<story><title>Why is it so hard to pull off a lunar landing?</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01454-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>machina_ex_deus</author><text>The Apollo moon landings were such an insane achievement. They did it in a time where digital processing was in it&amp;#x27;s infancy and barely existed, minimization technology was undeveloped, many modern materials which are much stronger and lighter weren&amp;#x27;t invented yet.&lt;p&gt;And they managed to live broadcast from the moon! Storage was in it&amp;#x27;s infancy, so even storing a video from the moon was impossible (they would need many reels of film that just wouldn&amp;#x27;t fit.&lt;p&gt;Digital cameras weren&amp;#x27;t invented, you only had analogue cameras. Most of them required film - and can&amp;#x27;t be developed on the spot, it requires special equipment. So to get video from the moon, the used cathode ray tube cameras - and even the cathode ray tubes of TV news were huge at the time, you can look at pictures, these things used to take a whole truck to carry. But they managed to get a very small cathode ray tube camera there, and to film long videos  of hours of missions on the moon.&lt;p&gt;And get managed to broadcast it all with analogue RF all the way from the moon to earth. With no digital signal processing, because that wasn&amp;#x27;t fast enough back then for any real time use. And with surprisingly low noise for an analogue transmission. They made a whole network of receivers on earth to be able to do it.&lt;p&gt;Today all of that would be cheap, but back then it must&amp;#x27;ve been quite the achievement.&lt;p&gt;They also had pretty minimal computational power available compared to newer attempts. But maybe putting a human in control is enough.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s moon challenge is pretty cool. They actually wanted to give a bonus for taking pictures of the original moon landing site. That could&amp;#x27;ve been really nice.&lt;p&gt;But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pulvinar</author><text>Folks, NASA&amp;#x27;s Surveyor program (1966-68) is a better comparison here, not Apollo. It made the first moon landing by the US (after the Russian&amp;#x27;s Luna 9, 4 months before), and the first landing of the series was successful, though some of the others failed. It was a fully automatic landing, unlike Neil Armstrong&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;It built on lessons learned from the many failures of the Ranger program before it. And the Russians lost 12 landers before their first success.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why is it so hard to pull off a lunar landing?</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01454-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>machina_ex_deus</author><text>The Apollo moon landings were such an insane achievement. They did it in a time where digital processing was in it&amp;#x27;s infancy and barely existed, minimization technology was undeveloped, many modern materials which are much stronger and lighter weren&amp;#x27;t invented yet.&lt;p&gt;And they managed to live broadcast from the moon! Storage was in it&amp;#x27;s infancy, so even storing a video from the moon was impossible (they would need many reels of film that just wouldn&amp;#x27;t fit.&lt;p&gt;Digital cameras weren&amp;#x27;t invented, you only had analogue cameras. Most of them required film - and can&amp;#x27;t be developed on the spot, it requires special equipment. So to get video from the moon, the used cathode ray tube cameras - and even the cathode ray tubes of TV news were huge at the time, you can look at pictures, these things used to take a whole truck to carry. But they managed to get a very small cathode ray tube camera there, and to film long videos  of hours of missions on the moon.&lt;p&gt;And get managed to broadcast it all with analogue RF all the way from the moon to earth. With no digital signal processing, because that wasn&amp;#x27;t fast enough back then for any real time use. And with surprisingly low noise for an analogue transmission. They made a whole network of receivers on earth to be able to do it.&lt;p&gt;Today all of that would be cheap, but back then it must&amp;#x27;ve been quite the achievement.&lt;p&gt;They also had pretty minimal computational power available compared to newer attempts. But maybe putting a human in control is enough.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s moon challenge is pretty cool. They actually wanted to give a bonus for taking pictures of the original moon landing site. That could&amp;#x27;ve been really nice.&lt;p&gt;But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bouncycastle</author><text>back on those days, the best brains of their generation were not occupied with thinking about how to make people click ads...</text></comment>