OT: Moon Landing

Hopefully there is no-one here who doubts it actually happened. This is a sci.* group after all - NOT alt.conspiracy.wing-nut

It was a very good example of NASA making something that was right on the borders of what was possible happen. We did get some pristine lunar rock samples out of it that are still yielding science even today.

Shame they managed to lose the plans for the Saturn V.

Whilst I am inclined to agree that now there are powerful robotic probes there is less reason for manned space flight then ever there are some things that humans still do better than machines. But when Apollo 11 went to the moon computers and robotic was in its infancy. They really had no option but to send the very best test pilots to pull it off.

The men who flew the Apollo missions were incredibly brave and brilliantly focussed at getting the job done safely even when the hardware and landscape was fighting against them.

Russians tried a robotic probe as a spoiler even while Apollo 11 was on the surface but Luna 15 crash landed. Luna 16 worked the next year.

It was interesting to see Fred Hoyle making the same argument against manned space flight and in favour of robotics on the BBC back then. BBC have dug out a lot of archive footage for this 50th anniversary.

The Apollo moon shot inspired a generation of people to go into science and engineering, just as the famous Spassky - Fischer chess match in Reykjavik inspired a generation of new chess players. I doubt there is anyone alive who saw it that was not mesmerised by the Earth rise over the barren hostile lunar surface from Apollo 8 that Christmas.

One interesting side effect of the Apollo programme is that automotive seals no longer weep their vital fluids onto your drive. Packed glands were simply not good enough in the vacuum of space and mechanical seals won out big time. ISTR Chesterton seals did well out of it.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Actually they could do quite a decent job of filming things faster to simulate the appearance of lower gravity. Dimensional analysis was routinely used to get scale model behaviour right in film work. Thunderbirds being the canonical example of state of the art back then.

2001 a space odyssey also demonstrated what was possible at the limits of stop motion photography if you were prepared to spend 3 years filming a sequence that would last less than ten minutes in real time.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 film came out shortly before the moon landings, but since he was using just about all the most talented special effects people there was no-one left for NASA to hire for special effects.

As an aside it is amusing to watch the TV props and animated diagrams of the 1950's and 60's on the archive footage. Some are little more than pieces of cardboard being pulled or pushed erratically on a blackboard.

The Apollo 8 badge with the transfer orbit on as the 8 was inspired!

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Both sides routinely monitored each others space craft telemetry. Jodrell Bank sometimes found itself doing this fairly often and they sometimes had big scoops too which annoyed the Russians somewhat.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Kettering Grammar School had a surprisingly good track record in that respect: *schoolchildren* announced the existence of the Plesetsk launch site (cf Baikonur).

They also tracked the Apollo craft to the moon.

NASA paid Hollywood to make the video. However it was filmed on location on the Moon since nowhere on Earth looked lunar enough. The step from the ladder took 8 takes as the actor playing Armstrong kept fluffing his lines and slipped off the ladder twice. Each time the Moon dust had to be raked to remove the boot prints.

A friend who worked for Kodak at the time told me this, so it must be true.

Brian

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Brian

Oh, no, they were VERY interesting; those rocks prove that a bit over 1% of Earth's mass was knocked loose gigayears ago, and is floating in the sky, under the name Luna.

Maybe the search for balls of rock whizzing near our planet is worth spending some real effort... we don't ever want to take another hit like that.

As for 'lost', that's just a bookkeeping error. There are boxes in forgotten places, and some pilfering, and some bad handwriting or typos. Those thingsl always happen.

Is Cursitor Doom a not-particularly-elaborate hoax?

I'm tolrably convinced that the Moon landing was real. I was finishing writing my Ph.D. thesis at the time and had the TV set on, so watched it live - if not all that attentively.

There's going to be an IEEE Milestone plaque on the Australian radio telelscope that happened to carry most of the TV signal from the first landing.

The most recent NSW IEEE newsletter has a couple of pages on the subject (which was a pig to edit).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Not so much lost as stolen and replaced by common terrestrial basalt by unscrupulous dealers and slightly dodgy museum curators. Collectors will pay very good money for rare extra terrestrial specimens like Moon rock and meteorites. The market distortions make science more difficult.

There already is an automated program that picks up almost everything that gets close enough to be a worry. There has hardly been a human skywatcher discovered comet in the past decade. They are all named detection system/year/letter now. Pan-STarrs gets about half of all the new comet/asteroid discoveries these days.

Especially when there are collectors willing to pay serious money.

The theft/swapping of sample often only shows up when the "moon" rocks are taken for analysis with the latest techniques.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

om Platex

p late to watch it.

