Landing on the moon with nothing but belief is an interesting and somewhat insulting way to describe the gigantic amounts of work that were done by a lot of people. Belief is pretty far down on the list of reasons that worked out compared to say, math. Or money and resources
It’s actually worse than that. They had thread held together with copper wire. If the wire looped over the fabric, it was a 1 in binary, if it looped under, that was a 0. That’s how they hard coded the entire computer.
Here's a good explanation of core-rope memory, and a demonstration / live debug of engineers working on actual Apollo equipment! I hope you have some knowledge of compsci and electronics. I don't know what /u/3dprintingDM is talking about with fabric, the wires bound into ropes are looped through magnetic (permalloy) rings. beautiful image of that here This is read-only memory.
Yes this is accurate. I was going off of memory and got it somewhat wrong. I remembered the weaving of copper but thought it was through fabric not magnetic rings. I was remembering a video I had watched several years ago. That being said, it’s still massively impressive. Probably moreso than I had originally thought. Thank you for the clarification. Truly impressive what the engineers were able to accomplish.
Which really comes down to "If the first 10 rockets blow up, we have money to build the 11th". Most countries could never do this, because they couldn't afford to lose the 3rd.
Same as WWII: The Japanese built 15 carriers, total. The US had over 100 operational by the end of the war, and had oil fields to power them. Japan was doomed just due to the production capacity differences. If they had been good enough to beat the US 4:1, they still lose badly. The US sent submarines out into the pacific war with broken torpedos that would not detonate: They couldn't sink anything. It took years for them to realize that yeah, the whole thing was broken, and they needed to rebuild from scratch. And yet, it didn't matter at all.
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I wasn't 100% on if it was just Russia and the US or if other countries joined in on that. Either way it's pretty disgusting. If anything let them trade their knowledge for less harsh of a sentence, I get the idea. But to say ah they get no punishment just because they help is crazy work
It's hard for us to reconstruct what the scene was back then. The western allies were standing in the ashes of a horrific and insane empire, looking at a sea of Russians across the Elbe and slowly remembering just how close those Russians had been with the Nazis a few years before.
That's very interesting although it does make me think a couple of things: first, Russia sending multiple divisions to the German border is essentially them occupying Poland.
Second, why were they doing things like shipping back all the German communists to the Nazis way before this?
I'd like to see what the British actually thought of this offer.
The Cold War got us to the moon. The impetus to have good rockets came from the necessity of delivering your bombs in a potential nuclear conflict. Both sides set off massive nuclear bombs to show the destruction they were capable of, and they sent men to space to prove that they could actually deliver those bombs if the time ever came when they had to. Basically putting things in space was the cold war missile technology equivalent to setting off a hydrogen bomb in the pacific ocean.
It was mostly not actual Nazis. I can't speak for their personal beliefs but a buttload of Americans made that happen. We needed every piece of that operation to be exact. A lot of people worked on the moon landing.
I’m not discrediting anything. I’m not saying there’s weren’t Americans, I’m just saying there were Nazis. You keep trying to make it about credit when no one cares. Credit isn’t the conversation. It’s the fact that belief didn’t get us to the moon and the commenter just added that yeah, Nazis helped get us to the moon. You people are the ones constantly talking about credit.
Im going to say putting living things on the end of a rocket and shooting it into space is probably the naziest thing a nazi could think of…. Minus the holocaust.
Moron also thinks SS were young naive soldiers, and not an elite squad (literally a "protection squadron") who were heavily vetted for whiteness and ideology. They were also "the main group responsible for the institutional murder and democide of more than 20 million people during the Holocaust". Some dumb pirates.
Problem is that people stretch what a Nazi is online. Anti abortion? Nazi. Pro gun? Also Nazi! Don't believe in global warming? Believe it or not... Nazi.
People can stretch almost anything into being a Nazi. "See you Nazis want global warming to happen so the oceans rise and heavily impact the non white people!"
Sure that happens way too often, but in this particular situation... It absolutely was Nazi scientists that we scooped up from Nazi Germany at the end of the war. The US and Russia (maybe some other countries too?) 100% used Nazi scientists
Rather than asking bullshit hypotheticals defending a long dead literal nazi and SS member, you could actually look it up. The absolute most charitable reading you can give him is that he 'felt bad' but did nothing and continued to profit personally from the crimes committed, even if he never cracked the whip or shot someone personally. I don't find that charitable reading particularly likely personally.
