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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Fellow Motteizans, what are your small scale conspiracy theories? I'm not talking grand narratives here. What minor, apolitical conspiracy theories do you explain to the next table at a diner.

For myself, I think at least some large portion of lottery drawings are not random. I base this belief on the fact that of repeat lottery winners, a suspicious number of them are math professors.

I'm not entirely serious, but I am enthusiastic about moon landing conspiracy theories. If nothing else, I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.

I am a firm believer that many major sporting events have been rigged and that the leagues do everything they can to keep this quiet. If you can watch this game or this game and come away feeling like someone wasn't trying to get a desired result, I don't know what to tell you.

I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.

Damn, that's good bait. Okay: I guess I haven't thought about it? The thing that most people seemed to think was weirdest was "we sent people all the way to the moon but then we couldn't get back for half a century", but we made it all the way to the moon as fast as possible by spending as much money as possible, hundreds of billions of dollars inflation-adjusted, with NASA funding then cut by 2/3rds once "we won the Space Race" had been demonstrated. We tried to switch to a cheaper launch vehicle design (but not a cheaper procurement strategy...) afterward, we failed, sunk cost fallacy kept that failure on our backs for decades, and now here we are.

My favorite space conspiracy is the Lost Cosmonauts theory, Heinlein version. "Ha ha we already put a man in space oh wait the retrorockets screwed up did we mention it was just a test dummy" sounds so much like an inept coverup of a death. If there actually had been a coverup I'd have expected some documents/details/myths to have been leaked in post-Soviet Russia, though, along with the N-1 failures and the more salacious retellings of Komarov's death.

The thing that most people seemed to think was weirdest was "we sent people all the way to the moon but then we couldn't get back for half a century"...

This is, of course, kind of weird, but not nearly as weird as it being such a solved problem that we were sending golf equipment along for the ride! Or that moon rocks keep turning out to be fakes, or that we lost all of the telemetry data, or that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work. Of course, flipping through any of the conspiracy sites will provide a whole bunch more that's very weird. I don't really think it's a hoax, but I do think it's pretty weird that the people that are working on the current project don't really seem all that confident that going to the moon is something they can actually do. But really, my main question for friends is why they have such a high degree of confidence on something that they've really never even given a moment's thought to. Even though I think it's above the board, I still get a weird tingling when I notice how hard the Artemis Program is to pull off, but the Boomers tell me that when they were kids, they just grabbed some calculators and went right up for some casual golfing.

that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work.

To be fair, a lot of the Apollo Program approach was very much based around the concept of "keep trying something until it works", rather than actually understanding how it works. A number of different engine resonance issues were 'fixed' simply by throwing literal bombs into the stream and hoping they'd disrupt unintentional bombs. Even where they had decent models and fixes, sometimes they launched unfixed versions to try and hit deadlines: this was funny when coincidence with other unexplained problems saved lives, and less so when it ended them (on the ground!).

More broadly, fluid calculations are hard.

I think it's important to remember how complex manned spaceflight is and how chronically little attention is paid to end-to-end documentation. In fact, a big part of me thinks that utterly "complete" documentation is impossible because latent knowledge is so pervasive that sometimes you don't even realize you're using it as part of a step-by-step process. Furthermore, documentation outside of end user focused documentation is more about thinking through problems than a totally exhaustive record what what happened when and why for what reasons.

An interesting thought experiment I like to run with my developer friends; think of the most complex yet elegant piece of software you can think of...maybe the Linux kernel? Could Linux Torvals (or anyone) rebuild it from scratch so that its roughly functionally the same ... probably. Would the structure of the code be anything like it is .... probably not.

NASA engineers definitely know, remember (in an institutional sense), and appreciate the broad strokes of slinging a rocket at the moon, but its day one for all the details again.

or that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work.

Hey, I buy that. I work on a semi-mothballed flight sim that's evolved into C from a puddle of Fortran. Getting the damn thing to work on a machine from this decade is a daily struggle, and that's just on the technical end of things. Technical and logistics headaches in aerospace make perfect sense to me.

I think the Moon landing footage as broadcast to the public were definitely faked with the help of Stanley Kubrick; it's functionally indistinguishable from the real thing because he insisted that it all be filmed on location.

I do think it's pretty weird that the people that are working on the current project don't really seem all that confident that going to the moon is something they can actually do

Yeah, that's what the people who actually managed to do it said too- though if they had their doubts it's not like they would have really been permitted to air them at that point. It's not like we don't understand the physics of landing on other celestial bodies, given we throw stuff at them all the time (the Moon, Mars, and on occasion others too)- but the vast majority (all?) of the institutional secret sauce when it comes to engineering manned spaceflight with nothing but a slide rule and mid-20th-century materials science is 6 feet under now. And that goes for the Soviets just as well as it does the Americans; at least the Soviets didn't really stop cranking out Progresses.

And really, Artemis seems to me to suffer from F-35itis given they're both peacetime craft; there's a lot more bullshit they want/need the computers to automatically deal with now. "Just hit it with a hammer" and "turn it off, then back on again" was fine for Apollo (the fact that the people they sent tended to be test pilots meant they expected training to take up a lot of the slack)- and the telemetry they had was, I suspect, relatively minimal. But that's not fine for Artemis, built to a tighter budget with pilots that don't have the 20 years flying prototype fighter jets to fix anything too technical that goes wrong up there. And considering that they had to re-invent literally everything I'd say the project is coming along about as quickly as one would expect.

not nearly as weird as it being such a solved problem that we were sending golf equipment along for the ride!

The national security objective was achieved, and they managed to pull it off the first try. If your project isn't getting renewed and you know it, but the fuel and development costs are already paid for, why not go for victory laps?

Oh well, at least you can shoot the laser at it and determine that there's definitely something there from the reflectors they left behind.