NOTE: I had a beautiful version of this. Then I tried to move a picture, and lost it all. This is but a shadow of its former self.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest achievements of humanity, the landing of men on the moon for the first time, July 20th, 1969.
It was a long, long time coming. Technologically, we can trace it back to the first use of fire to smelt copper, or even further back to fire itself (see the back end of the Saturn V rocket), and stone tools.
Scientifically, it goes back to about 500 BCE, when people in a certain area of southeastern Europe we now call “Greece” began to think in a naturalistic way about the skies. Eclipses, both solar and lunar, were terrifying because they were unusual, they were thought to be bad omens; signals from the gods. But it had been noticed that solar eclipses could only happen at new moons, and lunar eclipses only at full moons. The Greeks, however, figured out why: A solar eclipse was due to the moon passing directly between the observer and the sun, while a lunar eclipse was the moon passing through the Earth’s shadow. Furthermore, the Sun’s path against the stars—the Zodiac—was figured out with ease; the moon’s path was harder to predict but did follow regular patterns. All you had to do was look forward to a situation where the sun and moon to be in the same place in the sky at the same time, and you knew there would be a solar eclipse; if the moon would be perfectly opposite from the sun, lunar eclipse. (Note: these descriptions of geometry are as seen from Earth) That took the mystery out of eclipses; they were totally predictable, and simply the result of regular movements of celestial bodies. It didn’t make sense to most people for eclipses to be omens if they could be predicted a hundred years in advance.
That began an over-two-thousand-year-long process of figuring out how things worked up there, and how big things were and how far apart they were. It was, for various reasons, far easier to figure out the sizes of the Earth and the moon, and the distance to the moon, than it was for the other planets and the Sun (we got our first good measurements of these things in the 1700s).
We knew, very roughly, sizes, distances, and shapes, but not the “how it works,” quite early in this timespan. But much of the real progress happened in the 1500s and 1600s. Copernicus put forward a new vision of a sun-centered universe, with the planets, including the earth, which had not before been considered a planet, in orbit around the sun, rather than everything going around the earth in circular orbits. He, however, insisted that the orbits were still circular, so the past two thousand years of observational data simply couldn’t be reconciled with his theory, any better than they could be with a simple geocentric model (but in the fullness of time, it would turn out he got the Big Idea right). Galileo saw things through the telescope that overthrew some of the dogmatism imposed on science by the Church (though the story is more complicated than that); but he still insisted on the circular orbits. The Jesuits knew (correctly) that that couldn’t be true. Galileo also did enough work in mechanics to lay the groundwork for Newton.
But before Newton, we have to talk about Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Brahe made observations of the planets’ positions (as seen from Earth) of unprecedented accuracy; Kepler was able to use these to discover that we were observing planetary motion along elliptical orbits…from an planet following an orbit that was also elliptical! The ellipses all had the sun at one focus, but they were of different sizes, shapes, had different orientations of their long axes, and were even tipped so they weren’t in the same plane. To top it off the motion wasn’t at a constant speed, either; it’d be slower at one end of the ellipse—the one furthest from the sun—and faster at the other end. Kepler was able to figure out that if you drew a line from the Sun to a planet (or the earth to its moon), that line would sweep out equal areas in equal times…a thinner, longer slice farther away, a wider, shorter slice when the planet was nearer to the sun.
He did this using nothing but the direction the planets appeared from earth—no distances (he had to figure them out!)—and he did it without calculus, without a calculator, and without knowing the law of gravitation. And I would love to know how he did it.
Many, many years later he figured out a relationship between the size of the orbit, and the period—the time it took to complete an orbit. For Earth that’s almost (but not quite) one tropical year.
So now, between Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler we had an accurate model of how the planets behaved. But we didn’t know why they did so, nor did we know how our own (prospective) spacecraft would behave “up there.”
Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who ever lived. He put mechanics, the most basic branch of physics, on a firm footing, founded optics as a science, and he figured out that the force that caused the planets to orbit the sun, and the moon to orbit the earth, was the same force that makes things fall to the ground when you drop them. [That was a revelation. Up to then, things “up there” were believed to be fundamentally different from things “down here.”] And a spacecraft would be subject to the same forces. He could figure this out because he knew the distance to the moon, and realized that if some force followed the inverse square law, it matched the behavior of the moon in its orbit and the falling hammer. He also eventually proved that a force that followed such a law would cause things to move in elliptical orbits. He needed calculus to do this; unfortunately he didn’t have calculus. No one did, it didn’t exist. So he invented it. (Another person in Germany, Leibniz, were also inventing calculus at the time, but they didn’t know about each other’s work, so it’s effectively as if each of them invented it in full.)
At first, Newton didn’t publish this work; but someone else, trying to figure out what could make the planets moved in ellipses, asked him, and he told them. “Can you show me the proof?” was basically the response. Newton had to go look for the papers. While the greatest minds in Europe was wondering what could make planets move in elliptical orbits…Newton had found the answer and lost it!
(If you get the idea that I admire Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, you’re damned right I do!)
Of course we now call that force “gravity.” Here is the law that governs it (except near extremely massive objects, as Einstein discovered).
At this point, we knew that to get to the moon, we’d have to fight earth’s gravity all the way, a quarter million miles or so, but that (at least) you could coast large parts of the way, much as the planets basically coast in their orbits around the Sun. We had some conception, finally, of what we’d have to do to make it happen. We ultimately learned we’d have to bring our own air with us, because our atmosphere didn’t extend to the moon; and we’d have to solve a huge number of other problems as well, problems people in the 1600s couldn’t dream of. But from this point forward, we basically knew the size of the problem and in principle what we had to do; now it was “just” engineering; creating craft that could do those things, and keeping people alive on them in a very adverse environment.
It should be noted that Apollo 11 could not have succeeded if our basic understanding of the Earth-Moon system, and the force of gravity, were wrong. Claiming that our theory of gravity is wrong, or that the earth and moon aren’t spheres of the sizes they are, or that the distance is wrong, is logically equivalent to the claim that we’ve never gone into space, much less to the moon, either manned or unmanned. If our theory is wrong, the things we’ve done based on it could not have been done.
So how was it done?
Our astronauts first had to be put in orbit around the Earth. This requires a rocket, a big one, because we have to go from moving about a thousand miles an hour relative to the earth (we get that from the fact that the earth is rotating on its axis) to moving at fifteen or sixteen <i>thousand</i> miles per hour, or roughly 7000 meters per second. The rocket has to get our astronauts, and their spacecraft, and their food and air, up above the atmosphere <i>and</i> moving at that speed, roughly horizontally. There are a couple of ways to convey how this works without getting technical. But it’s important to know they aren’t “beyond the reach of gravity” or anything like that. The Earth still pulls on them, they are still falling down, towards the earth, but they are moving so far sideways in the same amount of time that the earth, being spherical, has dropped away the same amount. Or you can look at it another way: the centrifugal force of moving around the earth in such a big circle counterbalances gravity.
The Saturn V—the billion horsepower wonder, the most powerful machine ever designed by man that wasn’t a big bomb—had three stages, all below the service module (cylindrical) and command module (conical). The astronauts lived in the command module; the service module supplied oxygen and included its own rocket motor for propulsion. The bottom two stages were jettisoned during the ascent, the third stage remained attached to the service module and command module in orbit.
I’ll point out here that the reason the Saturn V rocket was so big was because it had to be able to put the service module, command module and its own third stage, all into orbit at once. A heavy load like this required a heavy rocket.
So now that the Apollo astronauts were in orbit, the next step of the process was to wait until the right point in the spacecraft’s orbit around the earth, and fire the rocket in the third stage. This added more speed to the spacecraft…which has the effect of raising the other end of the orbit, lengthening the eclipse. Eventually, the ellipse was long (or tall, depending on your point of view) enough to reach the moon’s orbit.
It had to be aimed in the right direction when this happened, or it wouldn’t be headed toward the moon.
This started about three days of coasting, with the earth pulling back at Apollo 11 the whole time, gradually slowing it down as it climbed in it’s orbit. Remember what Kepler said about orbital speed?
One very important thing had to be done during this coast. The astronauts had to separate the command module and service module (together known as Columbia) from the Saturn V third stage, swivel around to face the third stage, and dock with the lunar module, the lander known as Eagle, which was stored in the third stage. They then had to pull the lander out of the third stage, and then continue on to the moon without the stage.
The Eagle had to be stored in the third stage, below/behind Columbia, because if it had been put on top of the command module during launch, it would have been shredded by the earth’s atmosphere. This was a complicated maneuver, and part of the Gemini program of the mid 1960s was learning how to dock spacecraft. It had a complicated name, too: it was called the transposition, docking, and extraction, and it was executed flawlessly by Michael Collins.)
