Did we really land on the Moon?

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It's not impossible.

The obstacles are primarily economic.

However it would not be an off the shelf mission. Many, if not most, of the engineers who worked on the Apollo program are gone, and while new engineers wouldn't be starting entirely from scratch, it wouldn't be like putting together furniture from Ikea either.

So half a century ago getting to the Moon was accomplished several times, practically like it was a piece of cake. Yet 50 years later getting to Mars is still only within the realm of theory and science fiction. And why has it always been limited to just our government? The government didn't design and build the iPhone etc. Can you imagine how much NASA and whoever would flip out if someone handed them something as commonplace as a smartphone in 1969? And how dramatically beyond their capabilities its technology would be? They probably wouldn't even be able to understand how it works. They would probably be studying it for years in some top secret laboratory trying to figure it out, like scientist from 1829 trying to figure out a light bulb if they were handed one.

I didn't say it's impossible. I'm saying (and being told) it isn't feasible. Not now and probably not 25 or even 50 years from now. Much less anything beyond that like traveling to Mars. It likely will only continue to happen by way of sci fi movies.

It has been, but it of course doesn't have to be. Elon Musk may get to Mars before the Chinese. He's already preparing to send a couple of people around the moon:

http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/s ... -next-year

Here's the career for you, Ezra:

http://www.spacex.com/careers

(Also: I think the chances are close to 100% that Elon Musk is an aspie.)

I don't think that an aspie would come up with something as idiotic as the Hyperloop.

Yes, exactly. Getting to the moon from low Earth orbit takes about 3 days, getting from low Earth orbit to Mars takes about 260 days. We don't know how to keep people healthy in zero-g for that long. Their bones and muscles will decay to nothing in that time, if they don't die from it and actually make it back to Earth their weakened bodies will fail under gravity. One option is a very big spacecraft with centrifugal habitats and radiation shielding, but all of that material for the craft and shielding has to be shipped up to orbit, moving stuff into space is extremely expensive. That's not even considering the weight of the food and water needed for all the crew.

The rotating centrifuge will be put under non-stop mechanical stress for the 260 days there and back, if it fails then at best the crew has no working artificial gravity, at worst one or both of the rotating habitats breaks off and flies off into the void and the remaining hab doesn't work due to the imbalanced weight even if they do retrieve the crew from the broken one. Another option is waiting for medical science to improve so we can use drugs to stop their bodies from decaying, that would be a solution to a lot of diseases that aren't currently curable.

As for the iPhone comment, phones are not rockets. Building the circuit board for a phone takes very precise machines that can lay down circuits with gaps of only a few nanometers between each other, rockets in comparison are much more simple in that none of the parts are so small you need a microscope to see them. Most of the complexity in building rockets comes from the fact that you have to be absolutely sure the very expensive spacecraft will not blow up and kill all the crew with it. Building a phone also takes a lot less money and has much greater marketability than building a rocket, so it isn't a good comparison to why private companies haven't gone to Mars yet.

Well it looks like they're at least actually building the thing.

Are you just making this stuff up as you go along?

Astronaut Peggy Whitson became the longest serving American in space on Monday, NASA reported, after she passed astronaut Jeff Williams' record of 534 days.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... speeddesk/

I was mistaken about that, I didn't realize people had been in space for so long. The longest time in space is actually 437 days by Valery Polyakov, that time is across several of Peggy's missions, not a consecutive 534 day long spaceflight. A trip to mars and back would be 520 days, 260 is just one way. Even then there is still the task of building such a large spacecraft with enough fuel to drive all the supplies and radiation shielding that far. The spacecraft would have to be sent up in several pieces and put together in orbit, much more expensive than a moon mission.

Anyways, that's only for a mission to Mars. As for moon missions you still haven't responded to rockets being easier to build in some ways than modern phones, while also being expensive enough that private companies have started only quite recently. You also haven't narrowed down on exactly which tech wasn't up to the task of going to the moon, and instead continue with the vague sense of "too primitive" I described before.

Nuclear rockets.

Are you saying a rocket was the only thing involved in all that? It's pretty obvious a rocket can launch stuff into outer space. It seems to me there was more involved in it than just a giant missile, but maybe I'm wrong about that. No computers aboard the command module or lunar module or mission control etc? What was a 1960's computer like again? Didn't it take something the size of a building to do a little bit of what my phone can do?

It's much more of an undertaking to get to Mars than the Moon. It would take about 500 days to and fro. Mars is about 120 times more distant from the Earth than the Moon is--when Mars is at its closest distance to the Earth.

The main problem: finances. Technologically, we can do it.

I am one who wishes we had a manned Mats mission.

The hoax that would have had to be put on us to fake a Moon landing would have seemed quite absurd to most people. It wouldn't have been worth the effort.

The Apollo Guidance Computer weighed 70 pounds and had performance similar to the first consumer computers from 1977, but it was also much heavier and far more expensive. The guidance system was more useful in its ability to orient the spacecraft in the right direction at the exact time needed than its ability to calculate orbital mechanics, much of those calculations were done by hand. Rather than telling the computer "get me to the moon", you'd calculate the maneuvers needed beforehand and tell it "Carry out these instructions at this time.". It's not really any more complex than the computers of the various unmanned missions around that time.

i think you mean NUKULAR

Powered like a nuclear submarine?

I don't know that much about 50 year old technology. But when I look at pictures and footage of it, it looks really primitive and hoaky to me. It makes me think of that line in Star Wars where Princess Leia says, "you came here in that thing? You're braver than I thought!"

So I'm not declaring fake or hoax. But just find myself a tad skeptical.

If this SapceX project actually pans out, it will be interesting to see how 2018 compares to 1969. And it will be interesting if they visit the Apollo 11 mission landing site. I would think that would be the biggest tourist attraction on the Moon. It would be funny if the government refused to let them.