Saturn V

And then if we fast forward a decade and say, what's AI going to look like in a decade? that one X is now going to be somewhere between 100,000 X and a million X.

And if I compare that to my Honda Accord, that means that that Honda Accord is now going to have the same horsepower as the Saturn V rocket with all five engines on a full burn as it exits atmosphere, which is about 250 million horsepower.

So think about that, that you're going to take this Honda Accord, and in the short span of a decade and a half, it's going to have as much horsepower as the Saturn V rocket at full tilt.

It's hard for the human brain to get around some of just the scale of this stuff.

And so AI is advancing at what we can comfortably call a scary pace.

G'day, boys.

45 years ago, I strapped three bottle rockets together, but I staggered them so I would have staging, like the Saturn V rocket.

And the first stage took off, launched itself five metres into the air.

Second stage ignited.

So this is a Space Act agreement.

And yeah, this site in Stennis was built in the 1960s to test the first stage of the Saturn V.

And it was later used for the Space Shuttle and for Delta IV.

And most recently, it It was a place where they did the green run tests of SLS, right? Where they actually put an entire booster there and they started it firing for its full duration.

You know, I got, you know, pretty high grade point averages in the upper threes, but it wasn't straight As or anything.

And then I needed a better job because I needed more income, and I went back to Louisiana, and this was in the days of the Boeing Saturn V program, and I went to work for Boeing.

And at Boeing...

I got exposed to computing, and I started learning to write programs.

We would make it to the motherfucking moon.

On the morning of July 16th, Apollo 11 stacked upon a Saturn V rocket with three astronauts inside.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael

Collins.

But anyways, going back to what I was saying, during a crew debriefing, Buzz said that the first unusual thing that we saw, I guess, was one day out or something pretty close to the moon, and it had a sizable dimension to it.

So, they put a monocular to it.

Initially, both he and Neil believed they were just looking at the Saturn V launch rocket, but perhaps it was something else, not of Earth or the moon, so maybe they're saying a UFO, which, uh, Edgar Mitchell, he has said on not just the initial moon landing, but on subsequent flights he went on that he observed unidentified objects flying around him.

But then later on in their journey, Buzz said, I don't know whether I saw it the first night, but I'm sure I saw it the second night.

And the NASA scientists clearly decided the moon was far too quiet and introduced some calibrated events.

Beginning with Apollo 12, NASA deliberately crashed the spent Saturn V upper stages, roughly 14 tons each, into the moon.

The impacts were timed and located so the seismometers left by the astronauts could record and analyze them with more detail.

These were the best calibrated seismic sources ever used in another world.

Wave velocities for the upper crust were measured directly.

Later reanalysis of the entire Apollo seismic network, including those artificial events, they would constrain the existence and size of a small solid inner core and a fluid outer core on the moon.

The craters from the Saturn V stages were about 30 to 40 meters across.

They've all been imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

chill them into cryogenic liquids, load them into rocket tanks, and their is the liquid-hydrogen, liquid-oxygen pair, the very pair that once pushed the Saturn V stages carrying Apollo away from Earth, one of the most powerful propellant combinations humanity has ever used.

At that third tier, the strategic meaning of the ice deposits changes character entirely.

on the moon as it stands there is not a single fuel pump worth the name every gram of propellant used to launch land or lift off from the moon once had to be carried up from earth at a price higher than gold an ice deposit at the south pole with a small electrolysis plant and cryogenic storage tanks would turn the moon from a destination into a gas station probes alive, refuel on the spot, and fly onward, to orbit, to the lagrange points, to Mars.

Gemini made the first rendezvous and docking in orbit.

Then the mighty Saturn V, the largest rocket ever to reach orbit, carried Apollo 8 around the Moon in 1968.

The crew saw Earth rise from the moon, and it helped the world fall in love with our home planet once again.

July 20th, 1969, we landed on the moon.