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…and we only did it because there was a dick-waving contest between two nations.
Soviets had no interest in going to the moon (yet) and were more focused on living in space before going outside earth’s orbit. The US was waving it in public on its own
Impressive rewriting of history.
I guess the N1 was never built, right?
Not seeing how building a rocket to compete with Saturn V means they were also racing to the moon
From the references of the wiki article on the N1 rocket
https://web.archive.org/web/20161031200800/http://www.starbase1.co.uk/pages/n1-project-history.html
Salyut and Mir prove the Soviet’s focus was on manned missions in low earth orbit and not the moon, and considering nobody has gone back to the moon since they’ve made the right call
You don’t need anything that powerful for earth orbit. Salut and Mir launched on much less ambitious rockets. They became the focus after the moon race was decided.
The N1-L3 version was designed to compete with the United States Apollo program to land a person on the Moon, using a similar lunar orbit rendezvous method. The basic N1 launch vehicle had three stages, which were to carry the L3 lunar payload into low Earth orbit with two cosmonauts. The L3 contained one stage for trans-lunar injection; another stage used for mid-course corrections, lunar orbit insertion, and the first part of the descent to the lunar surface; a single-pilot LK Lander spacecraft; and a two-pilot Soyuz 7K-LOK lunar orbital spacecraft for return to Earth.
You build an N1 or Saturn V to go to the moon.
Had the N1 launched without incident, the Soviets were on target to get a man on the moon first. When the Soviet Union fell all the details of the program became available.
So if they were racing the US to the moon why didn’t they also publicly proclaim their intent to go to the moon? They rejected the race, tried to make a Saturn V, didn’t work, moved on. Hardly seems like a race to me
From the references in that same wikipedia article you’re referencing, the one I linked in my comment:
"On June 23, 1960 the USSR gave the go ahead to the N-1 project via a decree: "On the Development of Powerful Launch vehicles, Satellites, Spacecraft, and Space Exploration 1960-1967". This was Sergei Korolev’s design for a family of launchers, the key one being the largest, the N-1.
This initial design while a powerful heavy lift rocket, had a planned payload capacity of 75 tonnes - a lot less than that for a lunar landing mission. Korolev was thinking flyby missions of Mars, which require a much lighter payload."
Why is it so hard to accept the moon landing was just pompous Americanism?
The whole thing was about national pride on both sides. The soviets didn’t admit they were striving for the same thing because they never wanted to be seen to lose. Their pattern was always the same:
- They didn’t say they were working towards having the first satellite. They just announced it when they were successfully.
- They didn’t say they were working towards having the first living animal in space. They just announced it when they were successfully.
- They didn’t say they were working towards having the first man in space. They just announced it when they were successfully.
- They didn’t say they were working towards having the first man on the moon. They just denied it when they were unsuccessful.
However, the Soviet lunar program was confirmed many years after the fact under Gorbachev’s policy of Glastnost when the Soviet Union fell. The Soviet Lunar program is fact. Their lunar landers were built just months after the US. Some still exist. There’s one on loan for display at Disneyland in Paris. I’ve seen another at the London Science Museum. Russia loans them out to show how advanced they were at the time. To take pride in what they accomplished, and rightly so.
This is all very public, yet you’re trying to convince me that 50yo face saving propaganda is the truth?
The US wanted to beat the Soviets at space, and the reality was when it came heavy lifting rockets the soviets were way, way ahead. The moonshot was a different problem that would require a different solution than simply “bigger rocket,” so the US made that the goal. They weren’t sure they could beat the Russians to the moon, but they knew they couldn’t beat them in a lifting contest for something like a space station.
Considering the relative speed of literally everything we can experience as humans, and that light ranks at the tippy top of every single one of them as INSTANT in pretty much any context other than math homework, it’s honestly pretty fucking wild that we not only got humans 1.3 light-seconds away from Earth, but got them back alive to tell about it.
That is straight up amazing.
Yes and no. I get the point and do actually agree whole heartedly but I think it obscures the reality that we’ve been observing solar systems as they existed millions of years ago.
We ain’t hardly been nowhere in the 'verse yet.
And those objects that are now 46 billion light years away move away from us faster than light.
They are not moving faster than light.
The distance between us and them is increasing at a rate than means light leaving earth now could not ever reach them. Such is the impact of an expanding universe.
Your point of view is 46 billion years out of date.
…but I like the meme.
You’re right, let’s send 1 person into the fuck of space just to say we did it.
