Del.Monte wrote: ↑Mon Nov 01, 2021 3:19 pm
@ Wibbs - Genuine question, what have been some of the tangible benefits from six decades of space exploration? I seem to remember that a some sort of fire retardant blanket and a super duper sleeping bag were invented. Unless space is being explored with a view to setting up a penal colony for the likes of Trump, Putin, Rocket Man, the Chinese politburo etc. it seems rather pointless.
What Norman said. On top of that major impacts on aerospace another. Guidance systems yet another. Ever use a cordless drill? That was a NASA thing that Black and Decker developed for Apollo. Freeze dried foods and medical monitoring others. Computing tech really got a major boost with the dire need to shrink what had filled rooms into something the size of a suitcase. Interestingly those systems written for Apollo couldn't really crash as such. If there was any issue in running a piece of code, the system would ignore that, keep the other commands going and reset back to the start. So if you got a program alarm(they got a few), you could wait for it to recycle and go again.
Another angle that's often left out is streamlining of products from different industries brought together in a final assembly, checked all the way along that route. When NASA was going for the Moon they needed to spin up dozens of contractors and hundreds of sub contractors all over the US and beyond and get them into a supply line all singing from the same hymn sheet and as quickly and efficiently and as safely as possible(after the Apollo 1 fire they doubled down on this and revamped the whole thing). And with incredibly cutting edge tech to boot, much of completely new and untested. While American industry had gone a good way down that route in WW2 the Apollo programme really revved it up and many of the practices are still in use in industry today.
The environmental movement got a real boost from Apollo.
This pic from christmas eve 1968 captured the imagination of the world and was the most reproduced photo on the planet for a couple of years. The astronauts themselves noted this to a man summed up by the words "we went to the moon, only to discover the earth". Look at how impacted William Shatner was recently after the barest hop beyond our surly bonds. Now imagine going so far out you see the entire Earth hanging in space. One astronaut when he came back and after the kerfuffle died down found himself going to shopping malls of all things to just sit and marvel at all the humanity and life around him. And these guys were not teenage hippies. They were in their late thirties, one was 48. Hard headed military types. Another thing the Apollo guys noted on returning to Earth was when they met people, no matter where they were from, France, India, even Russia people would say "
we went to the moon". It had a big uniting effect at the time.
And that's before all the knowledge we've gained since Sputnik went up. Ice volcanos on Jupiter's moons, likely huge under the surface liquid oceans on other moons that make ours look like a puddle. The sheer vastness of it all and questions about our place in all that.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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