For many years, the Moon has remained one of the most mysterious objects in space. Many amazing things are associated with the satellite of the Earth by the Moon, which have been silent for a long time.
Selena, Phoebe, Diana - the only satellite of our planet - have always worried scientists. At one time, the theory was popular that the moon was not at all a natural cosmic body, but an artificial satellite launched by a certain cosmic mind. However, this hypothesis has not been confirmed.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that rather the opposite, the moon is in many ways similar to a living organism. And by its existence, it maintains the fragile harmony of natural conditions on our planet, allowing humanity to survive.
The moon rotates in orbit at a distance of 385,000 kilometers from our planet. It takes just three and a half days to fly from the Earth to the Moon. This is the closest planet to us. That is why its gravitational field is constantly pulling the Earth. The attraction of the Moon is so strong that under its influence, the waters of the World Ocean seem to bend towards it, the ebb and flow of the tides appear on the Earth. When the Moon, moving in its orbit, approaches our planet, the tide comes, and when it moves away, the ebb comes. Due to the ebb and flow between the surface of the Earth and the waters of the oceans, a friction force arises. This leads to the fact that the speed of rotation of our planet around its axis is constantly slowing down, which means that the earth's day is becoming longer.
“The very rotation of the earth changes. Decreases all the time. The day is increasing. The day will increase all the time, the year will remain so, and there will be more hours (in a day), the calendar will have to be redone. We will have 50 hours a day,”says Valentin Esipov, astronomer, leading researcher at the Moscow State University.
The "deceleration" of our planet under the influence of the Moon occurs constantly. This has been going on for 4.5 billion years. Since the oceans formed on Earth. 3 billion years ago, the Earth's day was only 9 hours. When prehistoric animals lived on our planet 530 million years ago, a day lasted 21 hours. But for dinosaurs that lived 100 million years ago, the day lasted 23 hours. Now the day has stretched to 24 hours.
Thus, if braking continues, it will lead not only to a change in the length of the day, but also to the climate. Scientists have long wondered if our planet will be habitable in the future. Few people know, but in the USSR, in the event of a global catastrophe, a plan was even developed to colonize the Moon.
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In the 1960s, a model of the lunar city was created in the design bureau of general mechanical engineering. Scientists have been working on it for over a year. As a result, cylindrical structures were developed, which were planned to be buried in the lunar soil. According to scientists, this should have saved the lunar inhabitants from solar radiation. It was necessary to make these lunar houses out of metal, and provide them with thermal insulation so that the inhabitants of the moon did not suffer from sudden changes in temperature. Indeed, literally in one day, the temperature on the moon changes within 300 degrees.
Soviet scientists proposed to transport these structures to the moon using rockets. In their head compartment, one lunar house could be placed. Therefore, it was necessary to make at least 50 flights to deliver everything necessary for the city and its future residents.
The first lunar inhabitants were supposed to be biologist Andrey Bozhko, doctor German Manovtsev, technician Boris Ulybyshev. They were very seriously trained for the flight to the moon. And while the designers were developing the rocket, they lived in an experimental complex - a small box, in which conditions were created, exactly repeating the expected conditions of life on the moon.
Similar projects have been developed in the United States. But neither the USSR nor America have implemented them.
In July 1969, American astronauts made their first moon landings. And 7 years later, this fact was challenged in the same USA. In 1976, a book appeared on the shelves of bookstores called "We've Never Been on the Moon." Its author is American writer Bill Keissing. He argued that the flights of American astronauts to the moon were a hoax commissioned by the American government. And the astronauts' negotiations with the mission control center, video recording of the lunar landing and numerous photographs taken on the Earth's satellite are just a fake. And the directors of Hollywood created it. In the film pavilions of the "dream factory" they built the necessary scenery and simply imitated the lunar expedition, filming it all on film.
After the publication of Bill Keissing's book, many supporters of the so-called "lunar conspiracy" appeared in the world. As one of the main evidence, supporters of the lunar conspiracy cited a secret order from NASA, according to which in 1968, just six months before the Apollo mission, almost 700 people were fired from the agency in one day. And they are all designers involved in the development of a rocket that was supposed to deliver astronauts to the moon.
Supporters of this theory consider photographs and videos taken during an expedition to the moon to be another proof of the "lunar conspiracy". For example, in the famous footage, when Neil Armstrong plants the American flag on the lunar surface, the flag flutters in the wind. Conspiracy theorists believe this is a fake, since there can be no wind on the moon.
However, the arguments of the supporters of the theory of the "lunar conspiracy" are powerless over the facts. Indeed, hundreds of specialists carefully followed the American lunar mission around the world, including in the Soviet Union. Moreover, signals from Apollo 11 launched to the Moon were recorded by dozens of radar stations.