By the time Apollo 11 got near the moon, it was traveling at a mere 1 mile per second. But, this was too fast! You see, Apollo 11 may have been near the moon, but it was traveling faster than the moon’s escape velocity. Without slowing down, it would just coast on by.
In fact, the third stage had also continued coasting after the extraction, and it was nearby. It would sail on past the moon, getting a slingshot and escaping earth entirely, going into its own orbit around the sun. It’s still out there, somewhere.
So it was time for another “burn”, this time pointed in the direction of travel, to slow Apollo 11 down. This was done by firing the rocket motor in the Service module. Once that was done, the astronauts were in orbit around the Moon! They waited about 30 orbits, then Armstrong and Aldrin moved into the lander, and detached from the Command Module.
All of this had been done before. Apollo 8 had orbited the moon and returned, and Apollo 10 had actually almost landed on the moon with its own “lander.” (Is it a lander if it never lands?)
But this time it was for real. A landing site had been picked, but there was much we did not know. One possibility was that the dust on the surface there would be so deep it would swallow the spacecraft. (Though we had sent unmanned craft to the moon earlier, and they had not got lost in deep dust, who knew if this part of the moon was the same way?) Also, we had never seen the landing site up close—it could be filled with boulders instead of being flat.
As it turned out, the landing site was treacherous, and Neil Armstrong had to burn more and more fuel, looking for a good place to land. He barely found one before he would have had to abort, and return to the Command Module,. That was why the mission controllers were almost blue in the face. Armstrong had just played “chicken” with the moon, and won.
“Tranquility Base. The Eagle has Landed.” Men were on the moon.
Men were on the moon!
Think about that. We have existed as a species for something on the order of 200,000 years. And for 199,950 of those years, we had never been on the Moon.
(I was five when this happened. I don’t remember it, though I do remember Apollo 12. This is the one thing…the one thing…that sometimes makes me wish I were just a little bit older.)
Six and a half hours after landing, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, soon to be joined by “Buzz” Aldrin.
President Nixon called them while they were setting up the flag (which was troublesome; far from being deep dust, just below surface it was so hard they couldn’t plant the pole). Nixon said:
Hello, Neil and Buzz. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you’ve done. For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives. And for people all over the world, I am sure they too join with Americans in recognizing what an immense feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one: one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.
One line bears repeating.
Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world.
Soon enough, it was time to return. The top half of the lander, known as the ascent stage, blasted off, using the lower part of the lander as a launch pad. It had to rendezvous in orbit with Columbia, requiring exact timing on the launch (or it would reach orbit and Columbia would be somewhere else), and another docking maneuver. Then, with Armstrong and Aldrin back in Columbia the ascent stage was jettisoned. Columbia then did a burn to escape from lunar orbit, heading back to Earth.
The trickiest part was yet to come. On return to earth, there was simply no fuel left in the Service module. The two big burns near the moon, plus minor corrections, had used up everything. The craft couldn’t do another burn to go into orbit and then another to gracefully descend. Instead, the Service module, too, was abandoned, once it put the Command Module on a precise trajectory. It had to be aimed at the earth’s atmosphere at a very precise angle, one with would allow it to aerobrake. Too shallow and it’d basically bounce off the atmosphere, too steep, and it becomes a meteor.
Of course we know that they hit it right, and returned safely.
The entire gigantic pile of explosives known as a Saturn V had been needed to send the Command Module to the moon and bring it back to Earth, to do an aerobrake because there was no fuel left. It was only made possible by using a light tin can of a lander and abandoning everything once it was no longer needed. Each abandoned piece was responsible for carrying the weight of the remaining part of the mission; if you think about that, that necessitates big pieces at the beginning, small ones at the end.
So what did I mean by subtitling this, “A Triumph of Man Living In Freedom”?
This whole thing was made possible by man’s mind, his rational thought processes, his reason.
None of this could have happened, without minds free to think, free to reason. We’d never have understood what needed to be done.
None of this could have happened, without people free to build prosperous lives, to learn practical skills, or we’d never have had the resources nor the technical skills to do it.
Only FREE people could do these things. The Soviets came close…but they were piggybacking on the free world; they couldn’t have done it without free people, past and present.
And only FREE people can make any sort of progress, produce wealth which enhances our lives, allows us to thrive rather than just existing.
Don’t let them take it away from us. If they do, we lose not just what took us to the moon, we lose what we could do in the future. Worse, we also lose what makes it possible to thrive here on earth.
Don’t let them take it away from us.
Don’t let them.
Don’t.
Of course, I didn’t do a coin picture on July 4. Luckily, I have another one to show you to make up for it.
BRAVO!!!
The ball this post hit out of the ballpark hasn’t landed yet, but I hear they found it’s cover over by 2nd base. The seam was ripped right in two.
Hmm…into orbit?
Thanks!
I might as well use this as an excuse to try to make something about orbital mechanics coherent to people who haven’t studied it (I actually have, formally, rather than being self educated like with most of what I know). If Superman were to do that to a ball (and somehow didn’t shatter the bat), its trajectory out of the park would be part of the orbit it’s now in, because no one would be acting on it with a force again. (Unless someone, somewhere Up There hits it again to change its trajectory.) The only force acting on it is gravity. It will, therefore move in an ellipse. But part of that ellipse goes THROUGH the Earth! Don’t believe me? Backtrack back through the bat and you’ll see the line goes back into the ground.
So a ball smacked “into orbit” WILL hit the earth, somewhere, perhaps thousands of miles away.
There’s two things to add to that. 1) If superman hits the ball hard enough, it’s on an escape trajectory and is NEVER coming back. It’s following a parabola (if exactly, exactly, exactly at escape velocity) or a hyperbola (if faster, even by a millimeter per millennium).
2) ANY thrown (or shot) object is actually in orbit, until it intersects the ground. That wad of paper you threw toward the trashcan? Yes, in a god’s eye view that isn’t rotating with the earth, it’s following an elliptical trajectory into the trashcan (neglecting air resistance), and if it could somehow move through solid rock as if it weren’t there, it’d be in an elliptical orbit with a VERY low perigee. (I’m also pretending that the entire mass of the earth is concentrated at the center.)
“But wait,” someone might object, “in high school physics I was taught that things followed a parabolic trajectory!” Yes you were, BUT…the problem setup assumes that wherever you are, down is a direction that’s parallel to every other down direction. That’s not actually true, but in the classroom physics lab, down at one end of the room, and down at the other end, meet four thousand miles away so they’re almost parallel, so it’s a good approximation (and highly educational!).
Note I DID say “yet”, implying it would eventually land.
Or, as Han Solo once said…😉
Anything over about 90 minutes means it’s either in a BIG orbit, or never coming back. 🙂
AMEN!
I went looking for other high-res “earthrise” pictures. Here is one:
Here is apparently the first image, COLORIZED….
https://spacefellowship.com/news/art54274/earthrise-1-historic-image-remastered.html
http://spacefellowship.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Earthrise1_Apollo8AndersWeigang_20481.jpg
I just realized that this one makes sense. It’s from Apollo 8, December 24, 1968 – summer in the southern hemisphere, and thus Antarctica on the left is in summer. Africa is spinning DOWN into night with the two ends showing.
Great photos, Wolf! I see Africa. It’s always a little disconcerting to see our planet from this perspective. Reminds me that we are both valuable and inconsequential in our human forms, which leads me to humility and gratitude for that reminder.
AMEN! The construction of this universe is most remarkable to produce intelligence such as ours, on the surface of the ashes of the fireworks, bathed in the glow of their own production.
And yet beyond THAT awe-inspiring realization, is the realization that there are likely an infinite number of other “universe types” – where stars and planets aren’t even a “thing” – that would also create and support intelligence, with physics utterly unlike anything we experience, and laws nothing like our own.
People talk about universes where “maybe the speed of light or sound would be different”. I’m talking about maybe light isn’t a thing. I’m talking about sound isn’t even a thing. I’m talking about *speed* maybe not even being a thing. And at the edge of our minuscule human thought, *THINGS* may not even be a thing. Perhaps only self-consistency matters. And perhaps it does not. Or even, more fantastically, some other choice than THAT. If there are maths that cannot even begin to be described with our own, there may be universes that we literally cannot begin to describe. Or worse still, an infinity of them.
Life is a gift just to realize that life is a gift!
That, in the end, is an irreducible primary.
If someone posits something that’s not self-consistent, you can dismiss it out of hand until they fix the discrepancy…if they can.
You… you… “this universalist”! 😉
I highly recommend this book….
Very cool! Thanks!
Excellent post, Steve!
😃👍👍
What amazes me is how they were able to do this with such primitive technology at the time.
They were literally having to invent what they needed, as they went along.
