Apollo scam?
After more than ten years of long waiting, our Chang'e 5 is finally about to embark on a journey to complete the heaviest stroke of "winding, falling, and returning". Many friends can't help but sigh: "It's not easy! "Z3z
But turning back to think about things like , the Americans had overfulfilled 51 years ago. In July 1969, the American Apollo 11 spacecraft successfully landed on the moon. Two astronauts bounced on the surface of the moon for two and a half hours. After filming the live broadcast on TV, they moved 6 kilograms of rocks and The soil returns to the earth. You must know that all this was done in a human state, and the United States had not even done an unmanned lunar return experiment before.
Aldrin set up the scientific instrument
on the moon. Isn’t it amazing? In contrast, the Chang'e 5 will be weaker than half a century later, right. So, how did the Americans do it? As some people say, is the Apollo project a scam?
After the Giant Rocket, there is no comer
Saturn V . This is a name that is so impressive. It has a total height of 110.6 meters and a total launch weight of 2970 tons. It can carry 140 tons (more than 2 M1A2 main battle tanks) at a time ) The heavy load is sent to low earth orbit. Z5z has not been able to surpass Saturn V by any rocket, including the Americans themselves, and it has been impossible for decades to build another such super-heavy launch vehicle .
Saturn V can easily push two heavy tanks at a time.
Saturn V’s original design target was to launch a 41-ton spacecraft to the moon, but after many improvements in design, by the time of Apollo 15, Saturn V had already It can send a 48.6-ton spacecraft assembly to orbit around the moon. The powerful thrust of the
Saturn V comes from five Rocketdyne F-1 engines. This engine is 5.8 meters high and has a dry weight of 8.4 tons. It uses liquid oxygen kerosene as fuel and has a single thrust of 6.77 MN. The has such a powerful rocket engine that it cannot be replicated so far. After the F-1 was retired, the United States never made the again.
German von Braun took a photo with the F-1 rocket engine
Apollo spacecraft
Apollo spacecraft is the first manned spacecraft built by mankind so far. It had never landed on the moon before Apollo 11, had never carried out any tests on the moon, nor had it attempted to return from the moon and rendezvous and dock in orbit around the moon. Therefore, a lot of work for the Armstrong crew is the first time that the "big girl sits in a sedan chair". Unlike the big girl, the three astronauts of the United States have to fight for their lives. Z6z fully trusts the chief designer, German scientist von Braun and hundreds of thousands of people on the ground who participated in the design and construction of the spacecraft.
Apollo spacecraft assembly is full of science fiction
Don't look at the appearance of the Apollo spacecraft is extremely cool, even today, it shows a sense of science and technology is still incomparable. But if you enter the cabin of the spacecraft, what you see is a different scene. It doesn't have a display. You can't find any screen that displays images. Except for a small observation window and a gyroscope that indicates attitude, the other is a dense row of switches and indicators. Before returning from the surface of the moon, Aldrin accidentally broke one of the switch handles of the circuit breaker, almost killing both of them on the moon. Fortunately, the astronauts were clever. They finally opened the switch with the tip of a pen. .
Apollo spacecraft command module
The computer on the spacecraft
Is there a computer on the spacecraft in the 1960s? Of course there is. For the Apollo project, the top universities and enterprises in the United States have promoted the rapid development of computer science. Among them, IBM has manufactured the "LVDC" for the Saturn V. Its main frequency is 2M and the total memory is 16384. Byte, weighing 32.9 kg, is installed in the docking ring of the control system on the upper part of the rocket.
and two "Apollo Navigation Computers (AGC)" developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and manufactured by Raytheon, one command module and one lunar module are installed inside the spacecraft. The gray button on the upper left of the picture above is the AGC, and there is also an identical one in the lunar module.How about the performance of the AGC computer panel
on the control console of the spacecraft lander
? There are only 12,300 transistors in its CPU, 2K storage and 36K read-only memory. The computing power of is not as good as the chip in today's music greeting cards, and a random emoticon pack can fill its memory.
