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Manned spaceflight is back baybee.
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Its amazing that since then we haven’t had much success in even landing anything unmanned on the moon, let alone manned. The fact that they weren’t ripped to shreds like most other things weve ever tried to land, using that era’s technology, is absolutely fucking bonkers
E: Im assuming someone downvoted this bc they think Im saying this as in “the moon landing was fake” or something, which is not the case. Its just incredibly difficult to land something on the moon successfully, even with all the modern technology that we have. Resilience (2025), Hakuto-R (2023), Luna 25 (2023), and Beresheet (2019) all crashed in attempts to land on the moon using modern sensors and flight equipment that have infinitely more capability than what the US used to put men on the moon. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) used a 1.024 MHz processor, 2 KB of RAM, and 72 KB of read-only memory. You would need 4,000,000 times more RAM to simply play kerbal space program.
I dont believe the moon landing was faked whatsoever. Russia was watching every step of the way and would have happily pointed out if it had never happened. This was the height of the cold war. But instead they congratulated the US on its achievements. That said, its fucking insane that we were able to do it. Modern equipment has a less than 50% chance of landing safely, the odds of them being successful back then were infinitesimally smaller
That's mostly irrelevant because Apollo didn't have computers landing the ships. They were humans. Astronauts trained hard to achieve that. Computers only flew the initial takeoff and ascent. An IBM computer that stayed behind with the rocket. But Armstrong landed that bird on the moon by hand.
Also, while the on board computer allowed them to consolidate sensor input, and calculate and execute burn maneuvers (relatively easy tasks), everything was double and triple checked by mission control back on earth. With way more powerful, faster and capable computers. Anything that required reflexes or finesse was done by a human hand on a joystick.
This is why all those attempts are impressive even if ultimately failed some way or the other. Because they are autonomous landers. A technology that didn't exist until the turn of the millennium.