I have seen one of the Landers up close…and OMG, it was so clunky and fragile-looking…that is when it hit me how dangerous these moon-missions were.
😳😬
It’s really a miracle that they managed to do so many successful missions.
And, after Apollo 1…no one died.
Apparently Armstrong and Aldrin left an Apollo 1 patch on the moon, as well as medals honoring a couple of Soviet cosmonauts who had died.
Another tidbit, apparently a lot of younger kids today don’t believe it happened. They figure if we had that back then, we’d have something much better than that now (they’re equating rocketry with computers).
A lot of this is due to demoralization trolls who shill the flat earth stuff. I believe it’s part of a global effort to psychologically demoralize, contain and control America.
I got into a lengthy discussion with one such, a few days ago, on one of the daily threads.
I certainly appreciate this post – this stuff is a massive WAKE-UP CALL that just burns off layers of Fake News Mind Control.
I assume you’re referring to me. I have never advocated for flat earth, never advocate for anything else either. But I have something maybe an older, wiser person like you could teach a ‘kid’ like me. I see an assertion in the board that GPS technology guidance technology & rocket guidance technology are “different”. I grant you, they are different, in many ways,as different as LORAN technology & GPS are different. They Do, however, share many similarities, as do aircraft & rockets & there are no compensatory programs in ANY avionics to compensate for earths curvature. It is with that in mind i present this NASA technical paper. Geometry PROVES the earth is basically a ‘ball’ according to you, I say Trig & calculus prove it isn’t, at east as far as I can see. Maybe you in you’re elderly wisdom can explain this? ALL Avionics, guidance technology, & guidance systems, including the laser gyros in ships, planes & rockets are designed on these calculations.Read it at your own risk. I read it first in 1989, & it blew me away, there are also many supporting documents from Air Force & Naval sources, if you care to dig.This marks my personal exit from QT, ya’all as open minded as Sundance. Oh & by the way, I assume you are at least 80, if you can call me a kid. If the math drags you down, in the report, Just go to the summery page at the end, it contains all pertinent, information. I think you’ll find abstract # 16’s conclusion a bit unnerving. It’s OK though, Just cause this is in the design of ALL guidance Tech, you’ll be able to chalk it up to my apparent youth & inexperience.
Isn’t THAT just Shilly!. This is also for all you folks that have reached the conclusion that I am a ‘Flat Earth” “shill”.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/88104main_H-1391.pdf
Another Quote To make your Day!
Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason.
Albert Pike
Granted…… I am NOT the “smartest” commenter on this site……
But I am also NOT…. STUPID!
Yes…. It takes more PROOF for me to BELIEVE things than it does for others.
Especially after the HORRORS (and LIES) surrounding 9-11-01.
We ALL know “They” LIE to us over and over…..
And have been since time began.
“Proofs” that still need resolved in my mind:
Many rational theories are out there pertaining to:
Moon Landing?
Flat Earth?
BHO Birth?
UFO’s?
Aliens?
Tunnels?
Open minds lead towards truth.
ARROGANCE… not so much 🙂
Agreed, I have never been told by anyone how stupid I am in ‘nice’ ways more than here.
Sorry to hear that……. It definitely can be tough here from time to time……. I suggest maybe do what I do…..
Shrug it off and carry on.
There are ALSO many very good commenters sans the ARROGANCE of some.
true
Though These ARE laminar Flow calculation,It is still pertinent as those calculations are made in relationship between Aircraft position in relation to sea level or ground
Well I must say that’s impressive (by the way I never called you a kid, although Wolf and I are talking about how kids think we never reached the moon)!
You’ve managed to rip that entire paper out of its context.
It describes modeling the instantaneous dynamics of the forces acting on an airplane. And for doing that, it’s an appropriate approximation for the earth to be “flat” since, when you’re flying right now being hit by winds, it doesn’t matter which direction Hong Kong is in, and over the length of the aircraft, the direction “down” is effectively parallel everywhere, since the convergence is unmeasurable.
In other words, it doesn’t address navigation at all. You’ve been had, if some Flat Earther showed it to you and tried to use it as proof.
For your further perusal, Try NASA technical paper # 2835. It’s a long read, but it convinces ME I know A Whole lot less than I USED to think I did, including ALL the stuff you posted today. I used to be totally sold, however, I’m not so sure of what I KNOW to be fact. When I was younger, I had All the moon landing stuff, The models, book collection, whole nine yards. I TOTALLY KNEW that these things were true. When I was young I was taught all this stuff was the way things were. 500 years ago we KNEW the earth was flat, when I was a kid there were no such a thing as’flying saucers’ and we Knew the earth was round, in just the last few months we KNEW that there were UFO’s, there must be they were reported by “reliable” sources like military pilots. & we went to the moon 50 years ago. Imagine what we will KNOW tomorrow! Signing off, permanently, you need to read the report at the top of this post again, NASA Technical Paper # 2835
I’m sure you believe your last statement to be true, I didn’t think you’d be able to grasp the math, or, you would know your statement about “It doesn’t matter cuz they are talking about aircraft in flight & it doesn’t matter what the shape below it is. The point is, all of this is Designed for it’s relationship to what it Is flying over, otherwise guidance systems are useless, cuz if it does’t relate to sea level & the forces applied to the craft from ALL directions. This is dealt with in the math, if you understand what you are looking at. I guess you must be right though, some flat earther has me fooled, cuz I’m just too damn dumb to find it out for myself. That would also mean they got to the designers & engineers & the Air Force & the Navy & the US government, cuz these papers go on in adnosium in all those areas. When I was in that particular field, I finally just asked the people who did the actual design work, they didn’t understand, nor could they explain how it worked, cuz they KNEW the earth was round, yet, they had no idea how to design anything that took into consideration the curvature factor of the earths shape, so they designed it to operate the way the report said. I’m quite sure you’ll come up with some simplistic argument to dismiss this post too, unless you want me to do your research & look up All the tech papers available! You can go right on pontificating about my ignorance if you choose, I just think this is probably the first time you’ve met anyone as stubborn in what they think as you. Yes declaring someone to be ‘fooled’ or lacking understanding is the same tactic as those who really don’t have a ‘what’ again?
You realize that for the scope of this paper (dynamics of an airplane in flight), the situation is so local that one can approximate the earth as flat?
It doesn’t address navigation at all. It’s not intended to.
Did you READ it yet, doubt it I couldn’t read it that fast.
I read enough of it to realize what its goal was. I certainly didn’t check the math.
But there’s nothing in the text that has anything to do with navigating. Nothing that addresses which heading I should use to go to Hong Kong. For which a flat earth model would give a very different answer from the oblate spheroid model.
As I said before, you’re ripping this out of context. You’re taking a mathematical model of the local forces on an airplane and trying to say it has something meaningful to non-local navigation.
Of course, you must be right, I should have known better than the idea that you could grasp anything as stupid as some flat earther who must have fooled me with my inferior intellect would have posted. I guess I’ll just never be smart enough to grasp the greater truths in life. This is turning into the typical black hole of stupidity that I have come to expect from the”educated”. It is what I seem to live with out here on the anus of creation. But, I will soldier on, hoping to find more people like you, willing to come down from their great mountain of knowledge to enlighten me, though I think they’ll still run into the problem all of them seem to have, asking,What do you mean, forest, all I see is those damn trees!
Well, if you continue going through life with such muddy thinking, you’re going to continue feeling pain. I’m sorry, there’s no more polite way to put it.
You’ve pointed me to a paper that makes an *approximation* that the world is flat, locally, for purposes of modeling aircraft behavior.
It looks like solid work to me, and certainly making approximations–small ones–is a legitimate thing to do; in fact calculus largely operates by assuming things are flat or straight, looked at close enough, then adding them together to approximate the curved reality.
But then, you take this paper and insist that it’s somehow evidence that on the big scale (which the paper doesn’t say one damn word about) the earth is flat, but that’s being concealed from us. In other words, you’re taking a local approximation and forgetting it’s a local approximation, using it as evidence that it’s not an approximation. That’s a HUGE flaw in YOUR logic, not mine. The fact that I see that does not make ME closed-minded.
The fact that I’m even bothering to try to explain that to you puts me one up on most people who understand that the earth cannot possibly be flat, who would have given up on you long ago.
