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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

It is reported that a slide rule was on board for Apollo, which would make perfect sense.

I found this tremendously exciting video on the topic:


I am probably one of the last generations to have a slide rule at school, and one of the first to discover the joy of 80085 on a red display.

The whole "but your phone can do xyz..." is just another argument from incredulity. Apollo's computers didn't need to watch videos of cats or show you how to fry an egg in new and exciting ways.
 
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I've mentioned before that I'm sure the slide rule scene in Apollo 13 got edited down in later versions I've seen on TV compared to the original cinema release we saw. It certainly got a big laugh in the movie theatre we were in.

On log tables, my memory is of Smith charts which they used to try to introduce we students to antennas and wave guides. My takeaway was 'nope'. That was probably just before computers wiped all that paper away, like office software wiped away paper spreadsheets.
 
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Axxman300 said:
My favorite part of Apollo 13 is when the Mission Control guys bust out their sliderules, pencils, and paper to confirm a calculation. I don't know if they even still teach how to use a sliderule any longer. People forget what was common practice before easy access to computers, and it make me sad. Vixen is advancing a version claiming our lack of 21st century computing technology is proof the lunar landings were not possible. It's the same thing as claiming the Egyptians couldn't have built the pyramids because they lacked heavy euipment.

That;s why I don't mind posting in this thread. People need to be reminded how smart people once conducted affairs with hopes these practices aren't lost to time.
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I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but that scene is actually a goof (or artistic license, to be charitable). When the Lunar Module was powered up, the gimbal angles from the Command Module's computer had to be entered into the LM's computer. However, because the LM and the CM were facing in opposite directions, the gimbal angles had to be converted by adding or subtracting 180 degrees. In Lost Moon, Lovell wrote that he was feeling a little loopy when this had to be done, and started second-guessing his calculations, so he asked for "a double check of the arithmetic," as the line from the movie puts it. Slide rules cannot be used to do addition and subtraction (at least not normal addition and subtraction; when multiplying or dividing, they are actually adding and subtracting logarithms).
 
Mojo said:
I was in the last year at my school to be taught how to use a slide rule. Mid-1970s.
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I started high school in 1980, which was the same year my grandfather, an engineer, died. One of my most prized possessions is his slide rule. Even though it was mostly no longer being taught, I learned on my own, with a book from the school library which hadn't been checked out in about 10 years. My chemistry teacher still taught it in second-year chemistry, but more as a mental exercise than to use for calculations. He even had a slide rule contest, which I unfortunately missed due to having been hospitalized.
 
Foster Zygote said:
I remember a Clarke short story, written around the same period, that describes an enormous interplanetary warship, with the bulk of its mass consisting of the guidance computer.
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There was one in which two sides of a interstellar war were at a very slow attrition war, both sides had massive computers that computed everything and the people were reduced to bystanders following order that would see themselves killed and the slow loss of the war as inevitable. Until one day a human cracked under pressure and started randomly firing the weapons and moving the ship. It broke the stalemate as the other side's computer could no longer predict what the next "perfect" move was and became paralysed as the humans were no longer making the "best" moves. There was a monkey-wrench involved - it was to switch off the crazy human when required.
 
Darat said:
There was one in which two sides of a interstellar war were at a very slow attrition war, both sides had massive computers that computed everything and the people were reduced to bystanders following order that would see themselves killed and the slow loss of the war as inevitable. Until one day a human cracked under pressure and started randomly firing the weapons and moving the ship. It broke the stalemate as the other side's computer could no longer predict what the next "perfect" move was and became paralysed as the humans were no longer making the "best" moves. There was a monkey-wrench involved - it was to switch off the crazy human when required.
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<Makes note to go find that book on probability and game theory I never finished>

That plot suggests each computer would choose its perfect next move and then, entirely predictably, make it. But I think it's long been realised that a better strategy involves choosing your next move at random (having assigned a percentage weighting to each possible choice). Even if there's an obvious next move, it's greatly weakened by your opponents' computer knowing that's what your computer will do, so you need them to believe you have some percentage chance of acting quite differently, and they need to prepare against that too. The thing you need your computer to be brilliant at is assigning percentages to your choices. A human deviating from that optimum strategy ought to make the outcomes worse in the long run rather than better.
 
Darat said:
There was one in which two sides of a interstellar war were at a very slow attrition war, both sides had massive computers that computed everything and the people were reduced to bystanders following order that would see themselves killed and the slow loss of the war as inevitable. Until one day a human cracked under pressure and started randomly firing the weapons and moving the ship. It broke the stalemate as the other side's computer could no longer predict what the next "perfect" move was and became paralysed as the humans were no longer making the "best" moves. There was a monkey-wrench involved - it was to switch off the crazy human when required.
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Dr Who, Destiny of the Daleks.
The Movellans and the Daleks are locked in a stalemate war.
Both are looking for Davros in the ruins on Skaro.
The Daleks want him to help give them an advantage in the war, the Movellans to stop them finding him
The Movellans end up capturing Davros.
Anyway, both he and the Doctor have realised that the answer to the stalemate is to turn off the computers.
 
theprestige said:
Neil Armstrong was an elite test pilot. His vocation was making fine adjustments to thrust and attitude, under severe time constraints, in life or death situations. He was one of a select few men who could be relied upon to handle exactly this kind of situation. And NASA selected exactly those men.

What would be implausible is Armstrong not acting like an elite test pilot, while landing a test spacecraft on the moon.
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Yes, we get that Armstrong was legendary and an amazing test pilot. But is landing a lunar module onto the moon's surface really just like landing a plane..?
 
W.D.Clinger said:
(Ninja'd by @turingtest and @P.J. Denyer, but I'm adding a useful link.)

With my highlighting:

The Dark Side of the Moon was an important album, to be sure, but @Vixen is one of the few (the proud, the marinated) who have mistaken it for scientific research.

Having read everything @Vixen has written within this thread, I suspect she thinks the reason we can't see the far side of the moon is that the sun never shines upon it.

The parts of the moon that get the least sunlight are the poles. The sun does shine at the lunar poles, but how much sunlight they get is seasonal, as is true also of the earth's poles. NASA has released a visualization showing how that seasonal sunlight varied (and will vary) at the lunar south pole from 2025 to 2028.
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We were talking about mining the craters on the Moon believed to be full of ice - or rather elements that make up water - where the sun has not shone for billions of years.
 
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Vixen said:
Yes, we get that Armstrong was legendary and an amazing test pilot. But is landing a lunar module onto the moon's surface really just like landing a plane..?
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The LM was designed and built by Grumman who are famous for designing and building aircraft.
All the plans and specifications are available, csn you show us any reason it wouldn't work as seen?

Also aircraft can land vertically, they have been able to do it since the 1960s.

1784202718424.jpeg


Also, Grumman built a training rig.
The Lunar Lander Research Vehicle.

1784203122361.jpeg
 
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