36 lines
5.8 KiB
Markdown
36 lines
5.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Apollo program"
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chunk: 11/12
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program"
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category: "reference"
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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date_saved: "2026-05-05T12:32:53.499827+00:00"
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instance: "kb-cron"
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---
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Accurate estimates of human spaceflight costs were difficult in the early 1960s, as the capability was new and management experience was lacking. Preliminary cost analysis by NASA estimated $7 billion – $12 billion for a crewed lunar landing effort. NASA Administrator James Webb increased this estimate to $20 billion before reporting it to Vice President Johnson in April 1961.
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Project Apollo was a massive undertaking, representing the largest research and development project in peacetime. At its peak, it employed over 400,000 employees and contractors around the country and accounted for more than half of NASA's total spending in the 1960s. After the first Moon landing, public and political interest waned, including that of President Nixon, who wanted to rein in federal spending. NASA's budget could not sustain Apollo missions which cost, on average, $445 million ($2.73 billion adjusted) each while simultaneously developing the Space Shuttle. The final fiscal year of Apollo funding was 1973.
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== Apollo Applications Program ==
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Looking beyond the crewed lunar landings, NASA investigated several post-lunar applications for Apollo hardware. The Apollo Extension Series (Apollo X) proposed up to 30 flights to Earth orbit, using the space in the Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA) to house a small orbital laboratory (workshop). Astronauts would continue to use the CSM as a ferry to the station. This study was followed by design of a larger orbital workshop to be built in orbit from an empty S-IVB Saturn upper stage and grew into the Apollo Applications Program (AAP). The workshop was to be supplemented by the Apollo Telescope Mount, which could be attached to the ascent stage of the lunar module via a rack. The most ambitious plan called for using an empty S-IVB as an interplanetary spacecraft for a Venus fly-by mission.
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The S-IVB orbital workshop was the only one of these plans to make it off the drawing board. Dubbed Skylab, it was assembled on the ground rather than in space, and launched in 1973 using the two lower stages of a Saturn V. It was equipped with an Apollo Telescope Mount. Skylab's last crew departed the station on February 8, 1974, and the station itself re-entered the atmosphere in 1979 after development of the Space Shuttle was delayed too long to save it.
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The Apollo–Soyuz program also used Apollo hardware for the first joint nation spaceflight, paving the way for future cooperation with other nations in the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs.
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== Recent observations ==
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In 2008, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's SELENE probe observed evidence of the halo surrounding the Apollo 15 Lunar Module blast crater while orbiting above the lunar surface.
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Beginning in 2009, NASA's robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, while orbiting 50 kilometers (31 mi) above the Moon, photographed the remnants of the Apollo program left on the lunar surface, and each site where crewed Apollo flights landed. All of U.S. flags left on the Moon during the Apollo missions were found to still be standing, with the exception of the one left during the Apollo 11 mission, which was blown over during that mission's lift-off from the lunar surface; the degree to which these flags retain their original colors remains unknown. The flags cannot be seen through a telescope from Earth.
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In a November 16, 2009, editorial, The New York Times opined:
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[T]here's something terribly wistful about these photographs of the Apollo landing sites. The detail is such that if Neil Armstrong were walking there now, we could make him out, make out his footsteps even, like the astronaut footpath clearly visible in the photos of the Apollo 14 site. Perhaps the wistfulness is caused by the sense of simple grandeur in those Apollo missions. Perhaps, too, it's a reminder of the risk we all felt after the Eagle had landed—the possibility that it might be unable to lift off again and the astronauts would be stranded on the Moon. But it may also be that a photograph like this one is as close as we're able to come to looking directly back into the human past ...
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There the [Apollo 11] lunar module sits, parked just where it landed 40 years ago, as if it still really were 40 years ago and all the time since merely imaginary.
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== Legacy ==
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=== Science and engineering ===
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The Apollo program has been described as the greatest technological achievement in human history. Apollo stimulated many areas of technology, leading to over 1,800 spinoff products as of 2015, including advances in the development of cordless power tools, fireproof materials, heart monitors, solar panels, digital imaging, and the use of liquid methane as fuel. The flight computer design used in both the lunar and command modules was, along with the Polaris and Minuteman missile systems, the driving force behind early research into integrated circuits (ICs). By 1963, Apollo was using 60 percent of the United States' production of ICs. The crucial difference between the requirements of Apollo and the missile programs was Apollo's much greater need for reliability. While the Navy and Air Force could work around reliability problems by deploying more missiles, the political and financial cost of failure of an Apollo mission was unacceptably high.
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Technologies and techniques required for Apollo were developed by Project Gemini. The Apollo project was enabled by NASA's adoption of new advances in semiconductor electronic technology, including metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) and silicon integrated circuit chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
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=== Cultural impact === |