The Moon Landing: 50 Years On - BBC Click

[Music] this is clique 1001 a Space Odyssey in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing we've got massive Rockets space station robot arms and we bounce sound off the moon why because it's there [Music] we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard so said President John F Kennedy in 1962 on July the 16th 1969 three astronauts Neil Armstrong Edwin Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins made ready to fulfill that promise as they prepared for Apollo 11 the first crewed mission to land on the moon three men to represent the culmination of a dream here at NASA in Houston Texas Mission Control monitored every aspect of the moon shot these days it's used to monitor the International Space Station the actual control room used for the Apollo 11 mission is undergoing a bit of a refurb in honor of the 50th anniversary Marcos Flores is one of the current mission controllers for the ISS there was no guarantee that Apollo 11 was going to be successful I mean it was really cutting edge dangerous stuff wasn't it yeah definitely there was a lot of risk involved in the missions themselves and how dangerous they were but also a lot of unknowns in terms of being able to successfully move out of a huge Assembly Building and heads to the launch pad to build the launch vehicle NASA contracted Boeing North American Aviation the Douglas Aircraft Company and IBM to help build a rocket that would end up being the biggest and most [Music] [Applause] cool that rocket [Applause] this is a rocket inside here is a Saturn 5 rocket Stage one gets you off the launchpad and up to a speed of six thousand miles an hour [Music] two and a half minutes later all of this fuel you don't want to carry an empty casing into space so you ditch it to save on weight [Music] then five rocket engines in stage two ignites and send you into the upper atmosphere a hundred and fifteen miles up all that fuel is gone to you ditch the second stage and this rocket on stage three fires you around the earth and into orbit then it powers down and a little while later it restarts this time it sends you to the moon [Music] so here's the thing that bit there that's where the people sit all the rest of it is fuel while the rocket was incredibly powerful so at the time was the computing power required for the Apollo program even though in popular culture the computers of the day which in this case were giant mainframes are often compared unfavorably to contemporary technology the three 6075 that we used was a one myth machine 1 million instructions per second and it had 1 Meg of real memory or 1 million bytes a real memory and 4 million bytes of auxilary memory the numbers year for the you know the iPhone that I own or or anywhere from 10,000 times as as fast as that to a million to maybe even I think I've seen one that's a hundred million times as fast himer programs the actual code used for the descent and ascent of the lunar landing module and on July the 20th 1969 it kicked in as Neil Armstrong piloted the lunar lander on [Music] Oh 239 hours Armstrong exited the landing module and buttered now as any good tourist knows photos are a must Armstrong and Aldrin also left a plaque and a flag and took a phone call from President Richard Nixon what do we learn from the Apollo missions that we still use today we are leveraging a lot of the experience that we gained with the vehicles themselves in terms of the rocket beside the capsule design and what it takes for us to be able to safely you know send that that body up to space and bring it back down so let's head to the front of the International Space Station that's not something you get to say every day so we're now in front of the International Space Station Alison McIntyre is chief of NASA's space vehicle mock-up facility and today she's giving us a tour of her realm we were in amongst past spacecraft prototypes of future ships and a replica of the International Space Station that's used to train future astronauts we have a Canadian Davids and Jacques three Americans and then two Russian crew members every American who's flown to space since 1980 has trained in this facility so this morning we had an emergency scenario so you can actually pump smoke into a module and they run their procedures through it NASA is responsible for all of the integrated training so while the crew members may go to Russia together Russian systems training to Europe to get training on the Columbus European Space Agency's here we do integrated training the emergency scenarios and then these routine operations which is sort of a day in the life even though you've got part of the Space Shuttle in here and you've got a clone of the International Space Station and spacecraft of the future here too there are echoes of Apollo everywhere this is Orion which will take astronauts close to the moon in 2022 and it's design is very familiar this is significantly larger than Apollo but the similar shape and that's because while technology changes physics don't change so the physics of this entering the atmosphere is the same as it was in Apollo everything inside is higher tech and we're incorporating things like exercise equipment but it has to fit into a very small volume a toilet has to fit into a very small volume and things like Apollo did not have a toilets they deserve a medal just for that yes to what extent did the Apollo missions shape our understanding of how to do the moon and quite a lot when we first started launching space missions not just Apollo but mercury and Gemini we didn't know if humans could eat in space for example just fundamental questions what will happen to the body when you're free floating in zero gravity and there is one extremely important change that we'll see in future missions to the moon tell me about the people that will be the next people to stand on the moon so our administrator has said that the next people to land on the moon will be the next