"Apollo 11" Topic

No, I've not blundered onto the wrong forum!
All of the recent 50th anniversary celebrations of the moon landing had me thinking that it was indeed the greatest human achievement.
However, then I thought that the technological problems, navigation issues, cost and of course commitment & courage needed by the space program were similar in many regards to that required by the age of sail explorers. So which was indeed the greatest achievement?
On the plus side for the moon landings, they actually left the earth & entered into a complete void – no lifeboat or desert island there. On the other hand, they knew what they were aiming for & just had to plan how to get there – the early age of sail explorers were really leaping in the dark.
So – does the forum feel the moon landings were actually eclipsed (no pun intended) by their earlier sailing counterparts such as Columbus or Magellan? – or did NASA actually trump these with their giant leap?

Man has traveled around the planet by accident or design long before the European explorers, rarely has a human first shown up where no man has gone before.
(check out my posts on the last page of The Last Word thread.)

Both were mighty achievements. Until recently, human life was pretty cheap. I'd guess loss of life was rather expected during the Age of Sail. But there are similarities. In the forward to the Traveller rpg, the author describes interstellar space travel as akin to ocean voyages in the 1500s.

Space travel trumps sailing, though I get where you are coming from.

Back in the day, explorers setting off into the unknown to far flung regions certainly were brave, and had major challenges too.

Man has traveled around the planet by accident or design long before the European explorers, rarely has a human first shown up where no man has gone before.

Yes, but they mostly got there by foot or birth they didn't have to get where they were by braving a sea voyage into the unknown.

Thanks for the responses so far. though I'm not so sure space travel wins hands down quite so easily.
Columbus couldn't contact mission control for help/advice, and whilst the space program was a vast undertaking involving tens of thousands of personnel (and billions of followers) the early sailors were a far more independent & self motivating breed. I'm guessing when the "ship" hit the fan and you were being tossed about not knowing if your ship would hold together and how far it was to the nearest land or fresh water, a certain type of courage was required.

Thanks for the responses so far. though I'm not so sure space travel wins hands down quite so easily.
Columbus couldn't contact mission control for help/advice, and whilst the space program was a vast undertaking involving tens of thousands of personnel (and billions of followers) the early sailors were a far more independent & self motivating breed.

Except "help" was actually 252,000 miles away for the Apollo crews. Sure, they may have radio contact and in the case of Apollo 13 had experts radioing instructions -- but you're really far away from tangible help.

In space, if things go wrong:

* You can't bail out into a life boat and have even a chance of rowing or sailing to refuge – you die.

* You have limited air and when you run out of O2 you die.

* You could have lots of O2, but if your CO2 scrubbers fail you die.

* If your batteries go out you die.

* If you get hit by a solar flare without enough shielding, you die.

* If something happens to your spacecraft and you have a lengthy flight delay past your supplies, you can't fish for food, you die.

Space is the most inhospitable, deadly environment humans have ever traveled to. The Apollo lander was essentially a tinfoil balloon – the skin was no thicker than that of a coca cola can. It was also designed for operations in 1/6th gravity environment, and would collapse on itself in full 1G on Earth. It had limited fuel and needed level landing place. Apollo 15 landed on the slope of a small crater with a 10% grade. If it landed on just an 11% grade, it would have been unable to take off and they would have died.

So as difficult as the early voyages of discovery had been, spaceflight is infinitely more difficult and dangerous, and the Apollo missions the pinnacle.

The Apollo missions were the equivalent of throwing a raft together overnight with a rough ballpark estimate of how much food and water three people would need to get to the other side of a body of water.

Yes it was a bit more high tech than that, but look at the voyages, they had one or more ships with boats and full crews, many of which had skills like carpentry, iron working etc.

To emulate that level of capability they would have to move the equivalent mass of the ISS into orbit once or twice, assemble it into one or more ships with dozens of crew and all the equipment and skills to face most issues head on rather than have to assemble something with duct tape and some spare cardboard tubes.

Of course all that would have taken twice the time and ten times the money if not more and wasn't on the cards, so they landed on a budget with the absolute minimum equipment to keep three men safe to the moon and back.

The Soviet equivalent was not a lower grade inferior design, it was, given their resources, an even greater achievement than Apollo, though it was never tested to its full potential for better or worse.

Points taken, but I think the above replies have a 20th Century view of sailing. Its 1492, you're in mid Atlantic, to paraphrase SBminisguy:

You hit a big wave & broach – you die
You get yellow fever – you die
You get lost – you die
You run out of water = you die
You get killed by natives – you die
You get hit by a whale – you die
break a leg & get gangrene – you die
get a cut & get septicaemia – you die
Crew mutinies – you die
etc etc etc…

Yes, space is the most inhospitable environment, but the sea in 15th Century would kill you just as certainly in a far greater variety of ways – just not as quick. No lifeboat, no lifejacket, no c-rations, no temperature, no radio, no coastguard…

I'm certainly not denying Apollo was a phenomenal achievement, I state this in my original post, especially given the relatively low tech available at the time, I just think the early mariners deserve equal recognition, if for no other reason they actually set out wholly ignorant of what – if anything other than a slow death – they would find.

I know certain pubs more dangerous than either of those..!!