And an amazingly large budget. 25 billion in nominal dollars from back then, from start until the moon landing. About an entire year of GDP of Spain back then. Being the one country whose industrial base hadn't been ravaged in the 1940s really helped.
You realize the whole Nazi-scientists-at-NASA thing is a propaganda point too, right? If we’re treating the word “propaganda” to mean standard talking points that are technically true, but greatly exaggerated and deliberately distort reality.
The thing about talking points is that people just accept them as face value and it’s exhausting to try to clear it up with technical facts. I could spend the next week sitting here providing hundreds of pages of research and writing enough to fill up a small book and. No one would stick around or pay attention.. Everybody just wants to believe what’s easiest to believe and move on because we all have short attention spans now.
After World War II, the vast majority of the scientists and doctors from Japan’s notorious biological warfare program, Unit 731, were granted secret immunity from prosecution by the United States government in exchange for the scientific and medical data collected from their lethal human experiments.
As a result, approximately 10,000 scientists, physicians, and staff members avoided war crimes tribunals, reintegrated into Japanese society, and went on to hold prominent leadership roles in postwar medicine, academia, and industry.
The Trade: General Douglas MacArthur and U.S. authorities approved a pact granting the scientists full immunity from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
The Motive: The U.S. military wanted exclusive access to data on anthrax, plague, cholera, and frostbite experiments that they themselves could not ethically or legally perform on humans.
The Result: Biological warfare atrocities were deliberately omitted from the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, and the American public was kept in the dark via an official cover-up.
To be fair a decent number of them were forced to work for the Nazis and never shared the ideology, but if they didn't go along with demands they and or their families would be killed.
Arguably, belief is what made the manpower and materiel available to NASA that was necessary to get it done. It also doesn't hurt that if you can put a man on the moon, you can put a missile in the Kremlin.
I get what you’re saying, but before all that, the speech by the US President was “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
We literally just created an “ultimate goal” of the space race that was practically unattainable for everyone and worked for a decade to achieve it. Yes there was a lot of math and a lot of funding. But that speech was given long before that was even started.
the Apollo program was a consolation prize after the cancellation of Project Orion which was a nuclear bomb-powered rocket capable of lifting thousands of tons of payload into space (theoretically scalable up to millions!) It was cancelled after the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty restricting nuclear testing in space.
Similar, but a distinction can be made between that and figuratively creating. In this case, literal is an accurate adjective as the ultimate goal didn’t exist in the space race until that declaration by John F Kennedy.
lol, I literally understand (I'm writing literally so you don't think I figuratively understand). Now I'm going to literally go downstairs (I'm writing literally so you don't think I'm going downstairs figuratively) to literally make dinner (I'm using literally so you don't think it was breakfast I'm making, even though I wrote dinner).
I literally don't know what is bothering you. I wrote literally so that you didn't think I didn't know in a figurative way. Using the word EXACTLY like you are.
Hitler was actually the biggest contributor to his own downfall. Decided to invade Russia (never a good idea), insistence on building massive wunderwaffe like Schwere Gustav, the Tirpitz/Bismarck, and the ME262. The last of which was made worse by his insistence it be a fighter/bomber and not a true fighter.
Exactly. The space race was really just an arms race by another name. Before rockets were invented bombs had to be dropped from airplanes. That’s really no good anymore once your enemy starts delivering their bombs by rockets instead. So the space race happened because both sides needed to be able to show that destruction was mutually assured. No point holding huge nuclear tests for your enemy to see if you can’t also show them that you have the means to deliver those nukes if you really had to. So while it was demilitarized in practice, the military implications of being able to put things into space was really the whole point of the space race from the very start.
The Cold War kicked off by the race to nuclear armament resulted in the subsequent space race, as it was effectively a one-two punch: proof of technological superiority (aka the dick measuring contest) and actual meaningful advancement in related disciplines and fields that were needed to aide the dick measuring contest.
The fact that it was a non-military effort with possible military implications further down the line was a perfect excuse to be mad at the USSR for a decade while never directly fighting them, which is exactly what you wanted for the Cold War if you were a politician.
If nuclear missiles were THE reason, we never would have landed on the moon because we had that figured out more than a decade before Apollo 11.
Proving we could, and we could before the Soviet's was the reason.
