h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What has been happening with space travel development since they put a man on the moon?

I mean it's been like 30 years since they first did it and that's quite a long time. Lots of amazing things have been developed and there has been so many technological advances in this time, and there is a lot of time, effort and money going into this area. Surely 'They' have come up with something, so what is it?

This is just something that has been worrying me.

The race to put a man on the moon was largely fueled by runaway egos in the Cold War... now that that has warmed a bit, the space race has cooled.

Since then, we've managed to put up some cool telescopes to see into space, and launched probes to various places, including the Alpha Centauri system. Of course, NASA is going to have a lot of work to do to protect their budget in the wake of the two Mars landers that crashed.

Meanwhile, some models have been drawn up for new space crafts that can travel between stars, which would have to be constructed in space. The multi-national space station is a step in the direction of constructing and testing these things, but if Russia can ever get their pieces finished...

Apparently they can't put another person on the moon because they aren't certain enough of them getting back to Earth again in one piece. Back in the '60s the Astronauts lives were considered more expendable, but now if anything happened to one of them, bad things would happen to NASA.

They don't put men on the moon anymore because they didn't do it in the first place. Read about Van Halens Belt (not the rock band) and x-ray radiation and ask yourself hoe they overcame these phenomena 40 years ago. The ship would have to have been made of lead to withstand the radiation in outer space and required massive engines to get it off the ground and land it safely on the moon. Listen to the landing commentary and you hear nothing except the voice. Where is the noise of the thrusters and engines. My washing machine is on now and I can't hear the radio. I won't even start going into the photographs etc... Is Neil Armstrong a recluse because he can't keep up the lies of NASA. The Russians didn't do it either, it was all a cold war propoganda stunt.

LOL!!!!!

Yeah and the moon is a big spacecraft populated by little green Ernie and Bert lookalikes and its made of compacted cheese gratings...

In truth, if 100,000 Americans were involved in the "conspiracy" of the Moon landings, wouldn't you think that given the US's record of keeping things secret that at least some of them would have "come clean"?

CR

You poor gullible person. Why did 100,000 have to be involved? American services whether they be government or private sector work on a need to know basis. It would only require a dozen or so people including the astronauts, who I may say are conspicuous by their lack of public appearances. That is except Buzz who is just pissed at not being remembered as the 1st man on the moon, even if it is only allegedly.

I think the most common reason is that NASA have never since been given access to the type of funding required to put men on the moon. The project was enormously costly, and even while it was happening, it failed to hold the public imagination, which in some ways was the reason the guys went there in the first place. You also need to put it in the perspective of the Vietnam War, which turned public opinion away from large scale federal funding of initiatives not designed to improve the lot of joe public.

Successive US administrations have continued to limit the funding available to NASA. Indeed this is clearly illustrated in NASA's current motto - "better, faster, cheaper". It is much cheaper to put unmanned probes up, or to put people up into low-earth orbit, than to sling them over to the moon, with all the attendant difficulties of landing, lift-offs and docking that go with it.

There is little doubt that we will go there again, but in the absence of a political ideal, future manned missions to the moon will probably require some kind of commercial basis - the use of the Moon's low gravity environment, mineral deposits and lack of atmosphere or ecology to manufacture products for instance. There is some evidence of water reserves existing in the lunar poles. If this is the case, this might pave the way towards self-sustaining production facilities being built some time in the future. The six million dollar question, of course, is when?

CR

Gullible? If gullible is accepting the concensus opinion of the vast majority of astronomers, astrophysicists, engineers and geologists on this planet, then I will proudly accept this title.

