Mars: Inside SpaceX

Started by Henri, November 24, 2018, 18:16:28

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ThickO

I talked to a engineer that worked for NASA in the 60's, his job was the command  module. This was before polymers and graphite synthetic material. What is truly amazing is the the command module was milled from a single block of aluminum, that was the only way to assure no air leaks.
3D makes my head hurt...

Rick Nasher

#31
Quote... But I do believe that the American's landing a man on the moon was fantasy and a propergander tool to beat the Soviet Union.  It never happened.  We could not do that with today's technology, let alone 60's technology.

- If so, the Russians would have made sooo much noise shouting 'fake news'(they were close observers).
But instead, they were pretty upset they didn't make it there first.

Or.. it's all a conspiracy, big scam:
The earth indeed is flat,  there are aliens ruling us, we're in a simulation or.. well, have your pick.
Big problem with all of those explanations is always: *why?* - The answers almost never make solid sense, don't hold up if you continue thinking ahead.



- Old tech isn't completely 'destroyed'. It hasn't been kept up to date, abandoned and unusable under todays demands for safety and most likely too costly(the 60's/early 70's were a pretty prosperous time to live in, money to spare).

Also mind you Kennedy didn't exactly give them much time too(1 decade to beat the Ruskies) and the rocket was the biggest ever build under Wernher von Braun, who was pretty much ahead of his time.


I've yet too see compelling evidence for this one that cannot be explained otherwise.
















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RemiD

#32
you have to consider that, in the past, some people invented / built new technologies from scratch, with parts often manually made, and some were skilled in different fields, also there was less entertainment, more discipline and focus on work, so i am not surprised that many engineers of today are more "users" and "assemblers" than "inventors" and "creators".

i am personally trying to replicate a few "lost" technologies, and sometimes i have difficulties to understand what some past inventors meant / did and why. and sometimes i search for answers on the web and i find nothing about it (and i am far from a genius...)

and yes, some old technologies were voluntarily destroyed, or at least forgotten (because of lobbies and rules / taxes / obstacles from the state)

Rick Nasher

That might very well be true.

People of today having issues imagining how primitive structures were build. Old but even fairly recently creations, like 100 years ago. So with complex stuff like space tech might indeed be the case.
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meems

Quote from: GaborD on November 30, 2018, 12:02:43
Quote from: therevills on November 30, 2018, 08:32:23
I believe we went to the moon, the Apollo astronauts left a mirror on the moon which we use to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Yep, the lunar laser ranging retroreflector arrays. 3 of them actually, set up on three different Apollo missions (11, 14, 15)
Used by observatories all around the world.

Then again, a true conspiracy theorist will then tell you that the russians also have two reflectors, from their unmanned Luna missions with the Lunokhod rovers. So you don't necessarily need humans to do it.

To which you will reply "Yes, but those are just pre-mounted on the rovers, which lead to them having issues (one wasn't usable for decades, until re-found with the help of lunar reconnaissance orbiter images)."

And there is surely a clever comeback for that too...

And a clever comeback to the clever comeback...

And...

You can never win, there is always a step further one can take it down the rabbit hole.
The rabbit hole is turtles all the way down.

physics grad checking in.
the mirrors on the moon \ laser ranging is for some reason the favourite pub debate 'proof' story that the meris went to the moon.
its bollocks. its totally impractical to bounce a laser off a 1m^2 mirror 3840,000km away moving at 1km/s.

1. Ever held a laser and bounced it off a mirror some distance away? notice how the returned laser dot shakes around alot? The distance magnifies the trembles of your hand. To bounce a laser off a handheld mirror more than 20m away is impractical. Try doing it with a moving target. Now consider that both the moon and the Earth are constantly trembling with quakes. This makes it impractical for even the best tech to line up a perfect laser to a moon mirror such that it would bounce back to earth.

2. 'perfect laser' is pertinent. because lasers aren't perfect. their light spreads out. any laser we've got will spread out by the time it got to the moon to cover all the moon. And this gives u a clue as to how lunar laser ranging works and why it was operational 7 year b4 the merifats alledged they went to the moon. Lunar laser ranging works by bouncing lasers off the whole of the moon, then waiting for some of the light to get back to Earth.
Don't need mirrors, and a 1m^2 mirror would be worthless for such a task anyway. We can't even see 1m^2 resolution on the moon let alone point to something with that resolution.

i've been in pubs when non-scientists have told me with 100% conviction and serious tone that its proven that we went to the moon because 'lasers bounced off mirrors on the moon' . They've not got a **** clue what they are talking about, and can't even use google.

Rick Nasher

#35
@meems
Now there's an interesting point of view.

I know lasers do spread out, but I checked wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment and they say:

QuotePrinciple[edit]

The distance to the Moon is calculated approximately using this equation:

distance = (speed of light × time taken for light to reflect) / 2

In actuality, the round-trip time of about 2.5 seconds is affected by the location of the Moon in the sky, the relative motion of Earth and the Moon, Earth's rotation, lunar libration, weather, polar motion, propagation delay through Earth's atmosphere, the motion of the observing station due to crustal motion and tides, velocity of light in various parts of air and relativistic effects.[9] Nonetheless, the Earth–Moon distance has been measured with increasing accuracy for more than 35 years. The distance continually changes for a number of reasons, but averages 385,000.6 km (239,228.3 mi).[10]

At the Moon's surface, the beam is about 6.5 kilometers (4.0 mi) wide[11] and scientists liken the task of aiming the beam to using a rifle to hit a moving dime 3 kilometers (1.9 mi) away. The reflected light is too weak to see with the human eye. Out of 1017 photons aimed at the reflector, only one is received back on Earth every few seconds, even under good conditions. They can be identified as originating from the laser because the laser is highly monochromatic. This is one of the most precise distance measurements ever made, and is equivalent in accuracy to determining the distance between Los Angeles and New York to 0.25 mm (0.01 in).[8][12] As of 2002, work is progressing on increasing the accuracy of the Earth–Moon measurements to near millimeter accuracy, though the performance of the reflectors continues to degrade with age.[8] The upcoming MoonLIGHT reflector, that will be landed in 2019, is designed to increase measurement accuracy 100 times over existing systems.[2][13]


Now I can't claim to be a scientist so I do not have the means to check if this is in any way feasible.

