Seems about comparable to going from Kitty Hawk to the Concorde that fast.
If there really are thousands or millions of other advanced civilizations out there across the universe, I really have to wonder if any of them made this leap so fast.
And the group who did the first was not in anyway involved with the second. FWIW Kitty Hawk to Concord was about 70 years.
It also makes me laugh when people talk about the Chinese programme being the future. In 12 years of manned spaceflight, they have sent five missions to space. In that same time, the US went from Shepard sub orbital to Shepard on the moon and three Skylab missions, the USSR went from Gagarin single orbit to the long duration Salyut missions.
It blows my mind that since December 1972, no man* has travelled outsider Low Earth Orbit.
*No women has ever left LEO anyway. All 24 were men.
Actually, three of those men went to the Moon twice. James Lovell orbited the Moon on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 (which was intended to land, but was forced to orbit and return home because of an explosion which blew out the side of the service module). John W. Young orbited the Moon on Apollo 10 and walked on the Moon with Apollo 16. And Eugene Cernan orbited the Moon on Apollo 10 and walked on it when he returned on Apollo 17.
I always thought it was crazy that the space between the discovery of the Neutron to a working A-bomb was only thirteen years. At least in the case of the moon-flight, the basic theory was well understood prior to Sputnik. At the beginning of 1932, we didn’t even have knowledge of the basic constituents of the atom.
Of course, in both cases, the fact that both were closely related to obvious military applications probably account for the speed at which they were developed.
Apollo 13 ended up as a flyby, they never orbited the moon. Young and Cernan orbited three times, once before and once after landing on their landing missions and Cernan actually performed a deorbit burn on Apollo 10.
Chalk it up, largely, to frenzied competition. Competition often draws out the best results.
Actually, you’re right about Apollo 13. However I referred to three men visiting the Moon twice. I wouldn’t count how many times Cernan and Young orbited on their landing missions as separate trips to the Moon. Each of the three men left the Earth for the Moon on two separate occasions and returned. My main point is even though it is said 24 men left low-Earth orbit, the actual number is 21 because of the multiple missions flown by Lovell, Young, and Cernan. It’s a bit like counting Grover Cleveland as President twice. He was elected twice to non-consecutive terms, but in actuality he was just one person.
Really shows what people can accomplish when you give them a deadline.
Well, not to take away from their accomplishments but there standards for “safety” back in those days would not fly today. (Pun not intended.)
In order the men who went to the moon with asterisk on multiples
Borman, Lovell*, Anders, Stafford, Young*,Cernan*, Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin, Conrad, Gordon, Bean, Swigert, Haise, Shepard, Roosa, Mitchell, Scott, Worden, Irwin, Mattingly, Duke, Evans and Schmitt.
Thats 24. 9 lunar missions with 3 crew= 27 lunar flights, with 24 distinct persons, two of whom went twice.
Fun fact. Anders, Shepard, Roosa, Mitchell, Worden, Irwin, Duke, Evans and Schmitt orbited the moon more times than they orbited the earth, as for all of them, their lunar flight was also their only one.( Shepard’s other flight was sub orbital). Armstrong might qualify as well, since he had 7 earth orbits (6 on the truncated Gemini VIII, 1 on Apollo 11) and APollo 11 orbited the moon thirty times, but he was obviously not on board for some of them. Could some one find out.
You’re right. I miscounted the number of missions. Mea culpa.
oops
I think it’s more like going from the Wright Brothers to supersonic flight - which took about 40 years.
Concorde was a commercial operation - we are still nowhere near commercial space travel.
To be honest, the major breakthroughs during the space race were in automated and/or remote control (particularly early computers). The basic concept of rockets were operating in the 1940s - Sputnik was just a more powerful rocket, with the ability to be placed into a controlled orbit and release a satellite.
You’re right: that’s pretty amazing as well (and then the H-bomb was not long after). And a very similar period of time. Twelve or thirteen years is hardly anything. I mean, a dozen years ago we were already in the 21st century, in the “post-9/11 era”, etc. I suppose we didn’t have iPhones, Facebook, or YouTube, but cell phones were already old hat, as was the Internet. Yet the common trope is that the speed of technological change is accelerating.
The speed of technological development through the 20th Century is ridiculous.
In addition to landing men on the Moon, the human race also went from putting things in orbit around our own homeworld to launching probes into interplanetary space with fairly ridiculous speed.
In fact, it was only about 15 years between the time the human race first put something into orbit around our own planet, and the human race launching its first object into interstellar space.
Those who long for further manned space exploration had better pray that China (or maybe Russia, again) get a lot more more hostile and threatening to American interests, and instigate another Cold War.
I see it more of a combination space race and race to monopolize various mining/resource rights. There’s a crap ton of resources out there and governments are starting to notice and think about it a bit more seriously.
It’s astonishing to me to think there people who were children when the Wright Bros made their flight who lived to see the moon landing.
It’s incredible all that happened in a human lifetime.
The fact that only 66 years passed between the first flight and leaving the earth’s atmosphere is a pretty big accomplishment when you think about it.
Humanity went from planes that only flew for less than a minute to planes that could fly for a thousand of miles in a few decades (there were ww2 planes that had a range of 1000 miles), then ships that could leave the earth in a few more decades.