Please, GIVE UP, as you can see I must be hopeless, especially for someone with your obvious, to you at least, superior int-elect. You STILL don’t get it, ALL guidance systems are made this way, I can’t explain how it works in spite of having assurances that the earth is round, & having worked with these systems. No it doesn’t matter the shape of the planet, in the direct area just below the craft, but when it is multiplied by hundreds of miles, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles the tech that was designed to work over a flat, linear plane that is non-rotating in the design of the tech & the tech STILL WORKS, my interest is in how, if we are sure of our knowledge of the earth, & there are those that certainly are, HOW CAN THE TECH STILL WORK if it IS designed that way, over the model of a round earth. Can you explain it, cuz I’ve never found anyone with the intellect to explain it, even those who work in the design & implementation of said tech, I don’t know any other way to tell you this. Thank you ever so much for taking the time out of your day to lower yourself to someone you consider as ignorant as me,
(By the way, I looked at 2835…in the intro it says it’s about aerodynamics. And it appears to be the computer implementation of the model from the other paper. It neither adds, nor subtracts from it.)
The guidance systems you reference are about making sure the plane (or missile) is flying in the direction we want it to fly.
It’s nothing about choosing the direction in the first place. THAT is a decision that ISN’T made by the system, and ISN’T made with reference to a “flat earth”
Is there anything, in either paper, that will tell me which way I have to point my aircraft to go to Hong Kong?
No. It’s simply not addressed here, and the authors damned well KNOW that it would be inappropriate to make this decision using their flat-earth approximation. I’ll bet they’d be horrified to see their work cited in support of a flat earth theory.
You’re Still thinking in terms of flat vs. round rather than what I actually addressed, AMAZING, to say the least. It is, however a question that does come up in the community all the time. They don’t address it cuz they CAN”T explain it, but, as you can see my education & experience are meaningless in the scheme of things. One last try It, the tech doesn’t decide where it goes, but someone inputted it & the spacial relationship of the craft to it’s location; doesn’t ever seem to get lost. The uninterruptible auto pilot is what is giving Boeing fits right now, because so many have died in their planes as of late, they were grounded for some time. But, far be it from me to question your obviously superior intellect in not thinking through THIS particular angle. Same way in your rocket tech, the humans piloting it have way more to do than just steering the rocket, so, co ordinates are inputted, even in APOLLO, which had the average computing power of the average pocket calculator of the 1970’s. That can’t be refuted, but I’m sure you’ll come up with another simplistic argument for that as well.
If I could figure out how it possibly has any bearing to the matter at hand, I might try.
You’ve shown me code for an aerodynamic model of flight. It has nothing to do with navigation.
If the earth is not an oblate spheroid, then the correct way to get to a place thousands of miles away would differ, than it would for a spherical earth. You’re maybe not saying it’s flat, but you’re also arguing it’s not oblately spherical either.
These guidance systems simply DO NOT compute the way to distant locations, so the flat-earthiness of the math behind them doesn’t matter. They’re job is instead to keep the plane flying straight and level, in a direction previously input, or fed to them by an autopilot.
I was once a pilot. I heard many stories people who were trying to get their pilot’s license. They could fly beautifully, far better than I could. But they would land in the wrong places when doing a “cross country” flight, so they couldn’t get their license.
The system described in these two papers basically has the ability of those pilots. Their flat earth assumption is fine for that. But as they have nothing to do with pointing the aircraft towards the destination in the first place (they KEEP it pointed that way once it has been pointed that way, but they don’t make the decision which way to point), these papers are TOTALLY irrelevant to the issue of the shape of the Earth. Because that decision, which they don’t address, is what would differ if the earth were of different shapes.
As for the Boeing autopilot–it’s the same thing. It’s crashing planes, an immediate consequence, not sending them to Timbuktu when they were supposed to go to Cairo.
It’s a very different issue, the one has nothing to do with the other.
Imagine if I were to try to claim that Trump never said something (which he in fact had said) and in our discussion I kept pointing you to other speeches as evidence and ignoring your links to where he did in fact say what he had said. You’d probably be pretty frustrated, right?
That’s the sort of exasperation I’m feeling. I’ve presented evidence that’s pretty damned incontrovertible AND which you can verify for yourself. (I haven’t even gone into the myriad of other things that we see on a daily basis, all best explained by a (nearly) spherical Earth.) In return for this, you’ve accused me of only believing the proof because I saw it in school. You’ve presented UTTERLY IRRELEVANT technical papers addressing a totally different issue as alleged support for a flat earth. Now you’re complaining that I shouldn’t think in terms of round vs. flat? Well what is it then? And If it’s something different, you really shouldn’t be citing those NASA papers!
By the way, you might enjoy this; someone asking stackexhange about this very thing:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/319909/why-does-nasa-need-an-aircraft-model-flying-over-a-flat-and-nonrotating-earth
Maybe one of them can explain it better than I did.
OH, yay!, more physics I left this stuff behind long ago, I kept tryin’ to prove it too. I’m given Eretosthenes & his ‘magic stick’, never mind Mickelson Morely blew motion out of the water, in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. I don’t intend to plow old ground that has been plowed so much that I can’t conceive of how many times I’ve been there, each time, convinced of the truth, only to discover it to be all bullshit. I notice you never addressed the how of my question, it still doesn’t explain it. As far as not citing NASA papers, it is public domain, yet you seem to feel that I shouldn’t be siting them. Again, that is one of the more easily found documents, You are free to remain ignorant if you wish, but what CAUSED the crashes in the Boeing planes, they all went into a stall before crashing, that indicates a loss of the gear loosing spacial relationship to it’s location in relation to the ground, could it be that the very design of the tech could be the culprit, there’s your flat vs. round. I can see that you are obviously unable to grasp more abstract ideas other than what is, in your mind, proven.
You’re certainly free to cite them. They just have nothing to do with the subject at hand; they are NOT evidence that the Earth is not spheroidal.
You have got to be shitting me. Well, no, you don’t. You clearly haven’t got the central point. Which is that you can, for ranges of less than a few miles, treat the earth as if it is flat, because it’s so BIG that you really can’t see the curvature over such a short range.
Stalling before reaching the ground? I’m sorry, I’m a former pilot and studied a ton of physics, and I simply don’t see how the system assuming the earth was round when it is really flat, OR THE OTHER WAY AROUND, could be the cause of the problem. The difference under those circumstances is literally millimeters or less. If that’s enough to prang a Boeing, then Boeing has much bigger problems than buggy software.
Besides which…this argument works against, not for, you. You maintain that this flat earth guidance model and software form the basis of everything that has been used since. Well, in that case, it’s the system that is assuming a flat earth that is in error!
On the contrary, I am able to grasp such abstract concepts like when it is appropriate to do an approximation, when it is inappropriate to apply that approximation, how to validate one’s knowledge, how to distinguish between different reasons to believe a proposition, and many other things.
You’ve failed in all those aspects of critical thinking. Someone handed you a reference to a NASA paper about a guidance system that was designed with an appropriate simplification, and you now believe that approximation is really “the truth.” You show a pride in bucking the conventional wisdom simply because it is the conventional wisdom. It never occurs to you that perhaps it’s conventional because it has been proven over a time span of centuries.
There seems to be a class of people who think that anytime someone agrees with the conventional wisdom, they’re not thinking for themselves; it’s the inverse of the attitude that it’s always wrong to buck it.
Both of these attitudes are wrong.
One should go through life looking at each individual issue piecemeal and make up their own mind. The price one pays is some fools think one is rebellious, and other fools think one refuses to question anything.
Spherical earth, proven? Yes, indeed. You’ve shown no sign you understand, or want to understand it. But I’ve experienced a lot of things, like midnight sun, massive timezone changes, latitude changes resulting in a complete change in the sky, and so on, none of which make sense any other way. I expect you’ll again condemn me for simply sucking up to the conventional wisdom, but in this particular instance, absolutely EVERYTHING I have seen in life indicates it’s utterly true. That is MY judgement speaking there. The true independent mind checks everything, and rejects what is clearly false and accepts what is clearly true, on no other basis than the facts. The FALSE independent mind simply rejects everything he’s told, because he has been told it, and he’ll latch on to specious arguments (“Look at this [totally irrelevant] paper!”) to support his rejection. Then he goes off and is arrogant (and you are sure arrogant) towards those who refuse to go along with his BULLSHIT, accusing them of refusing to question things.
Well, I questioned what you were pushing…and you didn’t like the result. Tough shit.
OH, yay!, more physics I left this stuff behind long ago, I kept tryin’ to prove it too. I’m given Eretosthenes & his ‘magic stick’, never mind Mickelson Morely blew motion out of the water, in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. I don’t intend to plow old ground that has been plowed so much that I can’t conceive of how many times I’ve been there, each time, convinced of the truth, only to discover it to be all bullshit. I notice you never addressed the how of my question, it still doesn’t explain it. As far as not citing NASA papers, it is public domain, yet you seem to feel that I shouldn’t be siting them. Again, that is one of the more easily found documents, You are free to remain ignorant if you wish, but what CAUSED the crashes in the Boeing planes, they all went into a stall before crashing, that indicates a loss of the gear loosing spacial relationship to it’s location in relation to the ground, could it be that the very design of the tech could be the culprit, there’s your flat vs. round. I can see that you are obviously unable to grasp more abstract ideas other than what is, in your mind, proven.I’m just saying, nothing, absolutely nothing we’ve been told is 100% true & we shouldn’t be so sure we have a total grasp of truth. What is truth in one generation, will not be in vogue in the next, be sure you ALWAYS keep your self open to new truth.
