Comments on: Apollo 11 – Could we do it again?

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:42:40 +0000

For those of you out there that still think Apollo was all faked. Check out this. An Indian probe takes a clear photo showing the tracks of Apollo 15's rover. There's some 3rd party confirmation for you.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:33:09 +0000

So, I was watching the Science Channel, and there was a show on the Cassini program. That spacecraft has the moon missions beat for trip awe factor. The moon missions had a forward pass between two celestial bodies, but they still had a chance to correct themselves if necessary. The Cassini spacecraft went 1 billion miles to Saturn with help from 4 celestial bodies: Venus (twice), Earth, and Jupiter. It seems it is difficult to get a large spacecraft 1 billion miles away with any speed. The solution was to go TOWARDS the sun the get two pulls from Venus. Then another trip past Earth for a pull, and finally a pull from Jupiter. Seven years later, and you're there. Brilliant! And BTW, the planets would not be in the right alignment again for 600 years so you needed to be right the first time. All worked to perfection. Fascinating stuff! See this for more info about gravity assist.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:31:08 +0000

Listening to the broadcast on wechoosethemoon.org, it is obvious that calculations and data are being checked and rechecked by multiple people. There are a lot of numbers being repeated back and forth to check rather than blindly believing the computer. I wonder if a modern system would set up multiple computers and compare to get something similar? This is what the Shuttle does -- with core memory no less. This reminds me to write about the time knowledge of the equations helped me to discover a minor problem in a system trusted blindly for 15 years.