• It is impossible to fake something has thousands of people that are “in on it” and even today thousands of scientists (and maybe everybody with a slightly better telescope/laser? Unsure) would somehow need to be part of it because you can just use a telescope to see the stuff that was left behind and the laser reflectors are being used today. There’s absolutely no chance it’s not real.

  • How can a rocket and thrusters work in space when there is no atmosphere to push against? The space ship/rocket would stay still and all the thrust matter would just be ejected. - For example, If the rocket wants to turn left, it is always shown as firing a thruster from the right side that turns the rocket/ship to the left. But in a vacuum all that would happen is the matter that came out of the thruster would be sucked into the vacuum and spread out evenly. The ship would not move. 🤔 Nothing to push against.

    Edit: I see now (from the more helpful replies) That it is not the rocket pushing back, but rather the combusting expanding fuel that is pushing the rocket forward. Which makes sense to me now.

    Google says thrusters are similar, in that it is expanding steam etc.

    • Equal and opposite reaction.

      There’s a law for this. The matter is “pushing” against the ship, it doesn’t have to push against anything else.

      In fact having an atmosphere to push against actually reduces the effectiveness of thrust due to atmospheric pressure, which must be overcome. Which is why different engines are designed to run in atmosphere versus out of atmosphere.

      If you throw a baseball in space you have transferred momentum to that baseball, pushing you back. You will move in the opposite direction (likely spin because you just imparted angular momentum onto yourself since you didn’t throw from center of mass)

    • A rocket does not work because there is “something to push against”. Your initial assumption is flawed, so it’s normal and expected that you cannot reason about this right now. A rocket works because there are gases that are ignited, looking to expand. This expanding force is applied to the nozzle, hence to the entire body of the rocket, and pushes it in the opposite direction : up

      Imagine yourself floating in space with a heavy object held in your hands. Say an anvil. You push the anvil away. This gesture is going to push you back by some amount as well, since the anvil is so heavy. Well the rocket is you, and the burning fuel is the anvil. A rocket is just an object continually jettisoning weight behind it so it can move forward

    • A lot of people are offering explanations, but I think I’m going to give one too.

      Think of recoil in a gun. If you don’t have a mental image of it, watch a few youtube videos of people firing handguns. Look for videos of big, high-recoil handguns, like the Desert Eagle or the Magnum (or the Super Ruger Redhawk according to chat-GPT).

      You need to get a good look at handguns pushed backwards as they are fired.

      Now think about this: those bullets aren’t pushing against an atmosphere. They are pushing only against the inside of a gun.

      But when this tiny, tiny bullet pushes super-fast against the gun, using the gun to accelerate to incredibly high speeds very quickly… it pushes the gun really hard in the other direction.

      Get that mental image into your head. Small object can push large object with a lot of force by kicking off of large object with insane speed.

      Now: Take away the person holding the gun. Take away the planet. Take away the atmosphere. Put that gun in space and pull the trigger again. (Just make sure to use a gun that has modern ammunition that doesn’t require oxygen to fire).

      What happens to all that recoil? What does the recoil do to the gun now? The bullet still goes flying out of the chamber. Still does this by pushing against the gun.

      Hopefully it should now be easy to imagine that the gun will start moving.

      Rocket fuel is basically a tank full of bullets.

      The main function of rocket fuel is “heavy stuff that is shoved out of the spaceship to make it move.”

      The reason we use highly explosive fuel is because “shoving heavy stuff away from you at the speed of a bullet” is going to move you more than “shoving heavy stuff away from you at normal speed.”

      Does this make any sense?

  • Apparently they say they did it with a super computer in 1969 that had less processing power than a watch today. Those old computers that used spools of tape. And now in 2024 we don’t have the technology to get “back” to the moon. Work that one out.

    •  lud   ( @lud@lemm.ee ) 
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      81 month ago

      We can’t go back today because we don’t have a fucking rocket.

      If we had the rocket of course we could go back but we don’t. Rebuilding the original rocket is very hard or impossible due to how it was contracted and the fact that many of the suppliers don’t exist any more and much of the knowledge is lost.

      Of course the actual technology we have is sufficient. Rockets are extremely simple when it comes to computers. Most calculations needed for actual burns could be done on paper or a video game nowadays.

      We could of course build a new rocket but that is really expensive and the budgets for these things are far lower nowadays compared to the cold war. Still we are actually planning on going there soon-ish.

    • Well the “super computer” argument is just not good because this wasnt an all purpose computer. This was specially build for this task. There are tons of special purpose chips today that wont be able to do general purpuse computing but crush a beefy pc in special tasks. Video encoding for example or tons of other tasks.