It was a little more complex than that. Scan converters were generally rack mounted units designed to maintain proper alignment of the monitor and cam era. Since the signal was FM, it was likely 30KHz wide audio channel, given the time frame.

It was recorded onto a Telemetry logging recorder, which was also FM. The 7

0 MHz IF from the Telemetry receivers IF was recorded on broadband logging recorders, for archival, or later processing of the individual channels.

I was a Broadcast engineer a couple of years later at a monochrome TV stati on, using equipment built in the lat '60s and 1970.

I worked in Telemetry at Microdyne. They were formed a few years after this mission, by former employees of Defense Electronics who was likely the sup plier of the Telemetry equipment for that mission. They left, because they had a better design, that their bosses weren't interested in. They were sti ll committed to their huge, tube based product line and not interested in t heir solid state, modular design. I left Microdyne in 2001, and NASA was st ill using some early Microdyne equipment that had been in continuous servic e for 30+ years without any problems.

That is one theory. But we didn't need men in spacesuits to get some samples. I submit that VERY interesting wasn't worth the cost in dollars or lives or lost opportunities.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Moon dust turns out to be very nasty stuff.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Perhaps not, but it helped make the USA population feel a lot better after the shock of having Sputnik in orbit going bleep-bleep-bleep a decade earlier. The moon race was a better idea than some of the US military wing nuts who wanted to detonate a nuclear device there.

The men who trained as astronauts and went to the moon were volunteers taken from elite military flight training schools. I think you under estimate quite how attention grabbing it was at the time. People followed the news avidly to see how it developed from Apollo 8 onwards.

Apollo 13 likewise grabbed the world's attention as they nursed a broken spacecraft back to Earth with some Rube-Goldberg repaired contraptions made from all the bits they had with them. After that people got bored.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Strictly it was their physics teacher and chemistry teacher (a radio Ham) who built the gear to get the school children interested in science. Back then you could do exciting dangerous science experiments in schools involving high voltages, explosives and fireworks.

My own school had a particularly inspiring biology teacher who ran the science club. Our bias was therefore on interesting rare animals (anything that wasn't actually deadly that turned up at the docks).

I still recall watching a Maxwell's spur arcing and sparking as it spun through a pool of mercury flicking tiny droplets along the bench.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

That would have been cool.

I remember it.

Exactly. It was a very expensive cheap thrill.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

The distinction is, um, blurry, I agree :)

And we did.

Being given (not handed!) bits of Na and K to put in water, conc sulphuric acid on sugar, potassium cyanide (with a warning not to flush it down the sink with acid), and no week was complete without at least one "squeaky pop" :)

In physics one of my friends found his watch was noticeably more radioactive than the school's most radioactive source.

And then there was the demo of detonating stoichiometric mixtures of gasses, in the Royal Institution :)

Yes, playing with liquid Hg was fun.

As a glider pilot instructor mentioned in conjunction with teaching kids (inc. my daughter) to fly, "back then you expected to lose a few".

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Just more circus for the nitwits, and nerd welfare of course.

still be trying to use a scaled up Estes pressurized water rocket...

and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Goddard successfully launched his rocket on March 16, 1926, ushering in an era of space flight and innovation."

Goddard never amounted to much. He was ill all his adult life and lacked th e energy to actually build anything, preferring to piddle with elementary i deas and take forever to prototype a few demonstrations He was never part o f or built/sold an organization to advance the science, mainly because he h ad no desire to do so. All this crap about his significance is just that, c rap. Same with naming science centers after him long after he was dead. It' s just your typical propagandist ploy of pushing the American exceptionalis m garbage as well as getting out from under the stigma of completely under- utilizing the individual when he was alive- you know that pesky era when th ey wouldn't give him any money for anything. America of that time period wa s not far removed from the gold standard of education being defined as the ability to write your name. It was a pretty sorry place IOW.

Goddard and the top military scientists were focused on liquid rockets and couldn?t get solid fuel rockets working

It was not until the Danish immigrant Charles Lauritsen came along and show ed them how to do it that the focus shifted

Charles team from Caltech produced millions of rockets for the Second World War, before that the US military rocket program was non existent

Charles also was key person in the atom bomb construction and the proximity fuse

Amazing that so few people know of his career

Cheers

Klaus

The only other reference Google can find online for "Maxwell's spur" and mercury is a message you wrote in 2009.

What is it, and what do other people call it?

Clifford Heath

Of course, but the point is that the "frame store" for conversion was just phosphor persistence.

Wow, 70MHz bandwidth on tape, that's a lot! A lot of tape, at least... I had no idea it was even possible.

Thanks!

Clifford Heath.