This is not good…… I hate to see you leave.
We ALL have differing ideas and views about all sorts of things.
“This marks my personal exit from QT, ya’all as open minded as Sundance……”
Please reconsider.
We all do KNOW they “THEY” LIE about almost EVERYTHING…
Hard to “Know” what is True and Real.
I leave open the possibilities of most LOGICAL and REASONABLE “Theories”
Please don’t leave.
Sorry. Wrong meme. Meant to do the one about if the earth was flat then cats would have pushed everything off the edge
I’m convinced that the whole ‘fake moon landing’ conspiracy theory was started and promoted by communists.
I mean…who benefits?
When we went to the Moon, we claimed it “for mankind”.
Not for the USA, but for all of mankind.
If the commies can claim that ‘that didn’t happen’, then they would be free to claim the Moon as their own territory…when they eventually get there.
It is an absurd conspiracy theory, too.
We left irrefutable proof on the Moon that we were there.
You’d be amazed at the mental gymnastics they can go through to discount ANYTHING.
“How do you know the proof is there? Did you see it yourself?”
“Oh, there’s a picture of it? How do you know it wasn’t photoshopped?”
I had one flat earth clown try to tell me I only believed the earth was round because I had been told so in school. In this particular case, WRONG; I’ve seen the evidence with my own eyes. He kept insisting. That made me quite angry–don’t tell me what I think and why.
I investigated the Flat Earth people when they were spinning up on Gab after Trump’s election. Their purpose SEEMED to oppose the revitalization of NASA and the creation of a space force. I noticed that not only were their memes and images quite good – the meme arguments were often very SMART in their deceptions. I have a very interesting science background which is both open-minded but skeptical, with great appreciation for the history of science. I wanted to figure out where the hell these were coming from.
I was led back to a guy who had infiltrated the 9/11 “Truther” movement, and was misleading them into dead ends. THEY caught him making flawed arguments, and eventually caught him in outright lies. Apparently he drifted in – ingratiated himself to the community – and then misled them. He left quite a bit of reputation in the process. Discreditation – disinformation – smelled like assets of commies, treasonous Clowns, or both.
There is a very high chance that this guy I found is red diaper, and also a high chance he would be associated with the people who are accused of fake videography on 9/11.
I need to get my research out sometime and give it to Aubergine.
Biggest rock in the path of the New World Order is America. In my opinion, 9/11 was part of it, too, just like shutting down NASA to force us into “Russia drives” space exploration. Note the Hollywood memes on that. Telling, no?
I now see 9/11 as an enhanced organic event – a psychological operation (buildings must fall – planes can’t just crumple on the sides and leave big divots) used as an initiator for all this Muzz-raising social manipulations we are now seeing – it just makes oodles and oodles of sense.
These people have a MASSIVE plan to manipulate the entire planet toward SOMETHING. Whatever it is, based on “transmania”, it’s weird as hell, and humans are highly controlled.
What I believe happened on 9/11 is extremely sophisticated anti-American Soviet-type military psychology. I believe that many on our side were bought into the project by deception – lies about purpose, about needs, about everything. The reality was a powerful psychological blow to Americans with a minimal number of deaths (very “Stalin”) to ultimately demoralize younger generations for LATER operations. Taking down NASA after Reagan is part of that. Killing Kennedy – they just had to do it.
All making sense now. And pretty monstrous. No permission, no forgiveness – they just DO IT and ignore us like cattle.
Red/Green/Black alliance yet again?
Remember, Ø made the whole NASA mission about making muslims feel better – affirming Islam.
Heck, Ø made everything about validating Islam….and communism and blacks.
It was all about ideology and skin color to Ø.
I suspect that a lot of people at the top of the NWO and globalist movements have been deceived BIG-TIME.
This is the evil trinity.
They are supremacists, aggressively seeking to eliminate other races and ideologies, esp. Christianity and Judaism from the earth.
Rising Serpent has exposed Rashida Tlaib.
Omar’s sister in violent jihad.
One thing about the flat earth disinfo campaign…
You can’t fake an eclipse.
And we have those gamed out to such an exact science that we know the exact millisecond that a shadow will land within only a couple of square feet for the entire earth’s surface.
Heck amateurs get the NASA data and write their own GPS coordinated eclipse shadow apps.
August 21st, 2017 is when I had this odd sense that everything with the Trump administration had changed. I’d been looking forward to that eclipse since I was in grade school, but there was something about it that felt epochal, like this was the point where things began to be reset. The media began to lose control of its narrative.
Yes, I caught that, in central Nebraska.
We’ve got another one coming up in a few years.
And yet another one in 2045 will pass right over my house. Watch an eclipse by bringing out a lawn chair!!!
You know, that motive just fits in with the ANTI-NATIONALISM of the “anti-national” socialists a.k.a. global socialists, yet it also fits in with the NATIONAL COMMUNISTS in – oh… maybe… CHINA.
All very interesting. AND LOGIC. Multiple ANTI-AMERICAN motives.
Timely reply, reposting from today’s daily thread:
https://wqth.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/dear-kag-20190720-open-topic/comment-page-1/#comment-206726
The propagation of the phony story that the moon landings are a “myth” or “staged” is an incredible piece destructive psy-ops that ranks right up there with the propagation of the flat earth myth as a triumph of modern disinformation campaigns.
Ironically the Soviets never called out the Americans for not landing on the moon. You know full well that isn’t the Soviet way, to let something like that slip…
…but they were more than happy to stoke the flames of an underground conspiracies that undermined confidence in the United States government. The moon landing in July 1969 was smack in the middle of one of the most inflamed periods of civilian targeted psy-ops in American history – 1968, during the election cycle, was a year where the MCM had No Good News, every news story was about the fabric of American civil life unravelling at every seam. It was calculated. The only blip in the 1968 news radar was Apollo 10. It was more than the masters of agitprop could bear…
Thus was born the “Americans didn’t land on the moon” disinformation campaign. One version of the story even blames the CIA for building the sound stages and sets for the grainy recordings. I can just imagine those CIAKGB people laughing all the way to the bank on that little gem. Conspiracy theories about the CIA are simply magical pieces of disinformation – it’s far too easy for a campaign to add in the CIA as a convenient boogey man. Why not? It makes anyone who is suspicious of the organization seem like a complete crank obsessed with – guess what? – UFOs and faking the moon landings!
And from their point of view, that would be the sheer beauty of it!
I’m not as convinced as many here that the CIA is THAT involved in everything bad that has happened for decades. But I sure as heck am not going to claim the opposite is certainly true, either!
By its very nature, it’s deception, and so things like Occam’s Razor cannot apply.
Great stuff! People need to read this three times to see exactly what you’re saying, because it’s subtle.
Keeping track of meme and counter-meme – lie and counter-lie, interest and counter-interest – picking apart even primitives like “the CIA” – THESE are the motivations behind the SCIENCE of conspiracy theory. Throw out nothing, sort out everything. Eventually, understanding wins.
Sometimes we just cut through the Gordian knot with the sword (Trumpian action) – sometimes we pick it open with the tip of the sword to study its construction, and cut through it with our minds (Trumpian preparation). We may even pick apart the fibers of the rope itself, to see why it kinks a certain way (AND logic, free speech, every tool we can bring to bear). But we refuse to abandon LOGICAL THINKING. One of the GREAT FRUITS OF CIVILIZATION.
Underneath all of the ancient Greek accomplishments of astronomy that I mention…is this. They systematized LOGICAL THINKING, and insisted it was the way to go.
It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that more progress was made on that front.
After Apollo 1, no more pure oxygen environments in spacecraft, I understand.
Plus they redid the wiring. And there was a LOT of wiring.
Yes. From the accounts, it sounds like Grissom, White and Chaffee knew something was going to go wrong. Like they had a bad feeling.
I had a bad feeling on a certain night in November of 2016, too.
We tend to remember those “bad feelings” when they come true.
Oh the precious little darlings! Isn’t this a vivid expression of why the space program had to be curtailed? One more brick pulled from the stature of the United States of America. No more excellence for America. Potus knows this cannot stand.
It’s a VERY good thing I detected your sarcasm…
They had a LOT of very smart people working very hard. But yes – dangerous.
