Thanks to Obama the US manned space program is NOT even considering returning to the Moon. Constellation is gone with all the joy, science and we’ll never know what else that it could have delivered because it was denied a full and proper chance to show us. (Remember Apollo was viewed as a hopeless lemon once too.) I think that’s a tragic stupid, needless error & I hate Obama for making it

Leaving aside the shortcomings of Constellation and Orion, do you really think Obama is solely responsible for canning Constellation? Or do you not think maybe that the failure of Congress to give NASA an appropriate budget to do the job (even under GWB’s administration) might also have something to do with it?

Governments waste so much money on sport – people playing games – and arts and whilst these things have their value – & I love a good cricket match or motor race as much as anyone – why do they not get singled out for criticism as supposedly “wasteful” in the same way that the space program and science does? Why are people happy for huge amounts to be spent building football stadiums and Olympic venues when that money could be invested in science instead? Arrgggh

You almost answer your own question here.

The public at large (in many nations) see sport as a “better” forum for showcasing national pride than they do science.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, not so much. Science and technology were seen as equally good or better forums (fora?) for showcasing national pride. Couple this with a hefty dose of Cold War paranoia (“if the Russkies can put a rocket up there, they can bomb us any time they want, Mr President”) and you had the space race.

To inoculate us against Messier Tidy Upper’s fiscal fantasies and programmatic pablum, here’s industry veteran-turned-space-historian Henry Spencer.

So you claim to have Henry (“who’s that?”) Spencer on your side?

I have Neil Armstrong, yes *that* Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, Jim Lovell, Gabrielle Giffords (Congresswoman & wife of a Shuttle pilot), & Johnson Space Center Director Chris Kraft who directed the Apollo program plus many others on mine.

(NB. Click on my name for an article where Kraft expresses his views of Constellations cancellation.)

I think that means I win!

Also when it comes to the cancellation of Constellation, I’m seconding what this guy says :

“We had our hands on spaceships and we learned how to make them increasingly safer and then Washington pulled the plug. … We won’t have the ability to put an American on the space station, in an American rocket, for at least a decade,” he says. He doesn’t hide his disappointment with President Barack Obama. “We all knew for years that the Shuttle program had a sunset but Constellation was supposed to provide human access to the space station. When Obama cancelled Constellation, he cancelled the pride that every American should have in our accomplishments. One half of one percent of the federal budget funds NASA and they can’t afford this program?”
- Gregory Cecil, Space Shuttle tile technician quoted on page 47, “Throttle down” article in ‘Air & Space’ magazine, Nov 2010.

Sadly, the question is now moot anyhow. Thanks to Obama the US manned space program is NOT even considering returning to the Moon. Constellation is gone with all the joy, science and we’ll never know what else that it could have delivered because it was denied a full and proper chance to show us. (Remember Apollo was viewed as a hopeless lemon once too.) I think that’s a tragic stupid, needless error & I hate Obama for making it.

@21. Carlos :

While intellectually I know the moon doesn’t change (ok, changes very slowly) this video really drives it home. Seeing features that are identical 40 years later is so unexpected to our brains accostumed to live on earth. Unchanged – of course – except for the left behind descent module.

Plus the footprints! Don’t forget them – or the various experimenst incl. the laser ranging distance finding one that the Mythbusters used in their episode busting the Moon Hoax myth.

@ 19. Shoeshine Boy :

On a related note, it appears that the public perception has turned against the landing deniers. I recently saw a TV commercial for a major auto manufacturer (maybe Honda) where the announcer claimed that if you don’t buy during this opportunity you are like that crazy moon landing denier guy (or some such similar statement.)

David Letterman joked on his show about Donald Trump trying to prove the Moon landings were a hoax next. (After the Obama birth certificate thing.) In fact, I think Obama joked about that himself so, yeah.

PS. Slightly off topic – saw a good doco ‘Tank on the Moon’ on the Soviet Lunakhod rovers and the team that built them and helped work on Mars rover projects and an automated bulldozer used to clear debris from the Chernobyl disaster site the other night. (Click on my name for details via ABC Aussie TV website.)

@26. Thameron :

“So, like I said – No moon travel soon. Perhaps no more moon travel ever.”

I really, really, hope you are wrong about that.

