On Saturday, February 9, 2013 9:10:47 AM UTC-8, snidely wrote:
Jeff Findley presented the following explanation : In article 7256629c-b021-42c7-aa9d-7376a3cc2d02 @h11g2000vbf.googlegroups.com, says... On Feb 7, 11:56*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote: bob haller wrote: On Feb 7, 9:04*am, Fred J. McCall wrote: bob haller wrote: On Feb 7, 12:24*am, Fred J. McCall wrote: bob haller wrote: On Feb 6, 11:21*am, Fred J. McCall wrote: bob haller wrote: Lets look back at some historical facts Computers were needed for the moon landing since it would be impossible to have enough humans onboard to control apollo and the LMs landing. Real time data downlinks / uplinks wouldnt be good enough. And yet they did exactly that. *You understand that those vehicles all had human-operated controls and that they were used, right? *So much for your "impossible to have enough humans onboard to control apollo and the LMs landing" idiocy. So nasa got mini computers to do the job..... Wrong. which led to hand held calculators etc...... Really wrong. apollo computers had less memory than a dollar store calcualtor today...... Well, you got that part right. nasas needs drove all sorts of developments that benefit every person on earth.... Totally wrong, if you're talking about computers. apollo with zero computers would of never been possible. Of course it would. The LM couldnt of carried enough people onboard to do all the computations ......... What computations were those? *All that **** was done on the ground back on Earth, you ignorant ****. well both the LM and CM had computers *running continious..... And when they went tits up humans flew the things. *Which part of that is it that is escaping you? at the time it was reported computers were needed for operations, and that overloaded computer caused problems on the first landing..... So it obviously wasn't needed, since they continued operating and landed sans computer. news reports stated no landing would be attempted without working computers, but there were back up plans to get them home, in case of a coputer failure Bobbert, you know you aren't old enough to remember the Moon landings, don't you? *What were you, about 9? I am 56 now and was fascinated about all things space.. I was only a few months old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I'm told I watched it on TV. Anyway, I spent my youth reading as many history books about space travel as I could. Quite a few were about Apollo. Some went into detail about the computers, including the 1202 and 1203 errors that were being thrown by Apollo 11's LEM computer. Those errors should never have been thrown during an actual mission. It took time to figure out why they were being thrown and if it was safe enough to continue. Armstrong could have called an abort either for the computer errors or for the low fuel warning as he was trying to fly past the boulder field and find a safe place to land. He didn't abort. He piloted the LEM to a safe landing. If Apollo 11's LEM would have been only computer controlled, or remotely controlled, it almost certainly would have crashed in one way or another. Sure, our toasters today are better than back then, but they *still* can't deal with the unexpected. And when the time delay to earth is more than a few seconds, you simply can't rely on people in the control room to handle the unexpected in real-time. The way this is handled with the Mars rovers is they're moved and operated at a snail's pace. Every move, every test, every tiny little thing is micromanaged from earth, so progress is very slow. None of your "mass produced" toaster proposals properly deal with this issue. There is *nothing* like an AI which is cheap enough, powerful enough (processing wise), miserly with power, and creative enough to actually handle the unexpected on Mars. Mind you, we had had unmanned craft land on the moon before Apollo 11: Surveyor, Lunokhod. They represented efforts to find out enough about the surface to know if humans could land there. They certainly weren't mass produced, though, nor inexpensive, and landing them involved a lot of luck. And we didn't find out much more about the moon than confirming the gravitational acceleration (on earth, we call that 'g') and determining a little of the surface texture (sand? dust? solid rock?). /dps -- "This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away be excitement, but ask calmly, how does this person feel about in in his cooler moments next day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him?" _Roughing It_, Mark Twain.

Minor nit-pick he the first successful Lunikhod (unmanned Soviet moon-rover) was Luna 17 in November 1970- after Apollo 11, heck even after Apollo 13. (There had been a couple of launch failures earlier.)