Awesome. So they can do a thing, which proves their concept but doesn’t have any immediate use. They add a mirror to the laser bouncing to make the results more focused and useful. How is this a bad thing?
Just because they can bounce a signal off it and see it again doesn’t mean it’s giving them useful data. We had fuel injection technology in World War Two, it wasn’t made widespread into every car until there was a need and a profit for doing so.
The moon holds little value as far as profit goes. The cost of making a permanent base there and cycling out personnel to avoid permanent muscle atrophy is huge and for what? Some rocks and maybe some helium3? That require more money to bring back safely. It would be different if there was some kind of super uranium that would enable fission reactors cheaply, or for a staging base for sending material to Mars, but given the history of every colony ever rebelling and fighting for independence, anyone who looks at mars being both a colony and friendly for long needs to look at history a lot closer.
A moon base beyond military use doesn’t justify the cost to most beancounters, nor does repeated trips there and back.
The point about useful data is mine. Just because you can bounce the light off it and show you can see it again is an interesting thing indeed, but it’s not useful. You can turn your porch light on and off and send Morse code to your neighbour 2 miles away, but it’s more useful to send that light down a fibre optic cable and send an easy to read post on the internet. Both are doable but one is infinitely more useful than the other.
People use it as proof that we sent reflectors to the moon, so the fact that we can bounce laser off the moon even without any reflectors placed there, is useful, as it debunks about the last proof that people cling to, regarding that man landed spacecrafts on the moon.
The need for specialized ultra sensitive equipment in the case of the 1962 laser bouncing and not needing that same specialized equipment after the reflector seems to prove otherwise.
You could test this yourself. Take a laser of the needed wattage and shine it randomly at the moon, measure your findings of the reflected light and then aim at the reflector that’s up there and measure how much different it is. The former may prove challenging compared to the latter as amateur astronomers can hit the reflector and track how much father the moon is moving from us year after year, where the former needs ultra sensitive equipment.
Awesome. So they can do a thing, which proves their concept but doesn’t have any immediate use. They add a mirror to the laser bouncing to make the results more focused and useful. How is this a bad thing? Just because they can bounce a signal off it and see it again doesn’t mean it’s giving them useful data. We had fuel injection technology in World War Two, it wasn’t made widespread into every car until there was a need and a profit for doing so. The moon holds little value as far as profit goes. The cost of making a permanent base there and cycling out personnel to avoid permanent muscle atrophy is huge and for what? Some rocks and maybe some helium3? That require more money to bring back safely. It would be different if there was some kind of super uranium that would enable fission reactors cheaply, or for a staging base for sending material to Mars, but given the history of every colony ever rebelling and fighting for independence, anyone who looks at mars being both a colony and friendly for long needs to look at history a lot closer. A moon base beyond military use doesn’t justify the cost to most beancounters, nor does repeated trips there and back.
I never made any point about useful data. The point is, you do not need a reflector to bounce a laser off the moon, according to their own claim.
The point about useful data is mine. Just because you can bounce the light off it and show you can see it again is an interesting thing indeed, but it’s not useful. You can turn your porch light on and off and send Morse code to your neighbour 2 miles away, but it’s more useful to send that light down a fibre optic cable and send an easy to read post on the internet. Both are doable but one is infinitely more useful than the other.
People use it as proof that we sent reflectors to the moon, so the fact that we can bounce laser off the moon even without any reflectors placed there, is useful, as it debunks about the last proof that people cling to, regarding that man landed spacecrafts on the moon.
The need for specialized ultra sensitive equipment in the case of the 1962 laser bouncing and not needing that same specialized equipment after the reflector seems to prove otherwise. You could test this yourself. Take a laser of the needed wattage and shine it randomly at the moon, measure your findings of the reflected light and then aim at the reflector that’s up there and measure how much different it is. The former may prove challenging compared to the latter as amateur astronomers can hit the reflector and track how much father the moon is moving from us year after year, where the former needs ultra sensitive equipment.