Post: #26

Damn... y’all really bumped my 6 year old forum thread... to bring up fake moon landings and femenist ?

Post: #27

Regarding NASA destroying the blueprints for the Saturn V, it's an urban legend. I know a guy who had to dig through the microfilm archive at Marshall Space Flight Center as part of a museum restoration. It was all there.

NASA, in fact, is using the original design as the basis for a modern redesign: https://3dprint.com/95914/nasa-3d-print-...et-engine/ No time to dig out the link, but this is part of an ongoing teaching program in which young engineers redesign elements of the engine with modern design, analysis, and manufacturing methods.

Which illustrates why burning the blueprints wouldn't have mattered. The technology available today is vastly advanced over what was available in 1960-64 when the bulk of the Saturn V design work was done. It would ultimately be cheaper, better, and faster* to start from scratch than to try to recover the various archaic or lost-art methods employed back then. (E.g. substantial portions of the engines were hand-welded by true artists of the technique, tank end-dome pieces were formed by setting off explosives in a big pool, etc.) And then there's the now-ancient electronics that ran the rocket, or worse, the electro-pneumatic logic (!) on the engines.

The real loss is not the one specific design but the destruction and decay of the industrial base and skills base required to build them. Not just the artisan welders and similar practical skills, but the planners and leaders at the top able to keep to a budget and schedule and make solid technical and managerial decisions, and engineers with broad and deep knowledge and practical experience. The rocket could be built today, and better from a strictly technological perspective, but as SLS demonstrates it couldn't be built with the people available.

(ETA: the NASA engine program I mentioned is specifically meant to counteract this skills and knowledge decay. But it's not big enough or broad enough a program to have a noticeable affect on the problem.)


* - Unless you have Boeing and NASA doing it together under the direction of a couple of senators who want a jobs program more than a space program.

Post: #28

I watched the control room reaction to the Insight landings on the news and I'm afraid there is just too much toxic masculinity in this story for me;

Post: #29

Here's a good one for all the fake moon landing aficionado's;

'Moon rock' given to Holland by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin is fake
A moon rock given to the Dutch prime minister by Apollo 11 astronauts in 1969 has turned out to be a fake.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science...-fake.html



Whole article;

Quote:Curators at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, where the rock has attracted tens of thousands of visitors each year, discovered that the "lunar rock", valued at £308,000, was in fact petrified wood.

Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation, said the museum would continue to keep the stone as a curiosity.

"It's a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered," she said. "We can laugh about it."

The rock was given to Willem Drees, a former Dutch leader, during a global tour by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin following their moon mission 50 years ago.

J. William Middendorf, the former American ambassador to the Netherlands, made the presentation to Mr Drees and the rock was then donated to the Rijksmuseum after his death in 1988.

"I do remember that Drees was very interested in the little piece of stone. But that it's not real, I don't know anything about that," Mr Middendorf said.

Nasa gave moon rocks to more than 100 countries following lunar missions in 1969 and the 1970s.

The United States Embassy in The Hague is carrying out an investigation into the affair.

Researchers Amsterdam's Free University were able to tell at a glance that the rock was unlikely to be from the moon, a conclusion that was borne out by tests.

"It's a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone," said Frank Beunk, a geologist involved in the investigation.

My own views? I saw a documentary once which had me convinced that the whole landing was very fish indeed. Then I saw one a few days later that 'debunked the debunkers' and I became a true believer again. Who the fuck knows though, nothing surprises me anymore.