China also claims to have done this:
China just bounced a laser off reflectors on the Moon placed by NASA's Apollo 15 mission


So either we're being lied to or your understanding of the laser tech is not up to par with NASA's.
I know in the late 80's guys at my ICT school were pointing, by hand, self build lasers which were 2meters long at the time, at flying pigeons to blind them and see them crash fall from the sky(nasty f-ers, even though I can see the comic element in it). :-\

Thus question is: What is your knowledge based upon? What's your education? Selftought? Did you experiment with lasers? Etc, etc.
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Steve Elliott

Knowledge?  He said he was a physics graduate.
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meems

physics graduate, common sense, a lifelong interest in physics, and having a skeptical mind.

ok so good lasers now are only 6.5km wide at the moon's surface. It's a modest gain over the method of using multiple lower grade lasers to create a higher intensity, lower coherence beam.

common sense says if u shine a light on a reflective surface then u can see it, and for the purpose of timing light thats good enough. It isn't necessary that the beam is mirrored back.
Thast's why they could do lunar laser ranging in 1962.


meems

Adding mirrors actually won't make a detectable difference. There's a paper written by a top mathematician\phyicist that goes thru the precise details to show mirrors of the size claimed by nasa won't make a discernible difference to the detected number of reflected photons.

Rick Nasher

#39
Ok, so what you're saying is that the whole mirror thing is unnecessary and useless in in any case.

I wonder then what geniuses thought it was a good idea to spent the extra bucks and put them up there while is of no use anyway? Shouldn't they all be fired for that? I mean, surely not cheap to put anything up there to say the least.

You'd expect the best of scientists to be working at NASA or the Russians and then to make such a mistake is just weird. Didn't they do the math?

Unless.. the moons surface isn't reflective enough due to the sun outshining just about any laser hitting it's dusty surface?
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3DzForMe

#40
@Remid, 20 years ago (I know.... That's almost distinctly in the past), I invented my own bicycle speed comparator with reed switches, magnets, a C90 cassette, a 3khz tone generator, and my own a to d converter using as schmitt trigger - and the graph software was written in Amigas blitz basic. Of course, there wasn't the distraction s of Grid Autosport with force feedback steering wheels then.... So not sure If would've made the leap from assembler to inventor these days. Nevertheless, my Blitzplotting carries on within Blitz3D, admittedly using Garmin's bespoke hardware to capture data instead of my own. The question is, how hard would it be to make my own GPS data capturing device with programmable chips and blah.... Maybe a little Project for next year.... Merry Christmas folks, and happy coding fellow nerds and geeks  :P
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meems

Quote from: Rick Nasher on December 25, 2018, 02:42:15
Ok, so what you're saying is that the whole mirror thing is unnecessary and useless in in any case.

I wonder then what geniuses thought it was a good idea to spent the extra bucks and put them up there while is of no use anyway? Shouldn't they all be fired for that? I mean, surely not cheap to put anything up there to say the least.

You'd expect the best of scientists to be working at NASA or the Russians and then to make such a mistake is just weird. Didn't they do the math?

Unless.. the moons surface isn't reflective enough due to the sun outshining just about any laser hitting it's dusty surface?
well its a 'pub proof' that the meris went the moon. But its hopelessly flawed and so is just a demo of how normies can't do logic and reason, yet have conviction in what they don't understand ( blind faith ) as much as any religious zealot. Belief in mass media myths is religion repackaged, with a bonus : Religion is even more powerful when the follower doesn't realise he's a devout believer in said religion.

>Didn't they do the math?
the meris didn't go to the moon, it was all stagecraft, so no one had to do the maths.

Rick Nasher

#42
@meems

Ok, I can agree that without enough knowledge it's pretty difficult to pull the correct conclusions and probably stupid too.

Quote>Didn't they do the math?
the meris didn't go to the moon, it was all stagecraft, so no one had to do the maths.

If staged. How would the Americans have gotten away with their claims while those pesky Ruskies were watching their each and every move during the cold war?

For that to work the Russians - their so called "No.1 enemy" at the time, were in on this too then? We are governed by aliens who put up a big show for us with wars killing lots of people just to make it plausible(dunno why though, what would be the point?). Is the earth flat, space don't exists? Or: we're living in a sim? Is this the Matrix? - The human battery theory I heard some people strongly believe in didn't make any sense to me. I'm looking for a good reason here.

Not saying there can't be any other explainations, open to all ideas, if at least the arguments for the 'why' are making sense. So far haven't heard a good one yet.
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3DzForMe

QuoteNot saying there can't be any other explainations, open to all ideas, if at least the arguments for the 'why' are making sense. So far haven't heard a good one yet.

Humans were a pet project for some aliens, however, the aliens weren't aware of the 'Humans aren't just for christmas' belief. They got bored after we built some pyramids.....
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meems

>If staged. How would the Americans have gotten away with their claims while those pesky Ruskies were watching their each and every move during the cold war?

The Russian space effort was faked too.
Meanwhile, Russian media has often opposed or dismissed US claims, but to no effect on the western public. No one in Russia held a magic red card that if played would cause everyone in the west to say 'oh it was all staged'.