40 years since first visit to the Moon


In 1961 President John F. Kennedy made the famous statement that a visit to the Moon should be accomplished before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo program started and so it happened when Neil Armstrong by travel with Apollo 11 on July 20 1969 became the first man to step down on the Moon. The others with him were Michael Collins and Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr.

Now the voices from the Moon will be heard again on the World Moon Bounce day, June 26, by the assistance of radio amateurs with their huge antennas. From
Wired: “We are actually sending out radio waves and shaking the electrons of the atoms of the dirt on the moon a quarter of a million miles away,” said Pat Barthelow, a ham radio operator for 43 years and the founder of the moon-bounce project. “We are jiggling moon dust and there’s enough energy to send back radio waves to us which we convert back to voices. To me that’s pretty profound.”

I have not thought of that
my own moonbounced signals last autumn did stirr the atoms on the Moon!



In the illustrated book "Conquest of the Moon" published 1953 by Dr. Wernher von Braun, Dr. Fred L. Whipple and Willy Ley describe how this will be done. They say that the first expedition to the Moon could take place in 1978. Maybe John F. Kennedy read this book already in 1953, four years ahead of Sputnik?


The proposed moonships were huge. The first expedition with three 50 m long and 33 m wide ships with 50 astronouts in two ships and cargo in the third.


Constellation is the name of NASA´s on-going return to the Moon project. See how similar the Moon landers look. The one on the front cover of the Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, May 2006, to land on the Moon around 2020 and the one from 1953!


In the same issue of Air & Space there is a comparison in size of the Apollo lander and the coming new lander. It is striking to see how similar the lunar lander model from 1953 is.


In Popular Science from May 1958 Dr. I. M. Levitt sets a timetable for the conquest of the Moon, whichs ends with a visit in 2000. Weird is that he proposes to perform two atomic explosions on the Moon! The first one to explore moon dust spectra from the Earth and the second one to to fetch dust from the explosion by a circling rocket to bring it back to Earth.


Another weird project, 51 years later, is proposed by a Swedish artist and it is called Luna Resort. I hope this proposed project will be put into a garbage bin soon. It is strange that "prominent" Swedes have been fooled to support it. Who´s next to propose a similar one, maybe a Coca-Cola logo on the Moon?

Comments

William Bennett said…
Try, just try and get a copy of this book then honestly ask yourself why it is so difficult