The_Only_AL

The_Only_AL t1_ixgbfgk wrote

Boy that’s a hard question. First Man is an absolutely brilliant read about Neil Armstrong. It’s great because it’s not all about nuts and bolts but gets into the state of the world at the time, how people think about space travel, their motivations for wanting to do it, the complexity and difficulty of doing it, and of course what in my view one of the bravest men ever ticks. There’s a million sources that’ll help you understand the engineering and science, but space travel is deeper than that.

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The_Only_AL t1_ixfbaov wrote

To answer your question and not drift off into tangents, yes it’s possible. It comes down to how many reliable rockets are made. There’s no technical reason why not, we have the ability. We need to able to prove long term life support far from Earth and being able to reliably and safely land. A mission to Mars will require many layers of redundancy, because Mars is a long way away, the mission won’t be able to call for help or spare parts. Once we land on the Moon and prove out systems and gear it will become clearer how soon we can go to Mars.

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The_Only_AL t1_iwpk7og wrote

I’ve read the book several times, and the movie was pretty good, especially the music for the landing, it was so intense. I thought it focused a bit too much on Neil’s loss and so it was kind of depressing. Whilst Armstrong was deeply affected by the loss of his daughter and Ed White and other pilots, he was generally a very intense person but also really fun and goofy. A humble man, who was intensely focused on getting a job done right, and he loooved aircraft. He was universally well loved by almost everyone, a truly great man.

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