Anniversary of ‘Apollo 11′: What has changed in space exploration since the arrival on the Moon? – THE COUNTRY

One of the questions that appears most frequently in denialist forums is: Why in more than half a century, after the alleged landing of Armstrong and Aldrin, has that feat not been repeated? The question ignores the fact that it has that turned Five more times (and once, the 13th, which failed). Next December will be half a century since the last expedition. Since then, it is true that no one else has set foot on the Moon, but the advances in space exploration have been so many and so spectacular that they tend to distort the perspective of what the technology of the time was like. In July 1969, the only celestial body whose surface had been mapped in detail was the Moon. Of Mars there were only about twenty very low-resolution black-and-white photographs, transmitted by an automatic probe four years ago. In fact, a few days after the first moon landing, two other flyby vehicles arrived on the red planet, which sent back a few dozen better quality photos, but also did not show any of the spectacular accidents, such as volcanoes, ravines or dry rivers, that today they are familiar to us. Nothing was known about the geography of Venus, Mercury, much less the outer planets. Of Jupiter, for example, a dozen satellites were known, simple bright points in the great telescopes; today there are more than eighty, most of them widely explored. As we also have planispheres of all the planets, some comets and numerous asteroids. Astronomy at that time was beginning to undergo a revolution. Only five years ago the first and most distant quasar had been identified, but its nature remained a mystery. A sounding rocket on a routine flight had also detected X-ray emissions in the Cygnus constellation that suggested the presence of an impossible object that was half-jokingly dubbed a “black hole.” Even more recent was another oddity. from the cosmic zoo: the remains of a star that rotated once a second, emitting jets of radiation like the beams of a lighthouse. It would be called “pulsar” and a few years later it would earn the Nobel Prize not for its discoverer, Jocelyn Bell, but for her thesis supervisor. Nobody suspected the inflationary expansion of the universe, nor the existence of dark matter or energy. . The largest telescope was the venerable Hale on Mount Palomar, which had caused a sensation by distributing the first photos of galaxies and nebulae…in color! The images routinely sent today by telescopes such as Hubble or the recently launched James Webb would have seemed like science fiction to astronomers who followed the first flight to the Moon. One of the images taken by James Webb and presented by NASA on 12 July. It shows the edge of a nearby, young star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI (AP) Armstrong’s first walk on the Moon was broadcast live to the entire world thanks to the fact that the first geostationary communications satellites already existed. There were also weather satellites, but only local coverage; Meteosat would not fly until eight years later. The few navigation aid satellites, reserved for military use. Free GPS was still very much in the future. Many of the structures that were built then to support the lunar program were obsolete. Houston’s iconic control room languished for years; today, restored down to the last detail, it is a museum piece for tourists to enjoy; as are the only three remaining examples of the Saturn 5, which were semi-abandoned in the open air for decades. It took a colossal effort to recover them and clean them of accumulated rust. The Saturn V was used for the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s and also served to launch the Skylab space station. NASAIn contrast, other facilities continue to serve. The deep space antenna array, for example, tracks nearly all of NASA’s and various agency space probes at almost inconceivable distances. The record is held by Voyager 2, which, after visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, is now almost 20 billion kilometers away (about 36 light hours). The Kennedy Center’s Launch Control and Assembly Building is still in use after having served for over a hundred space shuttle launches. Of the two platforms built for Saturn 5, one, the historic 39th from which Apollo 11 took off, is leased to Space X; Elon Musk’s Falcon rockets take off there. The other is still reserved for NASA for its new moon rocket, the SLS, which may fly next August. If it went to the Moon fifty-odd years ago, couldn’t Saturn 5, the only rocket that never suffered a crash, be resurrected now? serious bug? Probably not. Not because his blueprints have disappeared (NASA still has them on file), but because technology has changed. The tools that were used to build it, the individual components, the manufacturers of certain critical parts, and the specialized workforce that, for example, handcrafted the five giant engines of the first stage, welding one by one, no longer exist. the hundreds of tubes that made up each nozzle. Today their successors are printed in 3D. Nor would it make sense today to revive the capsules that took astronauts to the Moon. Technology has progressed spectacularly, especially with regard to materials science and, above all, to calculation equipment. In that sense, it is significant that the great computers in Houston that calculated the trajectories could be compared to a modest laptop today. And the one with the lunar module on board did not have much more capacity than a wrist calculator. It is true that manned flights have been restricted to low orbit. In abandoning its lunar program, the Soviet Union concentrated its efforts on orbiting laboratories with enormous success. His Salyut and Mir paved the way for what is now the International Space Station. On the other hand, access to space has become widespread. In 1969, only half a dozen countries had built their own satellite and only three (the USSR, the United States and France) had the real capacity to launch it. China, now a superpower in this field, would not put its into orbit until 1970. Instead, there are now more than seventy national agencies from Sweden to Turkmenistan, in addition to numerous private organizations dedicated to space exploration. Both India and Israel have sent landing probes to the Moon (unsuccessfully, all told); China and the Emirates, to Mars; Japan has obtained samples from a couple of asteroids; the European Union has sent ships to explore a comet and also to the frigid plains of Titan. And launches are no longer a monopoly of the great powers: a few days ago, NASA itself turned to a New Zealand company to launch a small device to the Moon that would allow it to test the orbit where the future Gateway station will one day turn, an intermediate stop in the future manned trips to our satellite. You can follow MATERIA on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.