaster to buy them more time while they perfected their special FX and a couple of missions later, someone came up with the novel idea of taking a car along.
You're nowhere near as cute as you think you are.
The Apollo missions followed an incremental path, each building on the previous. There were several unmanned launches to shake out the hardware in Earth orbit. 7 was a manned test of the CSM alone in Earth orbit. 8 was a manned test of the CSM alone in lunar orbit (it was
supposed to test the LM in Earth orbit, but the first LM was way behind schedule, so this turned into a lunar orbit flight and a bit of a PR stunt). 9 was a manned test of the CSM and LM in Earth orbit. 10 was a manned test of the CSM and LM in Lunar orbit. 11 was a test of lunar landing and launch. 12 was a test of
precision lunar landing and launch. 13 was supposed to be the first "real" mission in terms of science objectives, but we know how that turned out. 14 basically completed 13's mission.
15, 16, and 17 were the full-up science missions, necessitating the LRV to reach sites far away from the LM.
This stuff was all planned, in great detail, right from the beginning. Nothing was arbitrarily added midway through.
Do you really believe that the Russians simply lost interest and gave up because they were beaten to the moon by a country that had always played second fiddle to them in space until the magic of Apollo?
Yes. The Soviets squandered their lead by, well, being Soviets and demanding that engineering take a back seat to politics (which is where the US is now). It also didn't help that Korolev decided to test the N1 by building the full stack and lighting it without doing smaller-scale tests first. They wound up falling years behind (I remember seeing that their first landing was on pace for 1975 or something like that). And yeah, once the US succeeded, the Soviets decided those rubles were better spent elsewhere. The USSR's economy was never that strong, and trying to keep up with the US in the arms race effectively bankrupted them.
How can you possibly accept the fact that no other country has ever had the spare change to develop the technology and do a couple of unmanned missions to test the hardware, followed by a single trip around the moon, when in reality, every country with a space program would be falling over each other to replicate a feat that had already been performed multiple times with apparent ease?
Enough with the "apparent ease" crap. Apollo wasn't easy. It was incredibly difficult and
stupid expensive, and had no payoff except national pride. It takes incredible political willpower to make something like that happen. Hell, we didn't even finish the program as originally envisioned - there were at least 3 more missions that were planned, but Nixon and Congress couldn't wait to kill it.
But more importantly, why is it taking so long for NASA to go back? They stopped going to the moon, only because public interest had waned, then destroyed the technology
The tooling and pad infrastructure were destroyed, but there are spacecraft and rockets that were built but never flew since their missions were canceled. They're not in flyable condition due to age, but they're still around.
that got them there and decided to circle the earth for the next five decades doing what? They apparently achieved so much in ten years and then threw it all away to do countless meaningless experiments in LEO and a few back flips for the cameras. The Vietnam War cost the US tax payers an estimated 168 billion dollars, which is around a trillion dollars in today’s money, while Apollo cost a measly 25 billion, so you can stick your money excuse where the sun don’t shine.
There's always money for war. There's almost never money for space exploration. That's where our priorities are.
You keep ignoring political considerations when you keep asking why we haven't done it again. The simple answer is that we don't want to - we're not willing to commit the resources. Yeah, we're building a big-ass rocket, but that's because certain powerful members of Congress see that as a way to keep jobs in their districts.
2024 is the current date planned for the next manned moon landing, but at the moment there is apparently not enough funding, even though I’m guessing it’ll end up being a joint effort, as they’ll all want in on the “act”. The rockets aren’t ready, the new space station is still on the drawing board and because the plans were destroyed for the original lander, which apparently worked almost flawlessly, they now have to find someone to design and build a new one from scratch. So much for the theory that the plans are hidden away somewhere on microfilm, as whoever wins the contract could’ve simply updated the old one.
Jesus, so much wrong.
SLS isn't ready because a) NASA's manned side has lost its ability to manage large projects, and b) Congress is funding it at a level such that it keeps people employed, but not enough to build at more than a snail's pace.
SLS was sold on the promise of being Shuttle-derived - basically take existing Shuttle hardware (external tank, engines, solid boosters), tweak and reconfigure it, build a quickie upper stage, and
theoretically that would take less time and money than a completely new, clean-sheet design. Except, that isn't what they did - they
extensively modified the design, requiring all new equipment to build and test it. About the only thing that's carried over as-is are the engines. Those lovely, expensive, exquisitely engineered
reusable engines that are going to be tossed in the ocean after each launch now.
By the sound of it, 2024 isn’t a realistic goal if they are actually planning to do it this time around, but with CGI being so advanced now, I suspect we will see it go ahead as planned, as they won’t need to use ultra-low quality footage to try and mask the fakery. I took my youngest granddaughter to see the new Dumbo movie, but I made the mistake of telling her the elephant wasn’t real and she now thinks I’m an idiot (try and keep the sarcasm to a minimum). I don’t blame her, as these upcoming moon landings are going to look very real to most people and it may be extremely difficult this time around, to find visual evidence that could cast doubt on their authenticity.
Again, not as clever as you think you are.
It was made to look like a walk in the park back then, as we had astronauts hopping, dancing, singing and falling over, seemingly without a care in the world. For most, it takes a few beers while on holiday to act in such a childish manner, but that’s showbiz for you I suppose. If you believe that fifty years ago, a big rocket and a shitty computer with a 1.024 MHz processor, 2k memory and 32k storage was enough to launch men into space and navigate to and land on the moon and then take off again and dock with the command module and then navigate back to earth, then you are simply deluded. But if you also accept that it’s ok to go nearly half a century and still not have the means to emulate an achievement that is fast becoming ancient history, then you are beyond delusional. You are asleep.
Here's the thing - there are people who are smarter than you. Your inability to conceive of how a thing can be done doesn't mean it can't be done.
I fear for Trump’s safety as he has not only given NASA an unrealistic goal to put men on the moon within five years, but he has also challenged the military to create a space force, which has to involve NASA, and we all know what happens to presidents who challenge NASA to do the impossible.
That is probably the dumbest f***ing thing you've said to date, and God knows that's a high bar to clear. Seriously, dude, you are an idiot. Moron. Jackass.
So go on Zakalwe, what, in your own opinion is the strongest piece of evidence that has brought you to believe in this Apollo nonsense? Just the one please. The one that is least likely to make me fall of my chair with laughter. I’ll be back in a few months to read your reply.
Let's go with samples from the Lunar surface that have been examined by a couple of generations of planetary scientists from institutions all over the world.
