re: Apollo 8 assembly, NASA is incredible

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grateful this survived!

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I'd look into some more hardcore protection for those schematics. If they're authentic program documents, they might be pretty rare and worth a lot to the right collector. If they're recreations or mass market items, then probably not so much.

It's a fancy whiz wheel. Nothing more

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If anything I'd say it's been raised. Pluto flyby? Jupiter insertion? The continual success of Cassini? Landing rovers on Mars? Telescopes that find planets millions of light years away? These are all extreme precision endeavors, where one thing goes wrong and the entire project does. And they have to work many years after the initial launch due to the timeframes involved in spaceflight. That's a damned high bar to cross in my opinion.

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You are part of like the .05% of the population that even knows about those missions. NASA doesn't even have the capability to put a human in space. I don't care what you say that's duck my pathetic. Should have canceled some of those other programs and all the earth science missions that they spent billions on and put people in space. Right now they're flagship program is billions over budget and years behind schedule. The agency is a fricking joke just like every other federal agency.

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They are currently driving a vehicle around another planet, have landed on a comet, have a probe orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, just did a flyby of Pluto, and are about to launch a telescope that can see back to damned near the beginning of the universe.



FTR, we had a man driving around on the moon in '71.

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This is basically checkmate for the thread.

Voyager launched around 1976-77 time frame for deep space exploration.
In the mid 70s the US put two landers on Mars.

Let's also remember:
Around 1970-71
Mariner entered Mars orbit. Took over 7000 photos. That's 45 years ago. Also the Russians sent two probes to Mars.

UNIX came out

We didn't have microprocessors. Think about that. Went to moon, no microprocessors (or maybe only a first iteration of one); now we have quantum computing and do what, spy on the American population, spread Fakebook around the globe? Have NASA gin up fake climate data?

the first e-book was placed on a computer at some university campus.

the first email was sent, although if I remember correctly it was hard wire transfer between two adjacent computers, so hardly what we consider email these days.


Apollo happened before any of these things above were out there in usable form.

NASA currently gets about $19 billion a year. Yet no one goes back to the moon. We still use remote vehicles on Mars despite getting one there for the first time about 40 years ago.

Mars has river beds. When did the water stop flowing and why did it stop? It would appear Mars used to have an atmosphere and orbit around the sun that were different than what it has now. What happened? NASA can't answer those questions and it won't answer them. Instead it will just play remote control games with those bots and keep wasting our money. NASA claims it is answering such questions with MAVEN but MAVEN is just reporting basic info like changes in CO2 and so forth. It's not looking for information that would explain why Mars is as it is today and what happened.

When Apollo ended, NASA ended. It's now more of a political pawn than an agency for development and space exploration on behalf of the American people.

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What does putting humans in space get us?

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Pushing boundaries has done a ton for tech and other areas:

LINK

Reusable rockets does save on launches, but there is still an enormous amount of propellant needed to achieve escape velocity for even a small amount of mass. It makes no sense to send humans into orbit when the same mission could be done much cheaper via robotics and unmanned probes. What you are advocating for is government waste.

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Reusable rockets does save on launches, but there is still an enormous amount of propellant needed to achieve escape velocity for even a small amount of mass. It makes no sense to send humans into orbit when the same mission could be done much cheaper via robotics and unmanned probes. What you are advocating for is government waste.

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You realize this makes no sense? Reusable rockets save on launches... saves money. But fuel costs a ton so No human missions just robots? Uh...

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You realize this makes no sense? Reusable rockets save on launches... saves money. But fuel costs a ton so No human missions just robots? Uh...

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You realize the mass of the robotics required to complete a mission is much smaller than the mass of the robotics + humans + life support required for the humans right? So how does this not make sense? The expensive part is getting something going fast enough, why add the mass of humans and their required life support unnecessarily? That's a tremendous amount of cost for little gain.

And I didn't say no human missions, but only when it makes sense. Most of the time it doesn't.

They get the funding they ask for and then some?

LINK

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They get the funding they ask for and then some?

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Dude, the national ink budget is higher than NASA's. It's utterly ridiculous and we need to send men back up there to get the budget they deserve.