• tygerprints@kbin.social
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    6 months ago

    Yet somehow we effortlessly went to the moon and back again in 1969 with absolutely no hiccups and pretty good TV imagery, even though we can’t broadcast from halfway around the world today without interference, and we can’t figure out how to get to the moon - somehow we magically did it all in 1969. What a time it was to be alive back then.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      6 months ago

      Yes, fucktons of money can do amazing things very quickly. Unfortunately, NASA doesn’t have that anymore.

      All the footage you see now of the old moon missions is direct from the cameras, not broadcast footage. The first steps were broadcasted using a camera pointed at a monitor in Australia which was receiving an SSTV signal from the moon. It was actually pretty horrible.

      • tygerprints@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        Well maybe that was the big difference after all. I’m not saying the moon landing didn’t happen, only that it’s weird we could do it back then - when you’d think we would’ve come farther and closer to doing it again by now.

        I certainly want to see us not just return to the moon but go farther and farther.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          We wasted 30 years puttering around low Earth orbit with the space shuttle without making any real progress at all, meanwhile all the old Apollo engineers have retired or passed away, and the infrastructure to build everything doesn’t exist anymore (for instance, the F-1 engine. To build that again, you’d have to rebuild all the tooling and test equipment that was used to make it as well). So we basically have to almost start from scratch.

    • wmassingham@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Effortlessly? No hiccups? The Apollo program alone cost $178 billion 2022 dollars between 1961 and 1972. And I’m pretty sure that they had at least one hiccup. And that doesn’t even count the other programs like Mercury or Gemini.

      • tygerprints@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        I was being a little facetious, as in, they made it SEEM like it was effortless and no hiccups. I remember watching it all on TV, it did have more than few hiccups, but they packaged as if it was all seamless and “meant to happen.”

    • damndotcommie@lemmy.basedcount.com
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      6 months ago

      with absolutely no hiccups

      So are you ignoring Apollo 13? How about Apollo 1? And what are you on about not being able to broadcast from halfway around the world??? Do you watch evening news, because I see reports from all over the world on a daily basis.

      • tygerprints@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        I was just exaggerating the way that the moon landing was presented to us back in 1969. If you weren’t there you probably wouldn’t understand how ‘without a hiccup’ was exactly the way it was presented to us. I’m sure there were hiccups on a grand scale, but they were mostly kept from the public.