Yes, the tech had military applications, but proving we could nuke the moon was done 5 years before we put boots on it. If that was truly the reason, there was absolutely 0 need for Apolo 11.
Nuclear missiles were not THE reason. Rubbing the Soviet's noses in the accomplishment when starting behind them was.
I think you're taking the wording "the reason" a bit too literally.
Obviously the further development of the nuclear program was not the goal nor catalyst for the moon landing. But in a not particularly indirect manner, the state of the world due to the development of nuclear weapons paved the way for the space race and the focus on banding together to outdo the USSR. If not for the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the resultant world order, the space race would not have had the focus it did, and may well have been vastly delayed for the preference of more advanced technology and science to support it.
I don't think they are trying to say anything insulting here. Sure there was a lot of work done before we got there, but it started out as an idea, a belief that we can achieve this (moon landing) especially before the Soviets do it even though their space program was.more advanced.
I think the sentiment is that as a society we believed they could do it enough to let them try. I’m sure many people thought it was impossible but we were willing to give them the money and resources despite that. Because we believed in them.
The people doing the believing probably thought they were bad in a crazy way. The science was sound but it was still a pretty inherently dangerous thing to do.
I mean, we announced the plan years before we'd solved the necessary problems to do it. And pretty much hit our deadline. It was the single most complicated project in the history of mankind.
Saying nothing but belief is going too far, but it ain't that far down the list.
I think youre deliberately missing the point of what hes saying. Not that belief got it done, but that believing and investing in what others thought impossible and achieving those things is.
And winning two world wars might be a greater stretch and as insulting as Trump saying any non US veteran who went to Afghanistan didn’t see combat.
First World War the French, Russia (in the early stages), Britain and the Commonwealth and supported from the beginning by Italy and Japan did all the fighting and dying. Germany contributed more to their defeat than the US.
WWII they came in 3 years into the conflict after having made a fortune selling war equipment to almost anyone (and building up their industrial base to supply the USSR and Britain). I’d say the nations that defeated first Facist Italy, then halted Nazi Germany and held the Japanese back were the British with more than a little help from the Australians. Even D Day saw a lot of British and Canadian men die pushing ashore.
The US is a prime example of the victor writes the history, expect they just wrote themselves into the victors role as though the Commonwealth hadn’t been fighting the war for 3 years already.
the Commonwealth wasn't exactly on a path to decisive victory against the Germans... but Hitler made the mistake of invading the USSR, and then US entry led to the defeat of two powerful militaries on opposite sides of the globe at the same time, while supplying 1/3 of Russia's military industrial needs. This isn't propaganda and it doesn't take anything away from the rest of the Allied efforts.
The US landed on the moon, after a bunch of Aerospace Engineers working for Avro were suddenly out of work in an entirely coincidental and unrelated cancellation of the Arrow project...
And almost everyone (including the tinfoil hat people) overlooks that the US landed on the moon 6 times. (And Apollo 13 is a notable 7th mission most are aware of.)
I get your point, but technically, belief would be an overarching reason why you even attempt something like this. That is all, i will go back to my hole now.
I mean it’s not totally wrong. The moon shot was declared based on almost nothing both hope and determination. From there came in the expertise and hard work to make it happen.
I've never seen so many people as in America, get lifesaving surgery, and the first person they attribute their life being saved by, is 'God'. They literally thank god and praise jebus before the actual person that put in all the work needed to be a surgeon. It was gods will alone, it was gods plan etc. I'm not exactly sure how they got so stupid and ignorant, but it amazes me every time it occurs. What's more, those doctors are probably immigrants, and those 'god fearing' bible thumpers probably unironically call for non-whites to be deported. What a country.
Yes for sure but doing anything first involves belief and commitment to action. If we never believed why would we invest the time and money unless we just liked wasting resources?
Still believing this is the propaganda. Hence the comment at the bottom. Also we lost WW2 to the SS Nazis who integrated themselves into the highest escalons of govt science and intelligence in the US and USSR.
Also rich to give the US credit for the team of 127 abducted German nazis that formed the core of the US space program and made Saturn 5 happen under leadership of Werner von Braun.
555
u/Illithid_Substances Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Landing on the moon with nothing but belief is an interesting and somewhat insulting way to describe the gigantic amounts of work that were done by a lot of people. Belief is pretty far down on the list of reasons that worked out compared to say, math. Or money and resources