Computer enthusiasts disassembled an AGC memory
AGC is huge in size, and its magnetic core memory is equivalent to a medium-sized suitcase. The densely packed lines need experienced female weavers to wear. In order to store 36K control programs in these circuits, MIT programmers spent a full 5 years, arbitrarily condensing one-person-high source programs into less than 36K codes, so that they can be packed into the huge volume and capacity. Inside the poor ROM. Z3z
such a thick control program should be condensed into 36K code, do you believe it?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology still failed to eliminate the bugs in the program until the computer was delivered in 1966. Finally, with the help of IBM, it barely completed the data calculation and avoided the abortion of the Apollo project. Even so, the Apollo 11 still couldn't process the radar data when it landed on the moon, and it went down, and finally had to rely on Armstrong to manually operate the landing .
You might think that since the astronauts are so powerful, what kind of computers are needed? The astronauts will drive the spacecraft to the moon directly. This kind of thinking is naive. In fact, the moon is 380,000 kilometers away from the earth on average, which is a very short distance. Without a computer to calculate the orbit, the moon cannot be reached. The training of
astronauts
Considering that the computing power of the computer at that time was really bad, so NASA still carried out rigorous training for the astronauts for a long time, and used their experience as the spare tire of the computer. This trick proved effective throughout the Apollo project. Astronauts need to remember the topography of the lunar surface
Before the implementation of the Apollo program, the United States launched several orbital probes to the moon to photograph the lunar surface and allow scientists to determine the landing site on the lunar surface. After getting the photos and determining the landing zone, NASA hired an artist (yes, the painter), and painted the image of the lunar surface taken by the probe on the wall.
The painter painted the terrain of the moon on the wall
and then the astronauts sat in the simulation cabin, facing the dashboard and huge canvas, holding the joystick and "flying" over and over again, so that they could see the craters they were going to pass, Images of valleys, mountains, etc. are engraved in your mind, so you can manually control the spacecraft to land correctly.
astronauts practice against each other, very primitive, not simple
At the end of this article, I will present the video clips of the Apollo 11 spacecraft landing on the moon and leaving the moon, please enjoy.
After leaving the moon, the rendezvous and docking of the spacecraft's ascent and the orbital module (command module) also requires astronauts to drive. After the chase and approach of 3 hours and 45 minutes, the three astronauts cooperated closely to transfer the two cabins. Butt together. After the rendezvous and docking is complete, the two astronauts on the spacecraft return to the orbital module and fix the samples collected from the moon, discard the ascending section, and then fly back to the earth.
command module and the ascent chase docking
Apollo "miracle"
Apollo spacecraft carried out a total of 11 manned flights, of which Apollo 7 and 9 orbit the ground; 8 and 10 orbit the moon; 13 A thrilling return from an explosion accident occurred midway; spacecraft 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 successfully sent 12 astronauts and 3 lunar rover to the lunar surface; brought back a total of 382 kilograms of lunar rock and soil samples; a large number of photographs were taken Photos and video images were broadcast live on TV. It stands to reason that this should be a solid scientific event, but the conspiracy theories surrounding Apollo for decades have never dissipated.
Astronauts are training in the studio.
Conspiracy theorists believe that the Apollo project is a large and well-planned scam. Saturn V went to the sky but did not fly to the moon. All the images of the moon’s surface were taken by the actors in HollywoodShot in the studio. The purpose is to make Americans feel proud, and at the same time to fool the Soviet Union into a space race with the United States. The
conspiracy theorists have put forward a lot of evidence, and scientists have also targeted the rumors, but those who believe in it will always believe it, and those who do not believe it will never believe it. There are some things you can never satisfy everyone. What's more, in the 1960s and 1970s when the level of science and technology was still underdeveloped, Americans risked sending astronauts to the moon without even doing many of the most basic tests. This can be called at any time "Miracle".
Astronauts took off on the moon to salute
Have seen the following two videos, do you believe that the Apollo project is real? Perhaps we still need to wait for the lunar soil dug back by Chang'e 5 to give an answer.
The process of Apollo 11 landing on the lunar surface
Apollo 11 ascends from the lunar surface and rendezvous and docks with the command module
Scientific combustion plan Why is Chang'e 5 the most complex space mission in my country