man and woman will be on that first mission and put boots on the moon so that's very exciting for all of us honestly right now our astronaut corps is about 40 percent female so they have some great astronauts to choose from they will get the best of the best and it doesn't take much to for that to be a female hello and welcome to the week in tech sticky with space it was the week that Virgin Galactic announced its plans to go public in a merger with a New York listed investment firm the move means a big cash boost for the human spaceflight company and the European Space Agency showed off a 3d printing skin and bones technique designed for low gravity the idea being that an injured astronaut could one day rustle up a bone or two whilst on a voyage to Mars the agency also unveiled a bouncing ball destined for the stars the aptly named space BOC could navigate the moon Mars or asteroids by hopping about rough terrain back down on earth it was also the week that British Airways was slapped with a hundred and eighty three million pound fame after half a million of its customers details were compromised in a security breach last year the penalty from the UK watchdog Information Commissioner's Office is the first to be made public under new gdpr rules Instagram launched a new anti-bullying AI nudging users are you sure you want to post this and Twitter banned words that dehumanize others on the basis of religion and just in time for summer this Robo Pharma could soon be picking the leaves for your salad the veggie bot from the University of Cambridge uses machine learning to identify and carefully pick right light is's you might be waiting a while for your dinner though [Music] being an astronaut on the International Space Station requires years of training today I'm being taught to do one tiny bit of it by amy ft so this is the coppola cupola Cooper yes this is a replica on board the ISS so we are going to be flying the space station robotic arm today to go and grab a commercial cargo vehicle called dragon which is developed by SpaceX okay see country to what I thought the supply craft don't dock automatically it's all down to the ISS crew to extend this seventeen and a half meter robot and pull them in there is a dark docking version of Dragon that's coming but this one and a lot of the other cargo vehicles right now they fly up to the station they get close enough that the arm can reach it and then the arm is used to go in and grab it and manually attach it so it's a little bit more controlled process okay I'm ready I'm ready to grab okay grab the dragon okay killing it you ready go for it there are two controllers for the arm to move it up down left right forward back and to roll it to the correct orientation whew and then when you're within pinching distance and everything is lined up there's a trigger to start an automated grabbing sequence okay first tip don't look out the window beautiful as it is you can't really judge that much from the actual scene instead I need to keep my eyes on the view from the camera mounted on the robots wrist well already I'm really nervous this is what the astronauts go through every every time there's a yeah at least you know that you're gonna sim so we can always reset if you mess out but they don't have that luxury on orbit you know so you you could bump the you could bump the dragon kind of push it away from us and put a raid on it you could fail to capture it I guess that would probably be like the worst things you were way off you could hit the dragon in some spot approach once the markings on the dragon are lined up with the guidelines on the screen it is time to grab it pull trigger now okay now remember hands off and now we're just gonna watch it do that sequence grab the dragon you got it yes this is just one of so many vital skills the ISS astronauts need my test scores are in and beginner's luck if you like but have to say I wasn't too shabby you're a little on the fast side but you got it done so that was great and then what you really want to see is the other axes your y&z should be really small relative to you to the others and they were so that was excellent you did a really good job a recent poll suggests that one in six Britons believed the moon landing was staged in the age of the Internet conspiracy theories run rampant and claiming the moon landings were a hoax is at the head of the pack companies like Nvidia have tried to use technology to try and prove the moon landings did happen they built a 3d render using powerful graphics processing units which realistically represents how light behaves on the moon debunking a popular conspiracy theory about the lighting in the moon landing images being wrong well we've decided to do some digging of our own and examine the evidence that proves yes human beings have landed on the moon 35 seconds and counting we are still go with Apollo 11 Jonathan Swift the famous novelist satirist reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion by which reasoning he never acquired if someone has a an unreasonable opinion about something based on nonsense it doesn't matter how much reasoning you do with them you're never gonna reason them out of it because reason didn't get there to begin with so there are the famous ones that you know the fact that oh they didn't actually go to them and they actually launched in the rocket an orbited the earth for a few times pretended they went to the moon and came home Oh radiation that's the other one there's no way they could have gone through the deadly Van Allen belts that surround planet Earth there's the kind of anomalies with the photographs all of which are ridiculous Stanley Kubrick directed it in a film set in area 51 somewhere in the desert the technology to fake the moon landings did not exist in 1969 the technology did exist to get to the moon in 1969 and just the lunar surface cameras were based on our 500l systems we had many modifications viewfinders and a mirror system all of this was