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Comment by wheelerof4te | Hacker News Reader

"Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship."

I'm all for it, and root for SpaceX and Musk to make it happen.

What I'm saying all this time on this thread is following:

"Man never went to the Moon before. Artemis will hopefully be the first. If man has been to the Moon multiple times using the same aging technology over 50 years ago, then it shouldn't be an issue to go there now. In fact, it should be much easier and cheaper, as the computers are 1000x more powerful nowadays, and we still have fuel/energy sources that were used then."

Thank you for the discussion.

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Astronomers today measure the distance between Earth and the Moon by shining a laser beam towards it and measuring the time it takes to come back.

Now, guess why the beam actually comes back instead of getting absorbed by the lunar surface? Because Apollo 11 left a mirror there half a century ago, it still works

There are people alive, today, that can prove to you that we went to the moon just by shooting a laser beam in the sky, so yes, we did go to the moon.

I used to think that if it were only slightly off, the return beam might end up intersecting the Earth at somewhere inconvenient, or even missing it entirely. Even more impressively, it took only five minutes to deploy, which is faster than most bathroom mirrors are installed :)

The reason why this isn't a problem is that the device wasn't 'just' a mirror, but rather a retroreflector. This reflects any light back at its source, regardless of which direction the light came from.

If you were really lost in deep space, perhaps you could flash a very bright light (not a laser) momentarily, then look for the return flash from the retroreflector moments later - or at least, hopefully that soon, otherwise you are very far away indeed! A few strategically-placed retroreflectors around the solar system could make an effective triangulation-based location tracker. I wonder if this already exists in some form.

Resorting to a conspiracy to explain facts you miss the opportunity to construct more precise mental model of engineering. And of economy of these big achievements.

It works this way with any conspiracy. It is you mental model, it is your decision, but it is little sad to watch people choosing ignorance over knowledge.

Again, you've glossed over the fact that if the US had never gone to the Moon, the Soviets would've been making it very clear. They obviously had good reason to closely monitor the landings so they could catch the US in any lies and embarrass them. The landings being faked requires a conspiracy to have lasted all this time, without ever being written down, between countries that were one serious misunderstanding away from ending human civilization.

As for cost and 'easier', the Artemis lander programs are cheaper than what Apollo cost, and they have far higher requirements than just being the bare minimum to keep 3 carefully selected specimens of humanity alive for a few days. Hell, Starship is supposed to have an entire infirmary. That is to say that it would indeed be a lot easier if we were just aiming to land a few people in a can for a few days and were completely willing to risk their potential inability to return. We've made the requirements much harder, so the project is appropriately harder.

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