So, lets say for a moment that the whole thing was just an elaborate film production. Even an average movie requires hundreds of technical specialists to complete (check out the movie credits after any film). A production on the scale you are talking about could quite credibly have involved thousands of highly skilled production staff, in order to make the effort seem as real as possible. A "need to know" scenario would not exist by definition, because everybody involved would know that they would be doing a production to cover up the moon landings. Not only this, but an army of people would also be required to maintain the cover up. People would have to effectively destroy evidence such as the six lunar command modules, and the lunar rover which are still "supposedly" in space. There would be people required to eliminate all traces of bacteria from the returned moon rocks (of which there are tons of the stuff, and which have been distributed to labs around the world). The navy would have to be paid off to make the re-entry vehicle recovery seem real. Then you would need people to police all of these individuals involved. Gosh, the "astronauts" themselves are only a small part of the problem!

And who says that the astronauts are inconspicous? First of all, they were hired for their piloting and scientific skills, not their public relations skills. The spotlight always points to Aldrin and Armstrong, who were whisked off on a world tour as soon as they came back from the moon, a move now seen as a mistake as they were not easily able to cope with such adjulation. It is no wonder that Armstrong shuns the public spotlight, and Aldrin had problems afterwards. The other astronauts had different post lunar experiences, and some have embraced the public spotlight. They have all contributed to detailed histories and accounts of the experience. Some appeared on TV to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first moon landing last July. What more do you want of them?

There are a number of very good books available which chart the experience of the moon landings and which provide a wealth of detail which has no point to prove other than to celebrate an extraordinary achievement.

CR

You have expertly explained how you think a conspiracy would not be possible, but you have said nothing to convince me that moon landings actually happened. The problem is that there is enough evidence, both physical in the form of disorientated photography and theoretical in the form of the enormity of over-coming the radiation problem (ask any astrophysicist/aeronautical engineer), to suggest an element of doubt over the whole thing. But hey lets not fall out about it, the question is really why has space exploration taken such a back seat, and undoubtedly it comes down to money. But surely there is as much money available now, but priorities have simply changed. So why was the space race so important, I'll tell you, it was the old U.S v U.S.S.R problem and that no longer is an issue now that the republic has deteriorated and the Russian people are on their knees needing help from the west which isn't coming.
By the way, I'm still working on your bacteria argument. There's a flaw and I can't find it yet, but I will. I'll get back to you.

My, my, my. I've heard that, somewhere out there in the uncharted backwaters of political thought, there was a tiny group who believed the moon landings to be faked, but I'd never met one until now. The idea is far more ludicrous than any conspiracy theory about black helicopters.

As far as radiation is concerned, every single mission to space has had to deal with this problem, Van Halen's Belt or not. The gamma, X, UV, and other radiations from the sun that the atmosphere filters for us would kill space travelers. So, by this argument, every single space mission would have had to be faked, from Yuri Gagarin all the way to the next shuttle mission. And, of course, everything we've learned from these missions would have had to be faked, and so we would also be faking the technology we have today that stems from this, like cell phones, weather maps, etc. I think the overwhelming evidence to the contrary has to shake your belief in that particular conspiracy theory.

There has certainly been some interesting and varied veiwpoints on this subject and I am extrememly glad that I asked. Not that I am any closer to the answer of my question (and definitely not any more reassured by any of the responses) but it has certainly been entertaining.

Re radiation : A major radiation storm in space with the potential to deliver lethal doses of X rays or gamma rays normally happens only 2-3 times every ELEVEN years, and usually then only at solar maximum. Sounds like a reasonable enough risk to me.

Re conspiracy : It either happened or it didn't. If it didn't happen, then the most elaborate, complex, intricate, resource intensive venture into mass delusion the world has ever seen was performed, and continues to be performed. What is more believable?

Oh, and it's the Van Allen Belt. Van Halen was, er, a rock star.

