re: Joe Rogan Podcast with Bart Sibrel - who here believes the Moon Landing was a hoax?

quote:

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The only 2 reasons legit make zero sense:

- Other countries just don't want or feel a need to go to the Moon? That's not believe, there's just zero chance that every other country in the world has no interest in doing so

- We figured out how to do this on 54 years ago technology but other countries and the additional 54 years of tech still can't figure it out. Again, just not at all believable

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You're clearly a very non-technical person, which is perfectly OK. I need a realtor, a banker, and an insurance rep too. Let me break it down for you:

1. Other countries - there is no political value in being 2nd. As the great philosopher Ricky Bobby put it, it just makes you the first loser. The USSR destroyed a good portion of their spaceport and killed an untold number of their top people trying to beat us, costing them hundreds of billions or more in today's dollars. That was a lesson learned for the rest of the planet. Also, until the rise of China, who else has had the economic HP and political will to do something like this? No one. Even if our allies in Asia and Europe wanted to, we would have not taken a pleasant stance on this until recently. China is at least a decade away, and the USSR is long bankrupt. Doesn't take a PhD in geopolitics to figure this out.

2. Tech advances - what has advanced in spacecraft propulsion since then? Exactly nothing fundamentally. We still use an exothermic chemical reaction using vast quantities of highly combustible, extremely nasty liquids and solids to propel rockets. Making parts at that scale is just not something that can be done without decades of test and development, a process that has been sped up greatly by advancing tech in CAD, CAM and CAE, and it still took Elon's boyz what, a decade or more and a bunch of blown up hardware to do it again?

Lay people don't get the scale of the Saturn until they see one in person. 6.5 MILLION pounds at liftoff, with five F-1's screaming at 1.5 MILLION pounds of thrust each. The world's most powerful jet engine, the GE9X, is over 11X less powerful @ max power than a F-1. Each pump for those F-1 engines ran at 42,500 gallons per minute. That is totally draining an average swimming pool in less than 30 seconds, and those fluids were COLD coming in and HOT going out.

Anyone who's ever manufactured anything of even moderate complexity will tell you that processes to make anything are darned hard to copy off perfectly. This is why our semiconductor tech perpetually stays a decade ahead of China, as one example of many.

A mind-boggling number proprietary methods and processes were developed for Saturn, not everything was documented - ISO 9000 didn't even exist then - and the guys who knew all the little things about the black arts of heat treat, part fits, surface microfinish, ad infintum, are long dead now. You can, for example, take a US Timken or Japanese NSK bearing, and run them to failure vs the best Chinese knockoff, and you will find that despite being identical in every measurable respect, the Chinese/Russian/Whatever bearing will last maybe 1/3rd as long. I know, i've done it. I could write all day on this topic. I've had enough of this thread for now.