50 Years Ago: One Small Step, One Giant Leap

hands up who was banging an sp on that day?

Just learned this week, (naturally Americans will never admit this), that the head engineer on the design team for the lunar lander was a Canadian. Also the legs for the lander were designed and built by a company in Montreal! So there you go, when it comes to space, it seems we`re the experts on arms and legs! lol Also, after the collapse of the Avro Arrow, NASA apparently actively recruited many of the laid off engineers, fast tracking their green card applications, etc, to join in the Apollo project.

stevieray said:

Just learned this week, (naturally Americans will never admit this), that the head engineer on the design team for the lunar lander was a Canadian. Also the legs for the lander were designed and built by a company in Montreal! So there you go, when it comes to space, it seems we`re the experts on arms and legs! lol Also, after the collapse of the Avro Arrow, NASA apparently actively recruited many of the laid off engineers, fast tracking their green card applications, etc, to join in the Apollo project.

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I was an actual "NASA Kid" back in the day (saw the broadcast live as a young lad) and I can tell you that both of those facts are well known here in the states. Credit where credit is due.

KK

I was a child when it happened, but I watched it because my parents did. There was a lot of excitement in the air.

superstar_88 said:

hands up who was banging an sp on that day?

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Nope, I was in The Friendly Giant mode back then.

Look up, waaaaay up.

The Moon landing project was essentially an exercise in engineering. The hard part was overcoming the lifting limitation and designing and actually building the Saturn vehicles. But, unlimited funding overcame even that problem. The Moon landings were a great achievement and beside taming of the nucler fission the greates advances of the 20th century. And yet, the cancellation of the Apollo program and a pivot to suborbital research says more about the Moon shots than anything else, that space exploration will have to wait, for a long while, for the technology to catch up to our imagination.

I think budget limitation rather than technological advancement
would be the factor determining how soon space
exploration will move forward. Even sending people to Mars
is quite achievable. But I think there are better ways to spend
the hundreds of billions of dollars required for such feat.

oil&gas said:

I think budget limitation rather than technological advancement
would be the factor determining how soon space
exploration will move forward. Even sending people to Mars
is quite achievable. But I think there are better ways to spend
the hundreds of billions of dollars required for such feat.

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There needs to be an economic reason to go there. The "ars gratia artis" model will not work when billions, even trillions are at stake.

Insidious Von said:

Nope, I was in The Friendly Giant mode back then.

Look up, waaaaay up.

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LOL, same here...and I'll get Rusty.

kkelso said:

I was an actual "NASA Kid" back in the day (saw the broadcast live as a young lad) and I can tell you that both of those facts are well known here in the states. Credit where credit is due.

KK

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Saw it live also, remember it like it was yesterday.

As I mentioned before, this site is populated by kids. I was an adult in 1969 when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon. The camera they used was shitty and ghostly, but it was a momentous moment.

Waste of scientific currency. Should have been working on renewable energy. You had to be blind not to see it was going to be vital. Flying to the moon achieved nothing.

Big Rig said:

Waste of scientific currency. Should have been working on renewable energy. You had to be blind not to see it was going to be vital. Flying to the moon achieved nothing.

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True, President Carter started an alternative energy program but it was scrapped by President Reagan. Not long after he was re-elected oil prices started to come down.

As for one giant leap for mankind, that never happened.

Big Rig said:

Waste of scientific currency. Should have been working on renewable energy. You had to be blind not to see it was going to be vital. Flying to the moon achieved nothing.

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It is difficult, on a board like TERB, to post the stupidest thing. Congrats!

I wouldn't say it accomplished nothing. For one thing, it put science and technology on a better footing in the West. The Russians scared the hell out of the West with Sputnik. The Americans (and other Western nations) doubled down. Yes, it was symbolic, but there were a lot of spin-offs. Even things like the Internet and GPS technology had obvious roots in the program, and technology that transferred. Could have spent the money on better things? No doubt. Likely to do that in a "bread and circuses" world? Nope. The thing that amazes me is they did all that and fought a war at the same time. Shows just how filthy rich they were in relative terms. A man has to dream. I watched it with thousands of other people. I sat under "The Archer" in Nathan Phillips, and saw the whole thing on the big screen.

50 years have passed since the huge progress in space exploration and how fast the technologies are developing now. The launch of ISS, the experiments made in microgravity, and so on. Every country aims to contribute to the space industry by proving different useful devices such as spacecraft, launch modules, vehicles, micro tug, and even more.

The fact that China seems incapable of landing a man on the moon with today's technology lends credence to the theory that the Apollo landings were fake. Many think they were staged by Stanley Kubrick, who made 2001.

This is another plug for the movie "The Dish."
It's about a giant radio dish located in Australia, which participated in Apollo 11. It's a drama, and a comedy, and historically accurate.
The Toronto Library has a copy or eleven on disk.