Why NASA stopped sending people to the moon
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
10 August 2014
After reading about the prediction I made in 2013 on the date of Idd-Ul-Fitr 2014, a few people were quick to ask about the 2015 holiday. Without going into the detailed calculations (I did that last year), I can confidently say that it will be on 18th July 2015.
Now, while I appreciate that the end of the Ramadhan fast must wait for the actual sighting of the moon, I think that the public holiday can be gazetted this early so that workers and employers can make their annual plans conveniently. There shouldn’t be a problem if the moon isn’t sighted on the night of 17th July 2015 (perhaps because of cloud cover). After all, even this year (2014) the public holiday didn’t coincide with the ending of the fast!
As mentioned last week, the moon is probably the most studied heavenly body. Indeed, it is the only place that man has travelled to outside our home planet earth…or hasn’t he?
There is a small group of non-scientists who believe that the whole moon landing event was a hoax staged by the by the Americans. Richard Mwenda has come across one these sceptical writings and he notes that “if they ever did [go to the moon], they should explain why they haven’t been there since 1969”
Richard goes on to quote some of the “evidence” advanced to support the hoax theory: “the distance from the Earth to the Moon (384,400 km) is so much, and it would require much in terms of foodstuffs, fuel for the space shuttles and other necessities”
Well, the Apollo missions used to take only three days to get to the moon and another three on the return journey. The total round trip would last about a week; in fact the longest one lasted only 12 days. Now that isn’t “too long” a period to carry enough supplies, is it?
On the question of why they haven’t been there again, my guess is that the project proved too expensive. In addition, a 70kg machine in an unmanned spacecraft can collect a lot more data than a 70kg man a human being! In fact, the level of telescope technology today is such that we can get more information about the moon sitting right here on earth than what the Apollo astronauts got.
In a related question, J. Kameru asks why the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft took 10 years to rendezvous with Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The answer is that the distance in this mission is very long – the craft is now over 400 million kilometres away.
Furthermore, the spacecraft did not travel in a straight line; it followed a complex spiral trajectory that included three separate “gravity-assist” manoeuvres with earth and one with Mars. At one point in mid-2012, the craft reached almost 800 million kilometres away – near the orbit of Jupiter. So, it is no wonder the journey took such a long time.
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