Have a good weekend,

CR

I was teaching in Ethiopia when the first moon landing happened. None of my (adult) students believed it , primarily because the lunar landscape looks like much of Ethiopia and the deserts are littered with what looks like lunar rock . In fact ,had they faked it, Ethiopia would've been a good place to stage it

Crymonal, The radiation of which I speak, and Van Allan, is NOT solar storms as you seem to think. This is cosmic radiation which exudes from all bodies in the universe.
Secondly Gugarin did not go as far as outer space. Gugarin was the first man to orbit the earth, a feet repeated many times by the space shuttle, but never gone beyond. The shuttle programme is as expensive today as the Apollo missions of the 60's and 70's, so why not go farther than the limitations of the earth's orbital belt, i.e Van Allans belt.
Tell me one Cosmonaut who claims to have walked on the moon. You can't with any certainty because the Russian Space Admin. gave up this ghost a long time ago and concentarted on their abilities,i.e orbital space stations. This is only now the path that American and European agencies are following

So now you're basing the argument on the fact that the Russians never did it? The Russians never did a lot of things, like build a decent highway system, but I'm fairly certain that the US is telling the truth when they say they've accomplished this feat.

Van Allen's Belt (thank you for the correction, I knew that name had to be wrong) is made up of electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation can be blocked with the simple expedient of a thin sheet of steel or aluminum arranged in a honeycomb pattern. We have years of experience with nuclear testing to confirm this, and anyone who works in an electronics environment where EMI can become a problem knows this as well. It has to do with wavelengths, and the scientific principle would take me forever to explain, but let me assure you that it works. You'll see the same honeycomb pattern through the window of your microwave oven, and if it didn't work as advertised, those jokes and old-wives' tales about standing too close to the microwave would be a reality.

Being a born skeptic, even of conspiracies, there's one point I've noticed remains unmentioned in the few discussions of potentially faked moon landings I've seen, where much conversation revolves around a couple of photos, or a particular clip of film with a dubious shadow. (Please don't assume I *believe* the following - it's just a plausible hypothetical counter-conspiracy)

Given it was deep in the cold war, and there was a definite chance such a high-prestige and risky project might fail, I can quite imagine that someone may have decided to fake some film as a back-up plan in case the landings didn't work out. Maybe a little of that film got mixed up with legitimate material.
Presumably, if there was faked film, yet the landings were real, there'd be much less incentive for anyone to talk. After all -

'US Government was prepared to lie to you, just in case'
doesn't have *quite* the same headline impact as
'Moon landings never happpened'.

I think we can all agree that no-one faked the Saturn V, and presumably there was monitoring by radar that confirmed *something* went from the Earth to the moon and back. I'm sure the Russians and Chinese were watching, and might have mentioned if it was a fake.


Changing the subject back to the Van Allen belts, the main problem is the streams of high velocity electrons and protons confined by the Earth's magnetic field. However, these charged particicles are derived from the solar wind, hence the intenstity does vary with solar activity.

I'm not sure what shielding such radiation would require, but it depends hugely on how large a dose you're prepared for your astronauts to get. On a mission as risky as a moon landing, I'd suspect the allowable dose level to be rather high.

Here's an interesting tidbit about the particle radiation component of the Van Allen Belt:

"When the Apollo spacecraft passes through the Van Allen belts on its way to the moon, the astronauts will be exposed to radiation roughly equivalent to that of a dental X-ray. " Courtesy of http://www.apollosaturn.com/frame-aff.htm

Let's just hope their suits had lead aprons...

I watched a BBC doco about a 'mission to mars' (as much as I loathe any allusions to that abominable movie) and it looked at the all the problems such a mission would have to overcome.

One of the problems mentioned was that a Mars crew would be exposed to vastly greater levels of radiation on their way to Mars than they would be on their way to the moon. I don't remember exactly why that is - something to do with time required to get there, perhaps?

Anyone see this doco, or want to hazard a guess?

Didn't see the documentary, but Mars has an atmosphere, and therefore would have its own Van Allen belts, so that could be a source of difficulty. Don't know what sorts of hazards they would encounter from here to there that would be different, but being that the mission would be many times longer than the moon mission, long-term exposure might be a factor.