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The Eagle landed 50 years ago: Apollo 11 anniversary thread

you'd think this would be top of the news here in the states, but no, we're dealing with Trump's most recent shitheadism.

anyway, best report:

Jgz720h.jpg
 
Did anyone hear R4 the other night when they got someone to read the speech that was written for Nixon to broadcast in the event that Aldrin & Armstrong were stuck on the moon?

Properly gave me goosebumps.

(Tuesdays PM I think)
 
Mrs Miggins said:
(But of course it was all faked :facepalm:)
Click to expand...
I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, talking to a married couple I’ve known since the 80s. I hadn’t seen them for 2 or 3 years, but they’re the sort of friends you pick back up with as if no time had passed. Good friends. I was with them when they announced their engagement (a New Years party in Aberdeen in 1985), and I was at their wedding. I know what music they love and hate. What food they like. I watched their kids grow up. I thought I knew them well. But I started talking about the Apollo 11 anniversary (because I’m a total geek) and they both started saying they couldn’t believe I was “a believer”! And how we didn’t have the technology and so on. The radiation would have killed them. All the tropes. I was completely blindsided. I still can’t tell if they were winding me up.

I choose to believe they were. But maybe that’s just because it sits more easily with me.
 
danny la rouge said:
I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, talking to a married couple I’ve known since the 80s. I hadn’t seen them for 2 or 3 years, but they’re the sort of friends you pick back up with as if no time had passed. Good friends. I was with them when they announced their engagement (a New Years party in Aberdeen in 1985), and I was at their wedding. I know what music they love and hate. What food they like. I watched their kids grow up. I thought I knew them well. But I started talking about the Apollo 11 anniversary (because I’m a total geek) and they both started saying they couldn’t believe I was “a believer”! And how we didn’t have the technology and so on. The radiation would have killed them. All the tropes. I was completely blindsided. I still can’t tell if they were winding me up.

I choose to believe they were. But maybe that’s just because it sits more easily with me.
Click to expand...
Oh how awful for you. People you've known forever as well. It amazes me how anyone can believe that shit. And flat earth and the like.

I'm much more comfortable with religion than that kind of nonsense
 
danny la rouge said:
View attachment 177544


All human beings alive at the time were in this photo. Two (Armstrong and Aldrin) in the Eagle lander, bottom of shot, the rest on Earth, on the Moon’s horizon.

All, that is, except the photographer, Mike Collins, alone in the Columbia command module.
Click to expand...
Collins often gets overlooked; his name won't be familiar to nearly as many as Armstrong and Aldrin. I remember reading about his huge fear that he'd be the only one of the three to make it back and how he doubted he'd be able to cope.
 
S☼I said:
Collins often gets overlooked; his name won't be familiar to nearly as many as Armstrong and Aldrin. I remember reading about his huge fear that he'd be the only one of the three to make it back and how he doubted he'd be able to cope.
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He’s my favourite of the astronauts, partly for that position you mention that he was in. His book, Carrying the Fire, is the best written of the memoirs. And I just like his personality. He seems really sound. I’d love to meet him.
 
Mrs Miggins said:
Here it is with a caption:
View attachment 177859
Click to expand...
Thanks. That's fabulous. The very fact we "didn't have the technology" but did it anyway is what I like.
I wonder what technology moon-landing deniers think we needed. I'm no scientist - I don't know a periodic table from an occasional chair - but seems to me unbelievers imagine it was all done overnight rather than the culmination of tens, hundreds and thousands of years of knowledge of rocketry, physics, chemistry, etc.
 
She was the lead on the team at MIT that wrote COLOSSUS (various versions also known as Commanche, Artemis and Skylark) which was the Command Module guidance and navigation software. LUMINARY was the corresponding code for the Lunar Excursion Module. You can peruse it all in Github.
 
S☼I said:
Thanks. That's fabulous. The very fact we "didn't have the technology" but did it anyway is what I like.
I wonder what technology moon-landing deniers think we needed. I'm no scientist - I don't know a periodic table from an occasional chair - but seems to me unbelievers imagine it was all done overnight rather than the culmination of tens, hundreds and thousands of years of knowledge of rocketry, physics, chemistry, etc.
Click to expand...
Totally agree with you there. I love how you can look back in history and see that the human brain has always been the same but our long, long acqusition of knowledge brings us to where we are now. It doesn't just come out of the blue.
 
Teams from the UK, German, USSR and China would have been able to observe the signals from the spacecraft on radio telescopes and other kit, measure the doppler shift, triangulate their location and measure the occlusion as the vehicle passed behind the Moon. It would also likely be big enough that you could observe some of its stages firing from Earth with either the naked eye or binoculars. To have faked the landings in a way that fooled the USSR would have required a level of cunning and deception that we may struggle to pull off today let alone in 1969. The assumption at the time is that the USSR would be on the Moon themselves not long after.
It was also implicitly assumed that Shuttle would make space travel so cheap going back to the Moon would be a synch so if the landings were faked, they would have to also sneak back to the Moon and leave artefacts of their fake landing to maintain the ruse.
Today we now have small payloads that piggyback on commercial launches that can go to the Moon so its just a matter of a few million dollars to get a lander onto one of those sites and "blew the whole thing wide open".
The biggest technological hurdle to get to the Moon was rendezvous (as all Kerbals will tell you!). Germini was mostly aimed at solving that. Buzz Aldrin did his Ph.D on the topic.
DSpace@MIT: Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous
With those solved, it was mostly about building a big enough rocket engine. (This massively simplifies things but those were the two big tech hurdles).

We also track some of the bits of the Apollo spacecraft on radars.
 
Yeah, I don't think any amount of evidence will persuade someone who has decided to believe it's a fake. People will accept what fits and reject what doesn't.
 
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