moon landings

[MacB]

......so the "getting to the Moon technology" was not available in 1950???

He has a point there David, little bit lax that one

 

[downfader]

The Americans basically stole their moon tech from the Germans. Now if the Germans had been otherwise inclined there could have been a moon landing in the late 1930s, but as said earlier with the Americans - the Germans also concentrated on weaponry.

 

[Davidc]

......so the "getting to the Moon technology" was not available in 1950???

The technology needed and used in the '60s to get there was just a big balistic missile, aka a big rocket, developed by the Germans in WW2 and first used in the somewhat smaller V2, some analogue computing mainly based on a type of valve called a nuvistor which had been developed in WW2 by MIT and which was used for the computing to shoot down V1 rockets in the first guided SAMs, and communications using a mix of those and microwave components developed by the universities of Manchester and Bristol (mainly) for WW2 radar.

So all of the components of the technology existed by the end of WW2. They were developed further afterwards. If that development had been directed at moon travel instead of people's usual desire to be able to kill one another as efficiently as possible the moon landings could have been achieved in the early 50s.

The technology existed, it hadn't been applied to that problem.

 

[slowmotion]

Lobbing missiles from country to country, and from continent to continent isn't quite the same as poncing about on the Moon....perhaps?

 

[Davidc]

the Clangers are real, they're running the country

That's a polite term MacB!

 

[alecstilleyedye]

i doubt jfk would have been so confident of announcing they'd do it in a decade if the tech was not in place…

 

[slowmotion]

i doubt jfk would have been so confident of announcing they'd do it in a decade if the tech was not in place…

If you are a barking conspiracy theorist, the availability of the technology is quite superfluous.

 

[MacB]

i doubt jfk would have been so confident of announcing they'd do it in a decade if the tech was not in place…

a decade lead time was what was needed to set up an elaborate hoax. This wasn't something they tried, failed and then covered their backs. It was a plot from the very first

 

[Davidc]

Lobbing missiles from country to country, and from continent to continent isn't quite the same as poncing about on the Moon....perhaps?

If you look at the maths there isn't a lot of difference. Simply needs to achieve escape evlocity and be on the right trajectory.

I was doing A level maths at the time, and like every other 17/ 18 year old in the world doing maths in 1969 we had to do all of those calculations for homework! I remember I got the figure for a Florida to Moscow missile wrong but got Vladivostok to London right ....

One of our group's parents wrote to the school complaining about how inappropriate and militaristic it was.

 

[MacB]

If you look at the maths there isn't a lot of difference. Simply needs to achieve escape evlocity and be on the right trajectory.

I was doing A level maths at the time, and like every other 17/ 18 year old in the world doing maths in 1969 we had to do all of those calculations for homework! I remember I got the figure for a Florida to Moscow missile wrong but got Vladivostok to London right ....

One of our group's parents wrote to the school complaining about how inappropriate and militaristic it was.

So the global economic meltdown is the fault of your generation, if they'd stuck to simple arithmetic we'd all be fine. But no, they had to teach you maths to blow things up.

 

[slowmotion]

I was doing A level maths at the time, and like every other 17/ 18 year old in the world doing maths in 1969 we had to do all of those calculations for homework! I remember I got the figure for a Florida to Moscow missile wrong but got Vladivostok to London right ....

.

So was I. My maths was so bad that a missile sent towards Moscow would probably have landed on the Moon anyway.

 

[Aperitif]

<MacB stands back - ready to launch his next missile into the atmosphere...>

Some interesting posts Davidc - I still like 'The Shining' story though.

 

[Davidc]

So the global economic meltdown is the fault of your generation, if they'd stuck to simple arithmetic we'd all be fine. But no, they had to teach you maths to blow things up.

Probably true. Those in their 40s now can take over in a few years and see if they can really bu**er everything up .

 

[Browser]

The real conspiracy is pretending that it isn't made of green cheese, there aren't clangers living on it, and that the man in the moon doesn't exist.

DON'T YOU DARE TRY TO PRETEND THE CLANGERS DON'T EXIST!!!!!!!!

They were there when the Yanks landed, they just hid, that's all!!!!

 

[Davidc]

DON'T YOU DARE TRY TO PRETEND THE CLANGERS DON'T EXIST!!!!!!!!

They were there when the Yanks landed, they just hid, that's all!!!!

Yes, and all these bits of hardware being crashed into the moon recently must frighten them to death!

Should we start a clangers rights movement?