I gather that China is planning to go to the Moon – with people not just machines – and others are too. It is such a logical step to use as a proving nearby testing ground for Mars missions and planetary exploration technology generally and we’ve done so little really in exploring it so far.

I think you’ll find people will return one day – maybe not soon though and maybe not Americans at leats for the next fifty-hundred years.

If the money spent on professional sports went instead into space travel we’d have those colonies that I was speaking of, but people care a great deal more about watching games than they do about space.

Agreed. That sort of attitude (those peoples not yours Thameron) really infuriates me. Governments waste so much money on sport – people playing games – and arts and whilst these things have their value – & I love a good cricket match or motor race as much as anyone – why do they not get singled out for criticism as supposedly “wasteful” in the same way that the space program and science does? Why are people happy for huge amounts to be spent building football stadiums and Olympic venues when that money could be invested in science instead? Arrgggh!

You have me all wrong lad. I’d love nothing more than to see probes around every planet, colonies on every suitable world and the terraforming of Venus. The problem of course is that a vast majority of our species (and American Taxpayers who would be called upon to fund those projects) most assuredly do not want those things or give a microfece about anything beyond the atmosphere, and the problem for space enthusiasts is that there is no good way to make them want those things. As Peter B. rightly points out the public got bored with Apollo at the end. The usual line that scientists such as the good Doctor take – ‘you should find this endlessly fascinating because I do’ – isn’t working and I don’t think it is likely to start working any time soon. Trying to make things that are happening in another star system (let alone in another galaxy) relevant to any decision that anyone presently living on this planet will make is a tough sell, and so far it isn’t being sold.

Human space travel is a luxury (perhaps the ultimate luxury) for those interested in travel beyond the atmosphere. In difficult economic times luxuries are jettisoned. I don’t revel in that fact it just seems inescapable. If the money spent on professional sports went instead into space travel we’d have those colonies that I was speaking of, but people care a great deal more about watching games than they do about space. If you have some method to change that I’d suggest you get about it, and best of luck. So, like I said – No moon travel soon. Perhaps no more moon travel ever.

Three related reasons: money, politics and public interest. Apollo was very expensive – around $200 billion in today’s money. It’s purpose ultimately was Cold War propaganda – to make the USA’s technology look better than the Soviet’s. Once Apollo 11 had landed on the Moon, the Apollo program lost a lot of its reason for happening, and even then people were calling for Apollo to be cancelled. But, having got the rockets built, NASA had enough momentum to push things out to Apollo 17.

But NASA’s budget had been shrinking since 1966, and by the early 1970s it got to a point that continuing Apollo meant that other programs couldn’t be pursued. Nixon was happy to cut NASA’s budget in an attempt to reduce spending and pay for the Vietnam War, and he knew that few voters would object.

And by the early 1970s voters were bored with Apollo. If you watch the movie “Apollo 13″, there’s a scene before the accident in which the crew do a live TV show, but none of the networks screen it, to the surprise of Lovell’s wife and mother.

“Two, where is the American flag we planted on the moon from 1969; can’t we see that with todays hi res photos of the moon… does that show up on google moon?”

No, we can’t see it. The main reason is that it (and the five other planted flags) all probably don’t exist any more. They were made of a material which reacts badly to UV light, and they would have decomposed by now.

Also remember these images are generally taken looking straight down. From that angle the horizontal bar on the flagpole would be far too narrow to be resolved. What’s the Google resolution? 0.25 metres? If you’re thinking Imperial, that’s 10 inches.

So even if the flag still existed, the best you could manage would be to see the shadow of the flag, but not the flag itself.

If you look carefully the area directly above the challenger descent stage but below the rover tracks, there is a distinctive black diagonal line about 4 pixels wide:

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/584392main_M168000580LR_ap17_area.jpg

Looking at this image taken before lift off from the assent module, you can see that the location of this feature corresponds to the location of the flag. Particularly useful are the paths of the rover that enable the location of flag to be identified with precision. Note the interesting loop made by the rover beyond the flag present in both images, which was made by Cernan when he first tested the rover:

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-145-22216.jpg

I have not done the calculations with the sun angle and the projection of the shadow, but they could be done. From the ground image we know the orientation of the flag and of course its size and height. I would say that from the width of this shadow, there is more than the flag pole standing.