Man on the moon?

Factual Questions
1

When the “Was There Really a Man on The Moon” Fact or Fiction show was on I thought that one of the doubters big points was that if it was so easy why didn’t we ever go back? So a guy in my office is talking about how many times we’ve put a man to walk on the moon and I said once. Now $10 is on the line and I have the feeling I’m about to feel very stupid. On the susequent Apollo missions did men walk on the moon? Did they just mean that it was puzzling that after the Apollo missions we never went back?

Help?

2

You must be very young. VERY young. Prepare to feel stupid! Visit NASA’s History of the Apollo Program. About a dozen astronauts walked on the surface of the moon over the few years of the Apollo program. The program was discontinued primarily due to flagging public interest.

3

Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 each put two astronauts on the moon, for a total of twelve astronauts. In every case the astronauts got out and walked around, and in some cases rode around in neat little dune buggies. The reason we haven’t gone back since Apollo 17 is that we have limited money and a short attention span.

4

As woeful as my ignorance may seem (ok be), I am at least on some kind of quest to rectify the situation. I am 28, not VERY young, unfortunately and fairly humiliated by this but thankful for the info - and $10 poorer.

Thanks for your help!

5

Pay up.

The final interpretation is correct, they’re asking why we ended Apollo and never followed up. Apollo itself had 6 missions that landed and men walked on the surface.

As for the question of why we never returned, you have to understand that Apollo was really and primarily and fundamentally a political mission. The sole purpose of going to the moon was a mission to beat the Soviets. They were beating us on all the space milestones, and it was a showdown over who had the better technological base (i.e. who could nuke you to kingdom come more accurately) and who had the better political/economic/social system (democracy/capitalism vs communism). Once we won the race (Apollo 11), and it appeared the Soviets were uninterested in followup (their program was in dire straights from a major disaster), the political will of our government was gone.

Now consider that Apollo was kicked off by Kennedy and not fulfilled till about 9 years later under Nixon. In that time we had Viet Nam flare up and begin to garner massive public scrutiny. Then there was the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death. And the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The public was suddenly scrutinizing the government on a lot of issues, and the refrain “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t…” became popular, though most people failed to realize reaching the moon was a technological challenge, not a social problem.

As for the science on Apollo, there was some, but it was basically a tag-along. “Hey, we’re going to the moon, let’s at least collect some rocks or something, and see if there’s something we can learn while we’re there.” Lot’s of stuff was investigated and lots of knowledge gained, but the science alone wouldn’t have gotten us to the moon by '70.

I know that’s a diversion from your primary question, but the whole Man On The Moon question has been a hot button topic for a while, so I wanted to address that point.

Other interesting resources

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal: nice transcripts of the moonwalks, and all the lunar surface pictures online. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on Apollo: http://www.nasm.edu/apollo/apollo.htm

The Apollo Saturn website: tons of technical info on the Apollo equipment. http://www.apollosaturn.com/index.html

The Bad Astronomy review of the Fox program in question: it shows just how horrendously inaccurate that program was. A must read for anyone giving that program any credibility. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

6

An even dozen have walked on the moon.

You’re 28? Can I ask where you live and where you went to school? Just curious.

7

Well, hey, now, I’m forty-something and had a year of college and everything, and I didn’t know how many men had walked on the moon.

Knew it was probably more than one, because they were walking around taking pictures of each other, but that’s about it.

Not all of us have minds like steel traps, ya know. Many of us make do with rusty colanders. :smiley:

8

While there may have been relatively little hard science in the moon trips, per se, there has been an enormous amount of knowledge derived from the space program. I’m sure one of the dopers out there can point us all to some websites that can list and detail some of the advances we take for granted here in the 21st century, but that wouldn’t have come along for a long long time, if ever, without the push to get to the moon and all the related research that came with it.

9

Actually, it was only 2. The footage they shot up there was used to make the other 5 missions that they faked look real.

(The Apollo 13 mission was just used to get everyone’s attention again.)

The money that was supposed to be for the six subsequent missions was embezzled by people at the highest level at NASA.

10

Tried to email this to you directly - your set up won’t allow that. Are you conducting a survey of geographic and University links to ignorance about our space program? Im happy to tell you, but I’d like to know why you ask.I went to Boston University and live in Austin, Texas. I was born one year after the cessation of the Apollo program so perhaps that grants me some type of amnesty from these blanket accusations of inferiority.

11

While willing to grant some slack to ahidell for failing to know that we put 12 men on the moon, or for failing to know about the cute dune buggy (tested in part where I grew up while I was still a child living there), I must point out to ahidell that there are better ways to learn the answers to simple questions like this without showing one’s potential ignorance. A quick perusal of any of the many on line encyclopedia services would have resulted in an answer, not to mention a persual of NASA’s official site.