40 Years Later

It was 40 years ago this month that we first sent men to the moon. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first human beings ever to set foot on the moon, and what is NASA trying to do now? Figure out the best ways to get back there. Once the Space Shuttle gets mothballed next year, NASA's next generation of spacecraft will look an awful lot like what we used in the late 60's. We are going back to huge rockets with capsules on top. My wife and I visited the Johnson Space Center (aka Mission Control) in Houston last year. It was an exciting visit, because on the tour they showed us a prototype of the next Orion capsule. The idea is to get back to the moon, and then use the moon as a staging ground to eventually send men to Mars by 2037.

The next series of rockets are the Ares series. The Ares I through V are already being designed, and Ares IV and V will dwarf even the Saturn V, which to date is the largest rocket ever used and is what was used for the Apollo moon missions. What's cool about the new missions is that the Ares I and the Ares V will be launched pretty much simultaneously. The Ares I will have the crew aboard, and the larger Ares V will have the larger equipment and vehicles that will be used on the moon (and eventually Mars.)


ABOVE: The Ares I (left) and Ares V (right) rockets and Orion capsules. This is the next generation of human space travel

I've always been amused by the conspiracy theories that insist that we never really went to the moon. You know, that the pictures were all faked on a Hollywood back lot. In an excellent article today at MSNCB.com, reporter Jay Barbree debunks the conspiracy theories and looks back on Apollo 11 generally. Setting aside the fact that thousands of NASA employees would have to remain silent and that the Russians even accepted that we were there, let's look at the conspiracy claims...

1. The famous photos of Armstrong's footprints in the moon dust are not possible, because footprints like that require moisture in the soil, and the moon has no moisture. Wrong. There may be water at the poles. But water is not why the footprints were so distinct. The soil particles on the moon still have their sharp edges, because they have not been eroded by wind. This makes them cling together as if they were moist.

2. Why are there no stars visible in the photos? First of all, if that were an issue, it would have been pretty easy to fake stars in the photos. But the reason there are no stars is due to the film and cameras used by NASA. They needed to use short exposure times to capture the detail on the surface and the white space suits. The stars were too faint to be captured with such short exposure times.

3. In the film footage when the astronauts plant the American flag, the flag appears to move as if hit by a breeze. That would be impossible on the moon. When Armstrong and Aldrin planted the flag, the ground was very hard. They basically had to jam it in there with all of their might. An object forced into motion in a vacuum will move longer than if there was an atmosphere. Therefore, the flag was moving from the when the astronauts jammed the pole into the surface, and the vacuum of space allowed it to move back and forth even longer than it would have on earth.

4. There are laser reflectors on the moon's surface that were placed by Apollo 11's (and subsequent) astronauts that are used to this day by scientists on earth in many countries for research and measurements.

It is interesting that just days ago, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter returned photos of the Apollo landing sites where the lunar landers can be seen sitting in their landing spots, frozen in time.

This is a time to reflect on our great accomplishment 40 years ago, and also to look forward to the space exploration of the future.