It really pays to THINK THINGS OUT – to see that they were REAL – maybe primitive-looking now, but advanced and SOLID at the time – because when you realize that, it puts the LIE to all the flat earth demoralization trolls.
Very interesting to timeline our space stuff (Q team in ascendance) versus the falling back of our space stuff (anti-Q Deep State on the rise).
I am now convinced of the veracity of the leaked (intentionally, IMO) “quick history of Q team”. It just fits everything like a glove.
My husband just reminded me that everything was calculated with a slide ruler.
He still loves his slide ruler.
When our kids attended High School all the kids had calculators ours had slide rulers.
Those were the days I remember them well.
My husband came from projects home 11 PM and went back to work at 6 Am.
I got to do a “patched conic” exercise in “planning” a mission to Mars. It’s a series of approximations, where at first you pretend only the spacecraft and Earth exist, then during the transfer to Mars, only the spacecraft and the Sun exist, then near Mars, that only the spacecraft and Mars exist. It gets you within the ballpark, and I imagine 20 years before I took the classes, it would have been slide rules, not my trusty HP-41C.
I guarantee you that the final calculations for that mission (if it were a real mission) would have been shoved through a big honking computer–one that’s less powerful than your cellphone is today, but big for its time–to do numerical integration of the whole thing assuming all four bodies existed, and probably accounting even for the effect of Jupiter. Without that, you won’t get pinpoint accuracy, since as soon as you have three bodies in the system, you have to do numerical integration; you can’t just solve some equation.
Wow Steve lots of calculations.
He remembers the big machines that were primitive for todays standart. I
My husband worked at the time for McDonnel Douglas and they did some work. He never said what. The guys who worked in Aero Space loved their work.
Now our oldest grandson wants to step into his grandfathers footsteps .
I cannot wait what next space explorations bring.
I actually used a slide rule for my chem classes at Purdue. When I was back there for statistics, 30 years later I was using a hot shot calculator that #2 son had outgrown. I found the calculator intimidating. Go figure!
I had a slide rule with me in college, just in case the calculator died during an exam. It was an extremely basic model. I just checked. I still have it. (Plus a “real” one my dad gave me many years later, 1950s vintage. It’s such a precision piece of work that if you grip it in the middle, you can’t slide it; you’ve pressed the three pieces together.)
I never had to use it. If I had, I’d probably have struggled to do multiplication; I’d have had to go through the whole test, set up the problems (to prove I knew what to do), written a note that my calc was dead and I was using a slide rule, then do very approximate computations, as painfully as in the old days, but ten times slower because of my inexperience.
I bet that slide rule your dad gave you is a beauty and a treasure.
I want to find slide rules for all my engineer sons and grandsons…just for the heck of it.
Apparently Pickett was a very good company.
Looked it up. Their slide rules went on 5 missions. Wow.
WOW!
That was a great read Steve. I was 19 at the time and watching this unfold was mesmerizing to say the least. Reading this now 50years later is even more enlightening to what they accomplished in that era and the triumph of Man Living in Freedom made it all possible is the cherry on top!
TY
That was a wonderful essay about a wonderful event. I am going to save it.
Thank you.
Amen
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus?
I got to see it in person, once.
…She wasn’t even alive, and she wasn’t born an American, yet she takes pride in this, as well she should, because she’s certainly an American now!
Steve, Bravo – your essays are always awesome – but this one is fabulous!!!
I asked this question on the Daily Thread – Does the Star Spangled Banner yet wave on the moon?
Have the flags survived all these years/
AND – THANK YOU – for your dedication and hard work doing it over – it must have taken a long time to write this post TWICE!!!!
It wasn’t complete destruction–I wrote a draft (without pictures) in OfficeWrite. But I had edited it a LOT after putting it into WordPress, and that got destroyed. I had to read it through and try to remember all the changes I had made, and re-do all the pictures (I forgot a couple, I’m sure–and one pic wasn’t in the search results the second time).
Steve, Bravo – your essays are always awesome – but this one is fabulous!!!
^^^
Many articles I go back and read a short area a second time..
Some articles I go back and read a section a second time.
This Apollo article I’ll read again in its entirety. Superb is an understatement.
Thank you.
Needs to be archived somewhere. I have sent it to my family already.
Just did it. HERE is the archived version. BOOKMARK IT!!!
https://archive.fo/CIpWk
Thanks, Sir Wolf – saved!
In at least one case (perhaps this one) the flag was knocked over by the blast of takeoff.
There’s no wind and water on the moon, but there’s a TON of ultraviolet, which normally causes fabrics to fade, and plastics often become brittle. Also, the vacuum can cause issues, depending on the material (I’d expect leather to be ruined, for instance).
The answer is, I don’t know–IF I were an expert on the effects of the space environment on materials AND I knew what material(s) the flag was made of, I could answer the question. Maybe–it’s possible even the experts don’t know in this specific case.
I’m sure there are people out there who can.
It’s not all about the actual trips here and yonder!
We non-space travelers have benefitted so much from the science of NASA.
Our disabled family member uses heat and break resistant dishes (by Corning) developed for the nose cone of rockets.
And also uses pull-on diapers using science developed for space travel…that keep the person dry while absorbing (supposedly) 8 hours worth of liquid.
https://wellnessbriefs.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/incontinence-briefs-perfect-for-travel/
We have found the second generation of incontinence products, springing forth from the same science, may be superior to the Wellness, such as Tena and Abena and LivDry (made in NC) products.
The trips the moon were a long time ago – imagine what a newly revitalized space program will develop that will change our lives for the good!
You haven’t even scratched the surface of “spinoffs” but you’ve listed things that directly affect you and yours.
Awesome post Steve, I’m still stunned at this magnificent accomplishment by our brave and courageous patriots/citizens of these United States of America …
The entire team are hero’s, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong … in space, on the seas and on the ground.
I was glued to the tv … even the never ending coverage of the lunar landing module hovering over the moon’s surface looking for a place to land, I watched that.
It’s amazing, and what a gift ..
For those of us who did not live through this, and have first memories of space flight being the Shuttle, it’s a good review. Thanks. Scarily, I understood the physics and sequencing that needed to happen for the whole thing to come off the way it did.
I’m just trying to imagine the reams of paper needed for the procedures. Gene Kranz had a thing for procedures. And I’m sure, times being what they were, all the ashtrays at Mission Control were filled up pretty quickly on those burns.
Our family too, that family of engineers, were pitched on the edge of our seats. It was a big damn deal and calculations so fragile. Amazing accomplishment.
“It looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.”
Ohhh, Steve, I could hug you bigly. You took us back, through the stages! What a terrific essay. Thank you, Sir!!!
Steve, thank you for this great post. I was in college during the moon landing. What an exciting time. Sorry you lost that first post, so frustrating when that happens after putting so much thought and work into it.
The influence of NASA was strong in our family.
Dad brought home the color TV so we could all watch. He became a Science Fiction nut, and I would curl up with him in his recliner to watch Star Trek……. or anything space related. Thought for sure I would be living on the moon by now.
I still remember the party at the lakefront when SkyLab fell to earth.
I still have the photo album reports I did for school. A generation later, my own kids used them for their reports.
In Miami, I was headed home to pick up a file when we heard the news about Challenger. I raced home and to the top of my buildings roofdeck. The fatal plume was still visible. That day the earth stood still.
The school next to me has a gifted program. Our kids were the ones to name the Endeavor Shuttle. The effort to send them to the launch and to the WH involved the whole town.
Then, my own kids got involved. Gunner graduated from Kindergarten, and we took him to Universal……… with a long trip to the Space Coast….. part of necessary education. He grew up with “Failure is Not An Option” NASA logo on his bathroom mirror for his entire school age life.
Of course, all our kids did the NASA Space camp.
Then he became an “Ambassador” for NASA, toured with the Mars Rover, and won a grant for robotics.
NASA gave us the inspiration to dream big, to explore. We’re Americans. It’s what we do, and we need to do it again.
Amazing article Steve!
Thanks to you, I have a much better understanding of the process without being overwhelmed by the technical jargon. VERY informational yet concise without losing the reader. Graphics were well placed to maximize understanding. I LEARNED SO MUCH IN A SHORT TIME!
FANTASTIC! Exactly the way it should be done!
I had full body goose bumps when I read “Men were on the moon!
Immediately posted on twitter, facebook, and parler!
To think I was only 2 years old at the time…….
I resisted the temptation to put in exact times, and so on–it would have taken longer and made digesting it a lot more difficult for most.
P-E-R-F-E-C-T! In my humble opinion.
Great post Steve, and an excellent title!
Thanks for taking the time to put this out there.
MAJOR take-away (beyond “the moon”):
“None of this could have happened, without minds free to think, free to reason…Only FREE people could do these things…And only FREE people can make any sort of progress [which] allows us to thrive rather than just existing…Don’t let them take it away from us. Don’t let them. Don’t.”
