Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "Why The US is Struggling to Return to the Moon - Firefly Blue Ghost" video.

  1. Yeah like you said not every Apollo mission was actually a flying success. Apollo 1 almost ended the whole program. But spaceflight is inherently risky. I do not think that fact will change any time soon.
    19
  2. We've already been to the Moon. Going back won't prove as much. The amount of lunar deniers today is annoying though. I doubt if going back would silence them though. The only way to shut those people up would be to leave them on the Moon.
    17
  3. "We" didn't land on the Moon no. But 12 very brave individuals did. They were each better than you can ever imagine. Because you're here now doubting their achievements.
    5
  4.  @flizzight  there's caves and then there's caves with Tony Starks in them. They're not all equal.
    4
  5. Yes they were wearing boots. If you exposed your skin on the Moon it'd explode.
    4
  6. We use really good radio equipment. That's how. Those huge parabolic dishes are no joke. Then the receivers are super sensitive too. They also use software to reconstruct the signals. We're still in communication with the Voyager probes. One of those is 15.5 billion miles away now. It takes light almost a full day to go that distance.
    3
  7.  @MattyEngland  tell me you know nothing without saying you know nothing.
    3
  8. Neil Armstrong was an absolute ubermensch. I couldn't point to his equal today. He was the high water mark of humanity. The guy was an incredible legend. I don't think anyone else could have pulled off that first landing. They had so many problems. Neil made it look easy but that's what the greats always do. It was only easy for him.
    3
  9.  @speedy01247  I can handle a quarter of a second of lag. 2 seconds I'm not so sure about. That's pretty sluggish so I'm thinking no. I used to online game during the dial up era though and a quarter second of lag was pretty good then. You'd literally have to do everything ahead of time. After a while you do get used to it.
    2
  10. Cool kids don't do what the old fogies did.
    2
  11. It's unlikely. A lot changes in a lifetime but the changes that would need to occur to make Lunar flight commercial are a long ways off from now. Many lifetimes away.
    2
  12. Actually the stated mission goal of Apollo was to put a man on the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth. It would have been considered a failure if that wasn't met. A very simple plan.
    2
  13. We know how to get there. What we don't know is how to pay for it.
    2
  14. Don't ride a bike for a long time and then try to ride one. You will have forgotten.
    2
  15.  @Fernandosampaio_  "we" didn't go to the Moon. 12 bat ship crazy brave Americans went to the Moon. Those that have gone to the Moon is a very small and exclusive club. I don't even like to fly in airplanes. They flew in what was essentially a TV dinner tray a quarter of a million miles from Earth. There's zero chance I could do that. I'd die of panic.
    2
  16.  @nicholaslarson3778  Apollo was all about branding. Science was a distance second to promoting US technological dominance globally. I think only one real scientist ever landed on the Moon? After the program was criticised for its lack of scientific focus. During a later mission they sent a real geologist to the Moon. Maybe there were others. I can only recall the one though. Yeah it was only that one guy. Jack Schmitt. Imagine going through life with that name.
    2
  17.  @ricardocarlitos  it is impractical to get unqualified people to the Moon so I suppose my proposal to prove it to people is a flight of fancy. Or a dream. I do believe it would be undeniable evidence though. You could do the feather and hammer experiment for them. Where both fall at the same rate. They did that on the Moon, you know? They televised it too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDp1tiUsZw8
    1
  18.  @Madosatoshist  yes there was. It was called radio. Perhaps you've heard of it? Anyways the astronauts used radio to communicate with the Earth and everyone on Earth could pick the signal up and even direction find where the signal was coming from too. Guess what? It came from the Moon. You'd better believe the Soviets were carefully monitoring the whole mission. Perhaps they couldn't put men on the Moon but they certainly had the technical ability to receive radio transmissions. Let's be real here. You could track the whole progress of the capsule all the way to the Moon. They were in constant radio communication the whole time. There's no way that could have been faked. Even school children in England tracked Apollo with radio. Radio triangulation is a thing.
    1
  19.  @Macwylee  "we" didn't go but 12 brave Americans did. There's no "we" about it. The evidence is overwhelming they went too. Both in the moment and lasting to this very day too. Their footsteps are still in the dust up there. We've imaged them with different missions. We as a species. Not you or I personally.
    1
  20.  @Macwylee  no one forgot how to get there. It is just extremely expensive and difficult to do. So without the will to do it, it won't be done. When Apollo happened the mission was a national imperative due to a variety of factors. For those reasons it was decided that we needed to go. We didn't care what it cost either. It cost plenty too. Today there's just not that sort of urgency. Then there was. When the Soviets launched Sputnik US dominance was called into question. Apollo was our answer. They put a ball in space that beeped and we put men on the Moon. Their empire collapsed and we're still here. So I guess it was worth it. We won the planet with Apollo. Those were the stakes. Winner took all. That's what putting men on the Moon was really all about. It was our big eff you. Apollo was a dick swinging contest.
    1
  21. We can't use off the shelf electronics in outer space. Up there there's no shielding provided by this planet's magnetosphere so that means high energy particles are tearing through matter. Which is devastating to modern microelectronics. Those impacts can flip data in transistor gates. It's a real problem. We can overcome it by using larger pitch lithography but when we do that we lose the advantages we've gained over time. It's called the postage stamp vs the billboard problem. If you shoot a shotgun at a postage stamp it gets obliterated. A billboard you can still read what it has on it.
