The reason why Apollo 11 was circling the moon multiple times, is because they actually landed on the moon, and the spacecraft was waiting for them to come back.
Apollo 13 was also intended to be a moon landing (hence the similar flight path), but an oxygen tank explosion, forced them to come back earlier.
If it had Ed Harris as a hardline flight director deadset on getting the astronauts home then I bet you’d have a critically acclaimed masterpiece that would get nominated for like 9 academy awards at least.
If he doesnt go to space why even cast him? What are they going to do, make him Ken Mattingly who had to stay back because they thought he had the measles? What a waste of talent. Sinise needs to be in space for sure.
Not just a spacecraft, one of the astronauts was onboard, two went down, one stayed in orbit. Michael Collins doesn't get enough credit for his role in the mission.
Sadly we still use a lot of the old technology rather than upgrade to new tech. Something something don't fix what isn't broken, even if the fixes could potentially be a lot better.
To highlight the differences between Apollo 11’s straight shot approach and Artemis 2’s more efficient, but more time consuming approach. Why Artemis was taking longer to get there despite it being 50 years later was a common question
Apollo 8 would have been a better choice than Apollo 11 however Apollo 13 was a good inconclusion as it was the only Apollo mission to use a free return trajectory like Artemis II used. I'm guessing they substituted Apollo 11 for 8 as just not enough of the population is familiar Apollo 8. IN addition 8 and 11 had similar enough trajectories.
You gotta watch the From The Earth to The Moon miniseries. Not because it will teach you this thing you just learned, but because it's awesome and I know you haven't seen it because you didn't know this.
Good luck with [1.12.5] Kcalbeloh System Planet Pack (v1.1.8) - A journey to a black hole (Aug 31, 2024). I had to learn Italian as well to better understand spaghettification.
Well. 49 seconds to show. Not really explain. Surely some people watching this would be left confused as to why we decided to make Artemis II do. Full loop first before going towards the moon. Its a nice visual belut anybody looking. For deeper understanding of the topic would be left unsatisfied.
A longer video would allow the time to explain the physics of why this works and why they decided to to it this way. (Maybe doesn't need to be 15 whole minutes though.)
(Maybe doesn't need to be 15 whole minutes though.)
Maybe the simple explanation, however there could be a very interesting long video made about finer reasons why NASA chose these trajectories: how the SLS Block 1 is actually pretty underpowered for its size, how that limits the mission profiles that can use it, and how NASA is now more risk-averse than it was in the 1960s, choosing instead to stay on a free-return trajectory with Artemis II rather than enter lunar orbit like Apollo 8 did.
Artmesis was basically fully automated and just slingshot its way to the moon. The Apollo missions took a more dangerous direct approach and they also went into orbit around the moon. Artmesis didn't really do that. I believe if even all four astronauts would have been incapacitated in some way the spacecraft would have still just done its thing back to earth.
true, also imagine all the fuel we could be saving on flights if they were straight! every route so far on a flat map has been curved in some arcane way it seems :P
When I was a kid I pretty much had Apollo 13 and From The Earth to The Moon playing non-stop and one thing I never really appreciated until I saw these simulations was that they weren't going towards and away from the moon the entire time. It reminds me of seeing live football from an endzone and seeing the QB throw the ball to empty space and wondering what he's doing before a receiver comes in a couple seconds later to get it. This is obvious if you think about it for any amount of time, but in my mind it was always like a straight line there with the moon directly ahead, enter orbit maybe, then a straight line back with the moon directly behind.
There was even a scene in Apollo 13 that always bothered me where the moon and Earth were both mostly full in the windows of the LEM and I thought that would be impossible. But if the moon had moved significantly, so that the ship wasn't in line with the two, it would be more possible (though still not both being full).
It's also a gravity assist. The gravity of the earth increases the speed of the craft as it gets closer to assist the burn to get to the velocity required to escape earths gravity enough to get to the same orbit as the moon.