😉
Have shared your marvelous essay, Steve, and printing it out. I like to read and reread. I’m a little weak on the comprehension of the physics and mathematics involved, but love to focus on the intangible takeaways of what early scientists did, to our modern-day scientists.
You brought the element in that encompasses the big picture:
“So what did I mean by subtitling this, “A Triumph of Man Living In Freedom”
Indeed, only a free people can accomplish these feats. Only a people FREE to THINK, ponder, experiment, and collaborate, while living in a Free society can bring forth the next accomplishments and discoveries.
Otherwise, we end up living as serfs and peons, grubbing to survive in a day-to-day existence of misery, while overlords and masters steal what wealth there is – not just monetary. America has been on the cutting edge of many great discoveries, not just in Space, but medicine too.
Communism and socialism thwarts the Human Spirit.
Americanism frees it. It’s why everyone wants to come here.
I could have used that instead of what I did write! Thanks!
I’m amazed at the science and math involved – my mind just lends itself to the extrapolating of these human events to the human condition – my forte!.
🐧🐧🐧 tend to be a little weak on the Left brain stuff! 🙂
A valuable thing, what your mind does.
I read my last bit a few times, couldn’t tweak it enough to have it not sound to me like duck quacking. But apparently it worked well for other people (judging by the comments), so I did what I intended, after all.
People free to think! THAT is such a huge takeaway from this great post!
My dad worked for Bendix at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was always very exciting in our house during the missions, my dad always worked long hours. I still have the mission patch from Apollo 11.
Steve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your Post gave me cold chills!!! In a Good way!!! “because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world”! 😎😘😍 Reading Nixon’s words….Powerful!!!! And Your tie in to Freedom and Free thinking and reason…AND LOGIC!!!
Outstanding Article, my friend!!! Thank you so much!!
I had never thought of Nixon as a good “speechifier,” but he absolutely shone for that sentence.
Guess What? President Trump read you article…
Of course, he’s thinking about it too. Anyone who gives a damn about anything meaningful, probably is.
But I don’t see from this that he read my little ramble!
Just kidding you… however.. who knows? It was especially good!
Yeah, who knows?
I do know I was irritated as hell at the trolls saying that Armstrong and Aldrin spent less time on the moon than it took Trump to disown “send her back” (a blatant lie).
Steve, thank you so much for this!! I especially loved your history of all the science learning that went before – Galileo, Newton, etc. And your descriptions of the actual moon landing itself!!! I was 12 and remember watching Neil Armstrong’s steps down that ladder with my whole family!!! I even remember John Glenn’s orbit around the earth and everyone talking about it. Somewhere around then my truly enlightened school librarian recommended “Podkayne of Mars” to me and I fell in love with Robert Heinlein and science fiction. Thanks for reminding us all of what it was like when the USA saw huge dreams fulfilled. I pray we have the strength, will, and guts to do it again!!!
Cindy
Poddy! Yes!
Fourteen at the time of the Moon landing. Great memories intact. Watching and marveling at the Mercury launches…counting the orbits and returns. Gemini, imagine, two astronauts at a time. Apollo, the horror of the launch pad fire. Bounced back to resounding successes…and landing on the Moon.
The landing was the talk of the world!!! Even recall, evil, Soviet Union congratulated America. As a kid, that impressed me. Emphasized the scientific feat America achieved. I thought at the time
The iconic picture of Earth beyond the Moon’s horizon;-) Subscribed to Newsweek in those days. (Yea as a kid, I subscribed to Newsweek and Time – pocket money being a paper boy, mowing lawns and raking leaves in the fall.) Actually kept at least two if not three Newsweek magazines…the launch, landing and return. One had that iconic picture of earth beyond the Moon’s horizon. As with the newspapers I saved of those events, also lost the magazines over the years and numerous moves.
Memories are vivid and filled with Pride.
Thank you Steve. The education of the article, reliving the wonderful memories and highlighting freedom is the “must have” key to it all.
Fantastic post Steve! And the link to freedom underscores why obummer had NASA designated as a mooslim outreach agency. Subversive at the outset.
Without Freedom we just cant create. Its the truth.
Thank YOU for suggesting it!
The freedom to think; the freedom to create; the freedom to solve problems; engineers do all this, it is who they are. My dad, grandfather, uncle, and many of my dad’s friends (all engineers) knew even back then that if anybody could put a man on the moon, we could! Thank you, Steve for a wonderful reminder.
Maybe the reason so many young people think the moon landing was a hoax is due to them having watched reruns of this movie….
That’s really, really odd. I could swear I had seen a bunch of those old James Bond movies, but this was totally new to me.
When I was a kid, it seemed like they always re-ran the same two or three movies (Dr. No, Goldfinger…) I did see Moonraker in the theaters. I guess I never saw Diamonds are Forever (maybe it came on past my bedtime).
Another, more on-point movie was Capricorn One, about deliberately faking the Mars mission. The astronauts, who played along with the whole thing, found themselves in trouble when the (empty) capsule that had been shot into space burned up on re-entry and they were officially dead but still very much alive.
You never saw Diamonds Are Forever?????? Okay, there’s a few others of the Connery Bonds I like better like Thunderball and From Russia With Love, but that’s one with a lot of great stuff in it.
It surprised the heck out of me that I had no recollection of seeing that scene. So I conclude that although Dr No and Goldfinger were repeatedly shown at times I was watching, this one apparently wasn’t.
But then, stranger things happened. My family got cable when I was ten–and I was finally able to watch Star Trek on one of the Denver stations we could now receive. 4PM every weekday during the school year (summer time, they switched to old comedies like (George) Burns and (Gracie) Allen).
There was one episode I missed, out of the run of 79…then I missed it again the next two times! Rotten luck. So maybe that’s what happened to me with re-runs of Diamonds Are Forever as a kid.
Was it, by chance, the gunfighter one?
Nope. Obsession.
Steve, you truly outdid yourself with this essay! You portrayed each historic scientist in such a human way as they went about their great discoveries; explained scientific concepts in language I can understand; described the lunar flights & landing in detail that is new to me; and wrapped it all in the irrefutable truth that freedom is the lifeblood on which we thrive.
You must have been so frustrated at losing your first draft, but your beautifully written published essay is yet another example of why we never, ever give up.
I had just graduated high school in May, 1969 and the horrors of the ’68 RFK & MLK assassinations along with great fears stoked by the nationwide riots that spring/summer, left me a traumatized teen wondering if our world would ever right itself. The moon landing, for me, was a respite and a sign of hope in what felt like a very chaotic time.
Thank you, Steve. I am sharing this with my family & friends. 💖🇺🇸
Same here. For me too it was the summer between high school graduation and college. I so desperately wanted that summer to last forever. I wasn’t ready for college and shortly after my first semester, I dropped out and became 1A for the draft. At that time in the early part of 1970, young men were still being sent to Vietnam. So I joined the U.S. Navy to escape the draft. It turned out to be the best decision of my life. I enjoyed most of my 4 year enlistment and have benefited from all the Veterans Administration policies since, including the G.I. Bill and V.A. Medical coverage.
I can still remember driving my ’64 Chevy hardtop to my buddy’s GF’s house to watch that moon landing on a B&W tv with my GF, the parents of my buddy’s GF and her. We watched in mesmerized silence as Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder and onto the moon soil. Afterwards we all had a spirited discussion as to whether the Lunar Landing Module would make it back off the moon and hook up with the Command Module that was orbiting the moon with “The loneliest person in the world”, Michael Collins waited for their return.
That was a very memorable summer.
To say nothing of Chappaquiddick just two days earlier! Wrong person drowned there!
While we were doing this, there were a lot of fruits of irrationalism in our culture too.
Ayn Rand wrote an essay juxtaposing this and Woodstock–I have no idea if it’s freely available or not.
Here you go. Text and sound.
Now one of the most famous statements ever made against cultural Marxism.
https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-and-dionysus/
I’m actually pleasantly surprised. The Ayn Rand Institute (and Leonard Peikoff, who holds all the copyrights) generally doesn’t put stuff out for free–which to my mind undercuts their mission.
Unfortunately this late in the game few people here will get to read it.
A poem from the front page of the NYT, July 21st, 1969
Steve thank you so much for posting this!
I know how it is to lose a post and try to rebuild it. Kudos for not giving up.
Please feel free to post again on this, there’s a lot to be said and I don’t think it all can be said in just one post.
Excellent essay. I was 6 at the time, with My Dad in Vietnam.. Remember this Mesmerized in front of the TV, on Sat. Moring.. My cartoons were interrupted..
Thank you, Steve, for laying out the history leading up to this great achievement. It provides a valuable perspective.