removed to save weight which then locked into a chess bracket on the astronaut suit and it was literally moving their body tilting their body to frame up the images we can't see any stars because the contrast range of the surface images is too high [Music] so this is as close as a modern equivalent as we would have it has a hundred megapixel sensor if we took it to the surface today would not be able to capture stars and lunar surface detail in the same image the studio is the dust on the moon and when there's no atmosphere thus behaves differently than the rest acts so now you have to have a studio that you evacuated and had vacuum in well now all the safe suits have really work and the CEO has to be unbelievably fortified to withstand the pressure of the atmospheric pressure outside you have to really try really hard and have a great faith in the fact that you could you could fake it why don't they have faith in the scientists in the engineers who actually and the astronauts and the 20,000 companies that made it happen there's no faith in that lot but Stanley Kubrick in his film set there's lots of faith the lunar mission comes as a climax of the space race that the United States and Serbian have been competing in since the mid-1950s for technology and scientific supremacy the Soviets possessed advanced tracking capabilities of their own they would have used them to track ICBM missiles as well as spaceflight so their inability to detect conspiracy of this nature seems unlikely moreover they would have had every incentive to expose this in order to score a major propaganda vat of victory Apollo engineers were very well aware of the Van Allen belts and but it wasn't in them for very long and be it charted a course actually where the Van Alen birds have got kind of quite weak anyway you'd think that having moon rocks on the earth would be living proof that the conspiracy theories can be debugged those rocks are still being studied today some of them are sealed up never yet been touched because the scientists even back in the 60s and the 70s knew that technology would get better with time and they would be able to make new scientific discoveries we have left by the Apollo astronauts on the moon retroreflectors is a passive experiments were a bit like cat's eyes we can fire a laser at them bounce lasers from the earth to the moon to understand that the changing behaviors of the moon and its orbit it's sadly not enough for the deniers because they'll always see conspiracy one moon landing conspiracies have been around for several decades if Sonny got a new lease of life in the age of the internet things like Facebook groups let all these disparate ideas when people come together and find each other in a way that we've never had before so the Romans had conspiracy theories they just didn't have the Internet now we still have conspiracy theories because we're humans and our brains are fallible and we have the Internet it's a perfect storm the moon is so far away nearly a quarter of a million miles in fact but somehow LJ rich has found a way to get closer if you can't make it to the moon don't worry you can always leave a message I'm in pula croatia at an MTF labs event music tech fest runs it it's a community of sound lovers who thrive on pushing the boundaries of music using technology and this evenings entertainment is out of this world an interactive work of art called sister moon people to talk to the moon it's the perfect time of year for this planetary cosmic art project and proving very popular now I can hear you good evening evening and welcome via a live internet connection into the cabin my words are carried on radio waves from the Dingle Oh telescope two hours outside of Amsterdam in the Netherlands I'm going to speak into the microphone and you two are going to do something with my voice related to the moon right yeah we're going to put it on a radio wave and B going to send it to the moon one and a quarter seconds later my words reached the moon's surface my words are bounced back down to earth and I hear them after the return journey two and a half seconds in total hello moon people what's the weather like up there music do you like in 1956 this was among the world's first moving radio astronomy antennas after decommissioning it was lovingly restored and now used for science education and art projects like this one well I have to say I've done stranger things in my time but I'm not sure quite what they are next day I caught up with the artist Martine Nicole Rowena to find out how she and the moon got on speaking terms always wanted to become an astronaut and I'm in love with celestial bodies I'm in love with the universe I mean I'm in love with the fact that we are made of Stardust and I've been watching universe documentary since I was a kid and yeah I believe that it has a wonderful transformative effect to leave your system literally go to another sphere another celestial body bounce back and what happens is that inside your mind you are going to see the world from the outside the earth from the outside and you're gonna realize that actually we are on a spaceship ourselves a lovely way to democratize celestial communication and for earthlings like me it might be the closest I'll ever get to the moon and that's it from flight control 1 here at NASA for now because next week we'll be back to look even further into space I can't wait don't forget we're on social media YouTube Facebook Instagram and Twitter at BBC click thanks very much for watching and we'll see you soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 44,591

Rating: 4.7267876 out of 5

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, news, bbc news, nasa, moon, iss, space, station, mission control, apollo 13, apollo 11, moon landing, space station, anniversary, robot, facebook, twitter, ai, ibm, computer, social, launch, neil armstrong, one small step, buzz aldrin

Id: rvV7Vt0hRwA

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019