I’m not being sarcastic.
Trump or Musk?
Let’s invent teleportation, then use the teleporter to merge them into a homunculus flesh beast, and then launch that thing into the sun.
Unrelated, but I thought it would be a good idea.
Homunculus is a little person that is proportional. You cant merge two tall, fat fucks and get one little person. 4 or 5 homunculi, maybe. But not one.
What if the homunculus argues that it, as a new and distinct being, has committed no crimes, and deserves to live? What if it begs for its life as you load it into the teleporter to
split it back up into your science officer and annoying morale officershoot it into the sun?We’ll just get Cate Mulgrew to argue that point.
Yes.
Yes
Dont eat the rich
Throw them into space to see who goes the farthest
“I trust them as far as I can throw them”
“Bet”
Like build one really really big space trabuchet, loaded with a space hotel with all the amenities possible for basically a one way generational ship. Then blast those fuckers towards alpha centari and call it a decade.
Oh, and just for fun, give them one life pod but it only holds 20 people.
But the real kicker? …they never left the ground And it’s all televised.
The launch sequence? Really fast merry go round.
The “artificial gravity”? Lol
The infinite food sources vending machines? Catering.
Yes! Thanks I had no idea this was a thing.
Elon on top of a super-heavy. He can be like Solomon Epstein.
Sure but even if we had stuck someone on voyager 1, it’s only 23 light hours away and has been going almost 50 years.
And we go no further for the next 4 years
Might be longer if Musk really guts the NASA
If Musk guts NASA, then surely it would be in an attempt to benefit SpaceX and himself, e.g. by removing regulations or funneling more money to SpaceX, and with that accelerating his Moon landing program, not pushing it back.
You assume his goal is actually to get to Mars, not just dangle that as a dream in front of people while siphoning off billions of tax dollars.
I didn’t say anything about Mars, I only meant the Moon mission, which I assume would slightly push the record further just because the longer duration would give more opportunity for the wobble of the Moon’s orbit to get the astronauts further than before.
Granted, SpaceX could also just fail to get to the Moon.
Considering his successes with Tesla I doubt it would get the desired results. But spacex does have some very smart cookies, so you might be on to something.
And a statistically large number of those people that we sent up there were from Ohio, one can assume because they were trying to get as far away from Ohio as possible.
I think this is true of US presidents too.
Copy paste. Next
You must be fun at parties.
With a spaceship which reach a huge percent of lightspeed, the occupants can reach in short time many of the exoplanets in the Milky Way, only for the observer on Earth it last thousends of years. But this isn’t important, after the rich people in the Spaceship had destroyed the Earth.
Holy crap the moon is far
You can fit all the planets in the solar system between earth and the moon
Please don’t, I believe you
Yeah no one ever mentions if you did do that it likely would not go well for earth
We’re really just photographers right now.
The ultimate townies, on a universal scale.
No problem once we build the improbability drive engine.
Probably a little heavy for a meme community, but why do images rendered of the observable universe appear symmetrical?
Not an expert, but an enthusiast. The universe can typically be considered homogeneous and isotropic on a large scale (it looks the same in all areas, and also looks similar no matter which direction you happen to be looking) for the sake of understanding and performing physical calculations. The beach may also be considered homogeneous and isototropic, but we know that if we dig down, we’ll find interesting materials, organisms, and even various grades of sand (for context).
The universe is roughly symmetrical even though there are structures and features of great complexity when you look close enough (such as atoms, you, me, horses, and icebergs). This is probably because the universe originated from a single infinitely dense point where there wasn’t room for much diversity or clumping of matter. As the universe expanded, random quantum fluctuations and coalescence, perhaps due to gravity and the various electrical and atomic forces, is to thank for the formation of elements, stars, and galaxies, over the last 14 billion years (or however old the Universe is supposed to be).
Anyways. It’s represented as symmetrical because it’s convenient and true on a large scale, but its always more complicated the deeper you look.
The symmetry is the interesting part. It’s Earth-centric symmetry. I don’t know if it’s a failure on the artist’s part, but the age appears to increase equally in all directions from the center point of the field. That’s why the question. One would think that it would be uneven, no “center”.
So this isn’t a joke? Wouldn’t that make the universe 46.5B years old? Very big bang.
The observed objects 46.5 giga ly away are about the same age as the age of the universe, but they have gotten further away from us in the time since they emitted the photons we’re now observing.
You have to start somewhere.
Beelions