Like others here, I am amazed that they were able to accomplish what they did without the technology of today. No doubt that stems in part from my lack of knowledge of physics, calculus, and the technology that existed at the time. The Apollo 13 episode also brought it home to me. It’s one of my favorite movies that highlights the triumph of our ingenuity — and, as you say, freedom. Thanks again for this enlightening and inspiring tribute.
Thank you Steve, not only did this take me back in time to those days, but solidified such in my mind.
I asked DH to read your article before I read it asking him if it would help me understand or leave me bewildered. He gave it a big stamp of approval. 🙂 He has been subtly been teaching me physics and other sciences for over 50 years. I used to believe I was dumb in science, but learned that I just wasn’t exposed to it in my schooling although I loved geometry and algebra, but couldn’t pursue it further.
I truly appreciate your article. You have a teacher’s way.
When you work with things like orbital mechanics, they start to feel “intuitive” and it then becomes very hard to explain it–because it’s “obvious” now. But in reality, it’s not, and there are some very paradoxical things going on.
Let’s say I have to dock with a spacecraft in orbit. Let’s make it easy, let’s figure you’re both in identical-looking circular orbits, and it takes exactly 90 minutes to make one orbit of the earth. But you’re ten miles behind the other spacecraft, approximately two seconds worth of travel behind.
How do you catch up?
Believe it or not…you slow down! That causes the opposite side of your orbit to drop. You’re now in a very slightly elliptical orbit, slightly smaller than the target’s orbit. If the orbit is smaller, it’s also got a shorter period. Instead of coming back to where you are in 90 minutes, it will take 89 minutes and 58 seconds. But the other spacecraft, will take exactly that long to get there too, since it’s two seconds ahead of you when you started. You’ve now caught up to it, by slowing down!
(Now that you’re there, you need to speed up again, so you stay in sync with it.)
The fact that you have to wait a full orbit for your change to have its effect is why it takes so long to rendezvous with the ISS today. A launched cargo payload (or crew) establishes an orbit that’s almost right, then has to do some maneuvering to meet up with ISS.
Thanks Steve. Your comment just generated a 50 minute astro-physics lesson. DH drew for me what you said, and the “lesson” ” ellipsed” or orbited out from there. 🙂 ( Okay, so that was a bad attempt at a pun of sorts, but I couldn’t resist.)
Good. I did what I could without a diagram, but it’s a very visual subject under all the math (that I’m sure he didn’t give you).
So, your lesson went off on a tangent.
Yep. We were getting tired, so we didn’t pursue many other angles.
I should think you’d have thrown him a few curves.
I think I should giggle and not answer your curve pun with my first de (in)clination.
Am I laboring on the puns too hard?
Declination and inclination at the same time! Cool!
I guess I’m eccentric enough that when I get cranky, I’m a mean anomaly.
Bwahaha.
Thanks for this window on our history. This story of Apollo 11 together with Gemini and Mercury are testament to true pioneers and the people who supported them: NASA teams, families and not least, the American public.
The inescapable dangers both subtle and obvious show why 24 of original 26 astronauts came from test pilot ranks. Steve’s straight forward narrative demonstrates, as in Neil Armstrong piloting the lunar lander by “the seat of his pants,” why only the best pilots could be tapped to man these missions.
Another vivid example was Apollo 13’s averted disaster. The cool headed astronauts and the seamless cooperation between them and Mission Control saved those lives and preserved the space program. That cooperation and the creativity of all parties will always exemplify the greatness of the United States of America. 🇺🇸
The unsung heroes of the Apollo 13 incident are the people on the ground who had to figure out how they could stitch together workable “scrubbing” out of baling wire and–literally–duct tape. A lot of practical engineering lessons were no doubt learned, like trying to use interchangeable parts between systems in the future.
The real unsung hero was the guy Gary Sinese played in the movie. If he hadn’t been available and spent so many hours trying to get the sequence right it would not have worked.
And then they had to write procedures.
One of the best lines in the whole movie happens when Kranz is told about the difference in the shape of the CO2 filters and he says, “Please tell me this is a government project.” Loved it.
Assuming we’re both thinking of the same movie (Tom Hanks as the commander of the mission), that was an excellent movie. I end up on the edge of my seat even though everyone knows how it ends.
Yep, every time. Failure is not an option.
Words I could imagine coming out of Trump’s mouth.
I love that “practical engineering lesson.”
According to available information, astronauts being test pilots was Eisenhower’s decision.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/19/why-didnt-nasa-accept-women-astronauts-until-1978/#4ec2e0235f7a
President Eisenhower directed NASA to select its astronauts exclusively from the ranks of military test pilots. This decision, while restricting the candidate pool, greatly simplified and accelerated the selection process. There were 508 potential candidates on the military rosters. 110 of those people met all of the qualifications. So that 110 was split into groups and invited to apply. There was no delay in the process to do security screenings, as all of the candidates had already been cleared by the military.
like that USMC motto: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. This is a very American attribute.
Stories abound of our military doing just that during WWll.
The precise moment of Armstrong’s footstep was UTC July 21, 02:56:15.
Which would be July 20 at 20:56:15 Mountain Daylight Time, almost 11PM EDT.
A fascinating read. Humbling and Inspiring at the same time for me.
Thank you Steve!
I just started watching a series on the Discovery Channel about the Apollo program and all of the conspiracy theories claiming that we were in a rush to beat the Russians and simply did not have the technology—so we faked it.
I was skeptical at first being that the source of the series is MAIN STREAM MEDIA. I have finished the first episode and am positively surprised that the Discovery Channel team is leaving no stone unturned to either prove or DISPROVE all of the conspiracy theories.
I still have several episodes to watch—but to this point—my hat is off. RESPECT to the Discovery Channel.
It is hard to fathom…and virtually impossible to over-state…the degree to which achieving JFK’s goal of putting a man on the moon and returning him (them) safely to earth kick-started so much in the life of mankind. In less than 10 years, brand new sciences were LITERALLY invented out of thin air in order to answer the myriad questions and problems achieving the goal required.
And it is no exaggeration to say that it was accomplished so quickly, so thoroughly, and so well, with so much demonstrated adeptness, skill, and aplomb that the Soviets simply threw their hands up and quit.
50 years later and it is STILL a breath-taking, MONUMENTAL achievement.
————————
Did you know…..?
There was another historical “first” that took place there in the Sea Of Tranquility on the moon, prior to that first step. And it was this…
The first liquid to be poured (in the moon’s 1/6th gravity) and the first bread to be broken was the holy communion, as Buzz Aldrin acknowledged the Lord God Almighty, his providence, and his great blessings.
Wonderful dissertation on the history of mechanics and physics and the evolution of man as if you were just tossing it off as an afterthought! “”Mahh- vel- ous”
10 greatest benefits of the space program….
So, I was boppin’ around the intertubez and found this thing from The Atlantic — https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/07/apollo-11-preparation-photos/593983/ — which had this photo —?1563217734 .
And I’m thinking to myself…….OF COURSE THEY ALL HAD KIDS…..they were opening up billions of cubic miles of the universe for development, and they wanted their families to be developers! That’s why the usual PP/PETA/Greed Nude Eel/Watermelon patrol are all about the dwindling earth and dwindling opportunities and dwindling families. Eventually they hope to have you crawl inside a coffin and screw it shut from the inside.
Did anyone see the movie Hidden Figures? Is it worth springing $8 on Amazon Prime to see. It’s the movie about the Black women mathematicians behind all the calculations for the missio.
I recommend it! I thought it was a rare honest portrayal of many realities of science and science orgs. The small amount of PC virtue signaling is excusable and based on reality. Some of it is anachronistically judgmental of the times, but that is just Hollywood being Hollywood.
People may find some of the stuff about racial restrictions unbelievable nowadays, but I can assure them that this was real. These restrictions were actively being removed in institutions and universities during the 1960’s, and from private businesses as late as the 1970s. Some places were quick to remove them by the time of this movie’s setting – others less so.
I think the most worthwhile aspect of the movie is to show that love of this stuff (math, science, discovery, accomplishing great things) is a very universal quality that transcends race and sex, and we often forget it. I was fortunate to work around a lot of women in science – a double edged sword for the feminists. Some of the feminist arguments about women in science have merit – but a lot of them don’t, and are just a poor excuse to drag in leftist politics and control of science. One of the things I like about this movie is that these ladies are portrayed honestly – not turned into mythical crusaders..
Thank you bunches Wolfmoon. I truly appreciate your critique. Will view it, probably tonight.
Steve….Beautifully done. Brabo!
and….BRAVO! too. LOL!
Approval from BMT…my day is made!
Awwh shucks!!! {It was very well done.)
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