    1
  22. The cameras they have to use are expensive. Terrestrial electronics do not work in outer space. Everything we put up there has to be radiation shielded. The Japanese tried to send a probe to Mars once using off the shelf electronics. Halfway there it just died. They lost communication with it and that was that. We use the RAD series of CPUs from IBM. Each chip costs a quarter of a million dollars. They have the processing power of a chip from decades ago.
    1
  23.  @cjay2  you cannot have an opinion on facts. If the Moon landings were faked the USSR would have immediately called it out. They couldn't put humans on the Moon but they certainly had the ability to track missions to the Moon. School children in England did that. Radio location is not a sophisticated thing. Apollo was a huge nail in their empire's coffin. They knew it. So there's nothing that could have gotten them to pass on the propaganda coup exposing Apollo would have been for them. They literally lost the whole world. Which was why we did Apollo in the first place. To drive a big nail in their coffin.
    1
  24.  @MattyEngland  the tape was in Australia. I do believe every mission had a tape though and I only think they managed to misplace the first one. That first landing was very exciting. You should have been there.
    1
  25.  @MattyEngland  you should find out how the video was made. There's a reason it looks like it does. There's other evidence that's been gathered since and there was radio telemetry at the time too. If you don't think the Russians weren't keeping an eye on things you're not thinking.
    1
  26.  @cjay2  it costs money to archive paperwork. It only takes one person coming along and saying clear this junk out we can't afford to hang onto it and it's gone then. That happens with surprising regularity. The company that built the engines went out of business in 2005. When they went under everything went right into a dumpster. It was piles of old musty crap that no one even looked at before they tossed it away. Or maybe engineers took it home when they retired and it ended up in their attics. Then they died and when their kids came to clean out the house they tossed it.
    1
  27. Anyone that can travel interstellar distances isn't going to crash when they get anywhere. Use your head.
    1
  28. It's not weird when you consider we're not so interested. The real genius in all of this is securing funding. Anyone can be a rocket scientist with enough money.
    1
  29. Up away from the protective shield of Earth's magnetosphere sensitive electronics are unreliable. So we have to use special radiation hardened chips that are considerably weaker computationally than the state of the art.
    1
  30. The rich pay 91% of all taxes. How about you get your hand out of other people's pockets?
    1
  31. No one you know went to the Moon. That's because everyone you know is a loser.
    1
  32.  @MFZoomzet  they should use open source. It is more reliable, performant and compatible. I wouldn't let Windows run a coffee pot.
    1
  33.  @Alt-indie-hits  what if the solution to our problems lies elsewhere? We can't have unlimited growth in a closed system. That's certainly not going to work in the long term. There are more people all the time that each want more for themselves. It all does have to come from somewhere.
    1
  34.  @Alt-indie-hits  perhaps you need to use some kind of a code? Substitute some words for others? Computers are programmed to look for certain strings. Past that they don't have a way to decipher much that they're not looking for. Unless you think they have people reading stuff. I'm thinking a lot of it has to be keyword triggered though. The list of naughty words and phrases. I was shadowbanned for a while myself the election before last. That changed my relationship with the site. Sometimes you have to be vague and not name names. I know it isn't ideal. But what can we do?
    1
  35.  @ChaseWatkins.  the truth is the USSR was never ahead of the US. The B-52 flew years before Sputnik did. The Soviets switched to ICBMs because they knew they were hopelessly behind with strategic bombers so their solution was just to change the game to one we weren't playing. We stayed away from rockets on purpose to not open up a new front of weaponry. But once they started we had to too. And yes we had to be better than them at it.
    1
  36.  @MattyEngland  what are you prattling on about? There's incontrovertible evidence that the USA visited the Moon. They brought back 300 pounds of rocks each mission. There's nowhere else between here and the Moon where they could have possibly gotten them. That's more rocks than you have in your head.
    1
  37. That's it in a nutshell. Going to the Moon is not cheap.
    1
  38. They have it but it makes no sense to use those old plans. You're talking about stuff that was designed and built 60 years ago. We don't need to sit old women down to weave core rope memory today.
    1
  39. It is not a pressing concern to go to the Moon. When we did it we had our reasons. Going again today wouldn't be as impressive a demonstration. Someone could say, but you've already done that. They'd be right too.
    1
  40. We landed probes on the Moon before we sent astronauts. We crashed a couple of others too. Apollo 12 visited one of the probes on the surface of the Moon. Apparently they even took souvenirs off it too.
    1
  41. Let's see you hit the Moon with something. A rock, a shoe, I really don't care what it is. If you can hit the Moon with anything I will be impressed.
    1
  42.  @MattyEngland  no they actually never even bothered to pick it up. Which considering all of the excitement isn't that surprising. You cannot overstate how exciting the first man on the Moon was. A quarter of the population of the entire planet watched it live. I was one of them. For Christmas I got a Moon suit too. Everyone had Moon fever.
    1
  43.  @richardbloemenkamp8532  all the astronauts were extraordinary or they wouldn't have been in the program. But they had to choose a pilot for the first landing and they went with Neil. So he was the best of the best. He wasn't a good pilot, he was a good test pilot. He was good at flying things that no one should fly. That's a very special skill.
    1
  44.  @L2M2K2  while we did Apollo to rub it in the Russians faces I think they were still onboard with the mission for all mankind so to speak. Ultimately they were proud of our achievement too. What Neil said was cheesy but it was still on point. It was a giant leap for mankind.
    1
  45. That's good that you believe physical evidence. The landing sites have been imaged by third parties now. If we faked it the Soviets would have figured it out immediately and called us out on it. There is nothing that would have stopped them. No amount of anything. They would have been all over that like white on rice.
    1