News and events
@isuusaYou are hereBlogs / dtreat's blog / Your Perspective 40 Years After Apollo 11
Your Perspective 40 Years After Apollo 11
With the recent 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the ISU*USA alumni association would like to invite all ISU alumni to share your thoughts, reflections, and opinions about the significance, meaning, and/or impact of Apollo 11 and the subsequent lunar landings. Whether you're a seasoned space professional or just starting your career in the industry, we encourage you to share your perspective with your fellow alumni and the space community.
Any and all viewpoints are encouraged: positive, negative, and indifferent. These can stem from a political, economic, socio-cultural, and/or technological and engineering perspective, or from a perspective set in a temporal context such as the past (i.e. the Cold War space race), the present, or the future. Whatever you want to say, and however you want to say it, we'd like to hear it.
We're asking you to consider participating so that the alumni community might share in the multitude of opinions regarding this achievement. The introduction of new points of view may provide a learning opportunity, result in the reconsideration of long-held views, spark new ideas, or perhaps even lead to a healthy debate or two.
If you'd like to participate, just comment to this blog entry with a response no more than around 200 words or so, about as long as this posting. This is not a hard limit, but we do ask that responses be fairly concise. If you'd like to submit a longer-form essay, we'd be happy to post it on the website - just contact any of the ISU*USA Alumni Association board members.
Thanks, and we look forward to hearing from you!
(Note: If you registered on this site as an alumnus/alumna, your comment will be posted immediately. If you are not a member you can still comment, but also please register and join us. More info about the site...)
This is about Moon landing eskeptics.
As an space enthusiats since I was a child (I was 1 yr. old in july 69) and having later spent several years at ESA and various space related institutions (militar and industrial), I have been confronted (as many of you, I suppose) to the questions of people willing to share with me their doubts and skepticism about other people having landed on the Moon.
I can not blame them; If we consider the many things that have been written about a possible conspiration, bad special effects and so on.. common people can be easily lost and prone to believe on the easiest explanation: "Going to the Moon is very difficult, so nobody has never gone there".
What has impressed me more than their skepticism is the great number of those people who actually believe on UFOs, ghost/spirits and extra-terrestrial bases on the Moon. So the problem for the skepticism is not the lack of faith, as those people have plenty of faith on things that I do not deny, even if I do not take them very seriously (because of the lack of proof or logical expalanation provided.. but this is my personnel stand point only).
I conclude that a big part of the problem could lay on the very limitted knowledge that people have on HOW the supposed Earth-Moon-Earth travel was done. I do not mean knowing the names of missions, spacemen, dates and so on... which can easily be found on the web.. I think on a different way of presenting the information that I call "Stairway to the Moon", a title inspired on the famous Led Zeppeling's song..
Let me explain briefly my idea: Landing to the Moon was not a big step, but a very small one; it was just the end step of a long stairway, made of many other small steps; each of which required lot of technological experimentation and can be accepted or rejected once one knows the facts that were accomplished, the technology involved, who did it first and how many times it was done by other people before attempting the Moon landing.
Once you know the different steps of the stairway, you can say at which step you decide to stop in your belief.. Denying the Moon landing has no sense.. you can believe up to the N-x step and deny the last "x" steps.. but you have to pronounce on it with knowledge and not just say "nothing has been done".. What means "nothing"?..
In y opinion the first step could be the V2 bombing of England during WWII.. I can not imagine anybody rejecting this fact (well, some people still deny the extermination camps.. so no reasoning would be sufficient to them..)..
Other technological accomplishments followed.. you all know them very well.. X-15, Sputnik, Laika, Gagarin, Leonov, the Gemini and first Apollos..
Excuse the length of this post. Your comments will be highly apreciated. I intend to write about this on a blog.
BTW: for those able to read spanish; a recommend the lecture of a recently published book I have just found: "La conspiración lunar: Vaya timo!", Ed. LAETOLI. It intends to dismount the various explanations usually given by the so called "skeptics".
I have the opportunity to learn more about the details of the Apollo efforts through some of the data collection needed to support trade studies we do for the Constellation efforts. And the more I learn, the more I am impressed with the myriad of challenges the Apollo team recognized and innovatively overcame. It is almost painful to think of where we'd be if as a nation, we didn't abandon that technology and had instead evolved the Saturn V and utilized the Apollo Applications Program. I hope we can find national support to continue exploration to the Moon and then to Mars as we build our capabilities and don't figuratively burn our fleet in the harbor focusing inward rather than outward.
Tracy SSP'06
To be completely honest, I've been too busy "celebrating" the 40th Anniversary at the NewSpace and the Lunar Science Forum at Ames (looking at ppt slides and talking with people) that I had not had a moment to really reflect on the significance of the Moon Landing... until I finally got some decent sleep and decided to take a moment to myself. Maybe some people here are in similar situations. Then I realized, that when a few of us were watching the beautiful Sun set behind the SF peninsula last night, we were looking right past the Moon... (which at the time was casting a shadow on the Pacific Ocean of our planet).
When we (on Earth) were around the same position in the Solar System but 40 revolutions back, people were able to look up at the Moon and realize Neil and Buzz and Mike looking back at us... If only today students and parents around the world could see the Moon and be able to get those same kind of goose bumps... I'd like to really start working toward being able to some day see, with friends and family, the shadow move across the face of the Blue Marble from that distance.
Thanks David for encouraging us to reflect!
Yuki D. Takahashi * * UC Berkeley Physics Dept, 94720-7300
1-510-684-8898 (mobile) ___/ http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~yukimoon
1-510-642-4359 (lab) http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/~yuki/sp
Skype: yukimoon ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
Amazing what they accomplished in 9 years and interestingly enough with vacuum tube and punch cards technology.
I think this still stands as mankind's greatest technological achievement. To think that we can't even duplicate this feat today, 40 years later, boggles the mind. It was definitely the Golden Age of spaceflight. Hopefully we can get back to that someday soon!
Hi, I had a blog post a couple of days that summarized my feelings about the 40th Apollo 11 Anniversary:
http://www.astronautforhire.com/2009/07/to-moon-or-mars.html
Cheers!
Brian Shiro
SSP05
Post new comment