Another sad anniversary

Dec 12 14:40 UTC 1997

        It's now been 25 years that mankind has not been on the moon.
If you where born after 12/12/72 you where not born in the age of 
man on the moon.
        So what are you all under 25 gonna do see humans on the moon
in your lifetime?

response 2 of 39:

Dec 12 16:35 UTC 1997

Agreed. I watched the first moon landing - it is one of the few world
events where I rmemeber exactly where I was (but then, I was at a
memorable place anyway, so which came first.....  :)). Most of what
was accomplished scientifically could have been done instrumentally, which
is not to disparage the up-close look around and sampling. I don't think
another visit by humans has much point, unless it were to set up an
observatory. 

response 4 of 39:

Dec 14 19:40 UTC 1997

        It took a human navigator/pilot to successfully bring the 
Eagle down to the moons surface.  The changing conditions (angle of
descent, alttitude, cureent weight of spacecraft, etc.) where to
much for the on-board computer to handle.  You probably have more
computing power in your wristwatch these days.

response 6 of 39:

Dec 14 23:51 UTC 1997

Re #4,5:  I believe that the computer aboard the LEM had 32K of ROM and 16K of
RAM, and it was indeed built just for the task of landing on the moon.  Some
people blame the computer's failure on Neil Armstrong for leaving a particular
radar dish turned on after the time when it was needed.  The input from the
dish contributed to overloading the computer.

response 8 of 39:

Dec 15 16:24 UTC 1997

I remember the first landingon the moon...it was the middle of the
night (like 2 a.m. or something I think)  I used to hate the apollo
missions because when there was one going on, CBS would have
special report coverage in the mornings and pre-empt Captain Kangaroo....

I mean I liked astronauts...but the Captain and Mr. Greenjeans were
my heroes, not Neil Armstrong.  How dare they pre-empt the Captain!

response 10 of 39:

Dec 15 18:16 UTC 1997

Re #7: I don't think the moon landing was done to cool your parents... 8^}

Funny - I remember the first moon landing to be late afternoon (EST).
So, whose memory is better?  :)

response 12 of 39:

Dec 16 01:16 UTC 1997

I was away at camp during the first moon landing. Other campers were spreading
the word that according to the Bible the earth would come to a firy end when
man set foot on the moon. As luck would have it, that night a nearby munitions
factory caught fire and exploded, lighting up the sky and booming with
explosions. Although the camp administration eventually let everyone know what
was happenning, peoples' reactions under stress were quite interesting. I
grabbed my Swiss Army Knife and was prepared to flee (classic reaction!).
A counselor (a big husky football-player type had to grab one of his thighs
with botyh hands to keep it from shaking. And afterwards, another camper lay
in his bed endlessly repeating the phrase "Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord,
Praise the Lord . . . ." Fascinating (and scary) stuff for a youth.

response 14 of 39:

Dec 16 02:20 UTC 1997

Hmm.  I've never seen anything on the LEM computer, but just last night I
found some info on the Apollo capsule's navigation computer.  By today's
specifications it had 50K of ROM and 2K of RAM, a 16-bit data path, and a 2
MHz clock, as far as I can tell.  Both the ROM and RAM were core memory, the
only difference being the ROM was set up to be read-only during each
mission, and could be reprogrammed between...kinda an early form of Flash
EPROM, if you will.  I/O was via numeric displays and a numeric keypad,
coupled to the computer's Input and Output registers.

Source: http://wwwis.cs.utwente.nl:8080/~faase/Ha/Apollo.html

response 16 of 39:

Dec 16 05:46 UTC 1997

I don't remember the moon landing, since I wasn't born. I do, however recall
the Challenger explosion.

I was in 8th grade, home sick from school that day. I came downstairs to try
and eat lunch, and saw the TV on in the kitchen. Mom told me the shuttle had
blown up. The impact of this didn't hit me until that night when I listened to
talk radio. One person said the hardest part was that everyone had seen this
live on TV.

My friend who was in school that day, said it was announced over the PA system
during lunch. The entire cafeteria went cold quiet... and that was all young
children.

response 18 of 39:

Dec 16 06:47 UTC 1997

  Oh geee, The Challenger. I can tell you exactly what I was doing. I was
driving for Yellow Cab, and just parked on the Depot, and stepped out to use
the necessary and buy a paper. When I got back in the car, I heard that the
Challenger had exploded. I was so stunned, I went home to tell my Mom and she
had the set on, and I was just aghast at the horridness of the explosion.
  I don't remember what I did for the rest of that day.

response 20 of 39:

Dec 17 01:32 UTC 1997

Re #4:  Tim, the Surveyor probes (one of which was visited by an Apollo
team who removed the camera and returned it to Earth) landed under
control of their on-board computers.  The job no more required a pilot
on board then than it would now.
 
The Surveyors proved that a probe could land on the Moon and not
disappear into "dust pools" which some people feared would swallow
anything which landed on it.  They blazed the trail, but they couldn't
do the kind of extensive sample and data collection performed by Apollo.
(Like it or not, the most versatile data collection and analysis system
available to the scientist can still be created by unskilled people
who enjoy their work. ;-)
 
Re #2:  Actually, an observatory (or several) would make excellent
sense for the Moon.  The far side is one of the few places you can
get away from Earth's raucous radio noise, not to mention above the
signal-blocking ionosphere.
 
However, you're quite wrong about being able to perform the entire
mission by remote sensing.  Without actual, physical samples it would
be impossible to date the rocks and thus assign them a position in the
events which formed our part of the Solar System.  You have to put down
probes and drill holes to do the heat-flow experiments which gave
more information on the origins of Luna.  This is mighty complicated
work for robot probes, and people are not *that* expensive to send.
Volunteers will do it for the glory, if the public will allow them.
 
Reasons to go back?  There may be many, including good financial ones.
If there is ice in the shadowed craters of the lunar poles (still in
doubt) it would make space travel much cheaper, as lunar rocket fuel
would not have to be hauled up from Earth at great expense.  Finally,
one of the discoveries of Apollo is that the lunar "soil" (regolith) has
absorbed comparatively large amounts of the rare isotope helium-3.
He-3 can be fused with deuterium to yield He-4 and hydrogen, without
producing any neutrons (which induce radioactivity).  It is just about
the ideal fusion fuel.
 
Clean energy without any CO2 would seem to be the answer to global
warming, no?  There are people who believe that the Moon will be the
source of the energy to run Earth's industry for the next century-plus.

response 22 of 39:

Dec 17 04:13 UTC 1997

We sat out at the lake and played cards with my dad waiting for the first moon
walk.

I sat and watched Challenger live.  I kept trying to think of some way to tell
the announcers that the damned thing had blown up, they couldn't seem to reach
that conclusion.

response 24 of 39:

Dec 17 18:30 UTC 1997

I remember more vividly the botched Apollo 11 mission (theone they made
into a movie with Tom Hanks) where lives were in the balance and
everyone was glued to the tv to see if they were going to make it into the
atmosphere or had burned up.