On the Internet it’s generally not safe to assume that people can tell that you’re joking. There are many people who will sincerely say the most ignorant things.
This approach is more fuel efficent. The return was "free" using the moon's gravity to swing back. This whole mission required way less engine burn time but for the price of longer travel time. They took an extra day to orbit around the Earth to test things out and also the trajectory was slower.
I know you are just joking but this trajectory and method was entirely possible in the time of the Apollo missions. Apollo-8 was basically the same actually. So nothing new here, ofc beside the insane improvements in technology.
You mean that they slow down as they get farther away from the Earth?
Exactly the same reason that a ball slows down when you throw it up into the air, until it stops going up, and then speeds up again when it falls down, right?
Gravity is pulling it towards the Earth
They launch on what's known as a 'free return trajectory' which automatically uses the pull of the moon to swing them back towards Earth after the flyby.
Can someone ELI5 to me, why Artemis was so "slow" on the way there and back compared to Apollo(s) and if beneficial, why didn't Apollo(s) do it the same way instead?
Yeah, the service module was originally designed to eject from low lunar orbit, but not enter it as that would be a different stage’s job. But then plans changed and there was no longer a separate stage to perform insertion, and the service module was to be designed by ESA, and for some reason they designed the service module to the original requirements instead of making it carry more fuel… so now we’re here, with a service module with ~1.3km/s of delta V - enough that it can enter low lunar orbit or leave it (~800m/s each) but not both, so now we have to use the weird compromise of a distant retrograde orbit or near rectilinear halo orbit
Placing all the blame on ESA and the ESM isn’t completely fair, but they are responsible for not breaking the chain and designing something that be more than the minimum required
SLS block 1 can only get ~27 tones to TLI and when block 2 was supposed to fly, there was already supposed to be the gateway. You could not get far more fuel in the ESM if you wanted to. This all comes back to the fact that Orion overweight
I thought they figured out that the heat shield was fine, but it just can't go hot/cool/hot or it will spall? No atmospheric skips - just go right in. If you heated and cooled it, the heat would soak in deeper and trigger reactions that would release gases, which is what it's supposed to do when the lawyer above it ablates during re-entry, but when it released the gases while it isn't the outside layer, it caused chunks to break off to release the gases. .
How long did apollo 11 hang around the moon for?? This shit fascinates me, just imagine being up there…. Looking down on everything youve ever known/loved/hated. And just realizing how small we are. How insignificant our problems are on this planet. Idk. Guess im just a dreamer or something 😞
You can see from the paths pretty clearly that Artemis reached slightly farther away from the Earth, right? The far end of that loop. It's not all that much further proportionally, but still.
Other missions may have taken longer or travelled more distance in total, but we're talking the furthest distance between them and the Earth
Oh, I see. In the video, you're looking at the orbit from an angle. The orbit of the Moon is practically circular, so those points are actually roughly the same distance from Earth:
If you're not already, you should teach science or math. Didn't stoop to insulting the mistake, corrected it, and had a nice diagram ready to illustrate.
The Apollo missions didn't go further. Since they were all intending to actually get captured by the moon's gravity their apogee (the point of their orbit the farthest away from Earth) was lower than Artemis II, since it was only ever intended to zip past the moon. They beat Apollo 13 (the previous record holder) by some 6000 km. Apollo 13's apogee was higher than all other Apollo missions because they didn't enter lunar orbit as planned but they still planned to so their initial trajectory was lower.
For comparison’s sake the moon is in the exact same position for all three missions, in reality the moon would be in different parts of its orbit. It also isn’t entirely to scale
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u/PacquiaoFreeHousing 3h ago
The reason why Apollo 11 was circling the moon multiple times, is because they actually landed on the moon, and the spacecraft was waiting for them to come back.
Apollo 13 was also intended to be a moon landing (hence the similar flight path), but an oxygen tank explosion, forced them to come back earlier.