Originally posted by orangetom1999
One more thing of importance here..it is OUR OWN government who has played us for a sucker here..not the Russians...or the Russian government.

The early space program required a very very fine precise working instrument called an accelerometer to accurately measure the velocity of a spacecraft in order to successfully control rocket burn.

To little control and one would not control rocket burn enough to prevent slamming onto the surface of the moon. To much control and the rocket motors would burn to long negating the ability to soft land until one ran out of fuel and crashed. This is the crux of the Russian design problem and why they could not successfully achieve a moon landing. They tried many times and kept slamming their unmanned spacecraft onto the surface of the moon because they could not get a successful working accelerometer to control rocket burn for a soft landing.

My understanding of the early accelerometers is that the initial batch of these precision measuring instruments were built by hand. In those days there were only about five machinists who could continually do precision work down into tolerances beyond 100,000 ths of an inch...by hand. All of them lived in the USA and all of them around Detroit Michigan.

Interestingly enough even our own WHORISH LYING government is loath to give us this information's and or tell us the truth about this question. Notice that this is a question avoided by NASA and all the supposed "EXPERTS."

Now if the Russians today have a working precision Accelerometer...I know from whence it came..not from Russia.

Hmmm...Are you aware that the initial moon landing was performed by Neil Armstrong under manual control? The automatic landing control was bypassed when it was observed that the lander was heading for a bolder strewn location. Seems that the need for a super precision accelerometer is a bit overstated.

willyclem

I know what you mean. The Russians won every other race in space, first dog, first man, first woman, first satellite, first space station and the Yanks have followed. The one thing the Yanks won, the race to the moon, was not copied by the russians which is a bit out of sync

Originally posted by orangetom1999

Still, a precision accelerometer is needed to get accurate velocity measurements...in X, Y , and Z axis of motion.

This is especially necessary for unmanned missions which would preceed the manned missions.

Uh, no. Only if you're flying blind -- 'open loop'. or 'dead reckoning' -- is the precision of the accelerometers paramount. With closed-loop control -- say, a good radar tracking the approaching surface, or target satellite -- you can calculate acceleration and -- more important -- required course corrections -- perfectly well without any accelerometer at all. What you do need is a 'good enough' IMU for attitude drift detection -- but even spring-loaded units are plenty good enough.

Seems to me you are imagining requirements for an operation you actually have personally never been involved in. Be cautious -- you don't understand it as well as you think you do.

The controlling factor on precision of a rocket thrust is not the accelerometer sensitivity, but the plumbing that opens and closes the propellant valves to start and stop the burn. There's always some 'slop' in that process so the attainable accuracy of a burn is far from perfect, and flight procedures are designed to detect 'residuals' from a planned burn and null them out.

Originally posted by orangetom1999
Seems like this could all be combined into an accurate, reliable IMU to save vital space in the lander.

Dang! Why didn't those NASA morons think of that??

Seriously, you want multiply redundent capabilities, preferably from different engineering principles.

Doppler radar may be easier for transponder ('active') systems where the target has its own ping-activated echo. You can get usable range rate from just time-integrating sequential range marks. But those marks will have some 'scatter' and need to be smoothed by a computer using what's called 'Kalman filtering' -- an automated 'reasonableness test' that weighs -- and adjusts -- a raw radar mark based on past marks. It's not simple -- but it did get us to the moon and back.



[edit on 31-7-2009 by JimOberg]

Originally posted by ufoorbhunter
I know what you mean. The Russians won every other race in space, first dog, first man, first woman, first satellite, first space station and the Yanks have followed. The one thing the Yanks won, the race to the moon, was not copied by the russians which is a bit out of sync

Many generous posters spent a lot of their time providing the OP with basic info he could easily have obtained from any number of good books, or even from easily-findable websites. Why he should even WANT to advertise both his ignorance of a question that's been addressed for decades, or his incompetence in exploiting a public library or an internet search engine, baffles me, but there seems to be a lot of that in some corners of this site: let somebody ELSE do the work to cure MY shortcomings.

We all help each other out, and that willingness is a strength of these threads, so kudos to the contributors here. But to others, don't abuse that spirit with an eagerness to demand one-on-one remedial tutorials when some practice in self-help would have been more constructive.

And I post this as one of the key historians who helped to initially unveil the secret Soviet man-to-the-moon race during the period after Apollo that the 'conventional wisdom' in the Western intelligentsia and news media was that Moscow had WISELY chosen NOT to 'waste their money' in an Apollo-type effort, because THEY were smarter than the crusading, arrogant, show-off Yanks.

Shows that what even the 'intelligentsia' knows it knows can be wrong, and that digging through and past it can be productive, and FUN.

Which is why, at its best, this site can be enormously positive in its contribution to better understanding. But that requires 'best efforts' and competent initiative all around.

Originally posted by Rabmal
Every documentary you watch on the Apollo missions, they use the phrase "the race for the moon". When the USA started the mission to reach the moon we were well behind the Soviets in the "race for the moon". As history played out the USA was the first country to reach the moon, but this begs a question.

Why did the Soviets not land a man on the moon as well even if it would have been second? Not in the 60's, not in the 70's and not in the 80's. I know they landed a rover on the moon but not a man.

One would imagine that if the Soviets had been the first to place a man on the moon we would not have stopped trying to get there and certainly still would have put our own man on the moon.

You would think that the Soviets would want to know first hand what it is like there and also check out if we put anything there as well. (Especially, considering the paranoia we had for each other at the time.) I understand they may be able to do this remotely, but you would think they would want to put "boots on the ground" as well.

This would be akin to the Spanish coming to the New World and the English deciding to just stay home and listen to stories about it.

In the 30 years past you would have thought that some country would have wanted to land a man on the moon for themselves. I would be interested in hearing anyone's insight on this.

YUP i was watching a russian doc the other day and he said something strange that stuck in my mind ..he said they were winning the space race right up to the early 80's...thought comment was strange and thought of the moon landing's been fake

As stated early on the fist page, the Russians were more advanced in getting men off of the earth than they were at returning safely those men back to earth. Consequently, they lagged behind in a vehicular safe transport of men from orbit, to the surface, which was less of a concern when dealing with a one-way trip of a robot. Though the Russians won most of the 'first's in space', their rover program being decades ahead of the American's, became their source of national pride, and another celebrated Russian space first!

Just my opinion.

Originally posted by orangetom1999
Did they have enough space to put one on the lander?? How about the power requirements in addition to all the other power requirements they had to meet?? I dont know if radars in 1968/69 were all that compact or the power requirements that small.

They had radars that fitted inside the fuze of a 3" shell in WW2, so of course they had room for a radar on Apollo!

Man on the moon,

I cannot truly say if this did or did not happen, but I do know that the bigger the lie the easier to believe.
What I have found odd is the following, perhaps someone could explain.

1) Why has no other country been there also, none what so ever, this is odd.
2) One would think man having a nature to colonize and destroy everything we get our hands, and there is still no MacMoon, where we can holiday and eat burgers, our nature is to colonize and destroy.
3) Why do so many not believe that it is real.
4) Did we really have the technologies for such, I heard the computing power was equivalent to a simple desktop calculator, and human error.
5) Has there ever been unequivocal proof provided.
6) Were the Astronauts sworn to secrecy.
7) Has any other country every verified that America actually did landed on the moon?.

Could it have been possible to commit a mass fraud at the time, Starwars was not to far around the corner and that was very convincing. Could it have been possible to shoot the moon landing on earth and then replay that back to earth while sitting out in space the whole time.