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Why is it so hard for us to go to the moon when we were there 60 years ago?

2022-10-06 23:24:26Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Why is it so hard for us to go to the moon when we were there 60 years ago?
Why is it so hard for us to go to the moon when we were there 60 years ago?

The first two attempts to launch the spaceship "Artemis" failed. And after the latest glitch, a large loss of liquid hydrogen from the supply line in the center of the rocket, the wait for the launch of this mission could become even longer.

For many people, a question seems inevitable: Why are there so many problems today, if we once went to the moon, with more primitive technology, and with a mission set up in just 9 years? The truth? Even then there were problems, because sending a spacecraft to the moon is much more difficult than we can imagine.

But in that case, failure (or even just delay) was not an option. To understand the climate in which the first American mission to travel to the moon was organized, we must remember the historical period from which it arose.

It was 1961, the middle of the Cold War, when the space race had assumed symbolic strategic importance. President John F. Kennedy appeared before Congress to announce that the US would send men to the moon by the end of that decade.

The Soviets had won the race in the first 2 phases of the human space adventure. They managed to launch the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into Earth's orbit in 1957. In April of that year, they also sent the first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin.

The United States therefore needed great success to be able to reassert its technological and military supremacy in the eyes of the world, both to its Soviet rivals and to the American people. Therefore, the goal announced by the American president was unprecedented: to send a man to the moon with a newly created space agency, and before the technologies to send astronauts into space were ready.

To succeed, NASA was given a fund of 100 billion dollars at today's exchange rate. He started the simultaneous implementation of 2 programs. The Gemini Mission, which would develop the capability for spaceflight, and the Apollo Mission, which would aim to send Americans to the Moon. Both would be successful, but not without potential problems or accidents.

Thanks to huge investments, NASA managed to build the Apollo lunar module within 6 years, i.e. in 1967. Meanwhile, the most powerful rocket ever built, the Saturn V, was ready to be tested. But the optimism of the Americans quickly faded after an incident that occurred during the test of the module in the orbit of the Earth in February 1967.

A month before launch, astronauts Virgil Grisom, Edward White and Roger Shafi entered the cabin to check the launch procedures. As soon as they closed the door, one of them gave the alarm "We have a fire in the cabin!" The fire was started by a spark from a faulty cable.

Fueled by the oxygen present in the cabin, it left no escape route for the 3 astronauts, who were trapped inside the cabin by a door that was not designed to open quickly in the event of an accident. But that tragic accident of "Apollo 1" did not stop the American space program.

The module was redesigned first to provide more safety for the astronauts. Subsequent tests also suffered major delays. But they aimed to avoid serious incidents.

In fact, the first test of the Saturn V, or the Apollo 4 mission, was a success.

The unmanned launch took place in November 1967, nearly 1 year after the originally scheduled date, and only after NASA engineers managed to solve over 1,400 different technical problems that arose during an agency-ordered inspection after the Apollo 1 Mission accident .

Despite the problems, within 6 years NASA managed to design and build from scratch the Saturn V rocket, the most powerful spacecraft ever developed before the new Space Travel System, to be tested on the Artemis 1 mission, and for which it took 10 years of work.

A historic achievement, which occurred at a time when space exploration was still a very pioneering activity, and when the lives of astronauts (and others) constantly hung in the balance. Do not forget the number of accidents that occurred during the historic flight of Apollo 11.

Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon with a constantly flashing error signal (signaling a computer system overload) that threatened to reformat the computer on board the lunar module. Also, the landing took place in a different area than the one foreseen in the exercise, as the fuel supplies were running dangerously low.

An adventure that today would no longer be imaginable. Therefore the release of Artemis 1 seems to be taking much longer than it should. This mission will test the Saturn V's successor, the Space Launch System, with a 15 percent greater thrust capacity, and which is designed to be used on future missions to the red planet, Mars.

Wired/ Bota.al


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