The moon landing was broadcast live to the whole world. More than a billion people have seen American astronaut Neil Armrstrong leave the module and take his first steps on the lunar surface.
And after a few minutes the broadcast was suddenly interrupted. Instead of a picture, viewers saw only interference. These problems lasted almost 2 minutes, after which the communication session was restored, and the moon picture appeared on the screens again.
Only in 1999, 30 years after this historic mission, the legendary American astronaut Edwin Aldrin - the second crew member of the Apollo 11 mission - made a sensational statement. It turns out that the two-minute interference on the air is not an accident. The radio signal was artificially distorted in the very center of flight control. This is because in those two minutes something began to happen to the astronauts on the moon that defied any reasonable explanation. The American aerospace agency NASA simply did not dare to broadcast this to the whole world.
It was only recently that this recording of the astronauts' negotiations was found in the secret archives of NASA.
ASTRONAUTS NEIL ARMSTRONG AND BAZZ Aldrin SENDED FROM THE MOON: “These are giant balls. They're getting closer. No, no … This is not an optical illusion. There can be no doubt about that!"
FLIGHT CONTROL: Apollo 11, what's going on with you? Describe what you see?"
Astronaut: "They are here, next to us, the light is too bright, you can't see anything."
FLIGHT CONTROL: “What's in there? (Communication interrupted) Control center is calling Apollo 11 …
On the tape, you can clearly hear that the crew of the spacecraft collided with something inexplicable. Very soon, this tape disappeared, and NASA said that more than 700 boxes of video and audio recordings of space expeditions literally disappeared into thin air. Hundreds of priceless materials were stolen, but the most incredible thing is that a unique video of a flight to the moon, about which no one knew anything, disappeared.
For many years, the cosmonaut, then in the crew, Edwin Aldrin tried to prove that what they saw on the moon was not a fiction or a hallucination. But they didn’t believe him. Indeed, except for the astronauts who visited the Moon, no one could confirm this: not a single device recorded the presence of foreign objects. Many believed that Edwin Aldrin was just fantasizing. Only today it can be assumed: everything that he saw is not an invention and not a fantasy …
One would think that all these stories are nothing more than hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen or stress … But it turns out that something similar was observed by Soviet cosmonauts.
Vladislav Volkov heard a dog barking in flight and a strange voice, as if the Universe itself spoke to him. Alexander Serebrov without binoculars saw from orbit all the streets of Cape Town. Vitaly Sevastyanov heard the sound of rain, Yuri Gagarin said that during the entire flight he was pursued by an unknown melody, which he had never heard before, very complex and very beautiful. Vitaly Sevastyanov, flying over his native Sochi, clearly saw his own two-story house. Astronaut Gordon Cooper, flying over the United States, with the naked eye made out not only large houses and surrounding buildings, but also a steam locomotive crawling along the rails. Only after the flight did it become clear that his wife was on the same train that day.
Be that as it may, plans for the colonization of the moon were being worked out. And they were developed seriously. Suffice it to recall the mysterious project Kiev-17, which they began to build near Chernobyl. It included a large airfield for transport aircraft, 8 factories and the main rocket launcher.
After Stalin's death, the lunar baton was picked up by the new secretary general - Nikita Khrushchev. All the forces of the country were thrown into space exploration. In 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first artificial satellite into earth orbit. Its launch stunned the whole world. In the same year, another blow to the United States was the launch of Sputnik 2, which took a dog named Laika into space. It was a matter of honor for Washington to send the first man into space.
In the fall of 1958, the United States created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA. America began to step on the heels of the Soviet Union. The USSR threw all its strength to get to the moon first. In December 1959, the Soviet station "Luna-1" transmitted the first images of the surface of our planet's satellite to earth. A year later, the whole world watched with a shudder the flight of Belka and Strelka. The dogs made 17 orbits around the Earth and landed safely. Soon Strelka gave birth to healthy puppies, one of them Nikita Khrushchev ordered to give the wife of the President of the United States Jacqueline Kennedy. The final slap in the face was the flight into space of Yuri Gagarin in April 1961. In response, Kennedy set a task: to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade.
This is how the Moon Race began. In the USSR, Sergei Korolev was instructed to develop a super-powerful rocket that can reach the surface of the moon. On June 23, 1960, Khrushchev signed the government decree "On the creation of powerful launch vehicles, satellites, spacecraft and the exploration of outer space." This was the beginning of the creation of the "N1-L3" complex. It consisted of three elements: the upper stage D, which served to decelerate the entire complex near the Moon and then to decelerate before landing, the lunar ship itself and the lunar orbital ship.
Different versions of the lunar ship were developed in the country's leading design bureaus - Korolev, Yangel, Chelomey. Colossal streams of money were spent on any development, only for the Soviet man to fly to the moon first. The total costs amounted to about 12 billion rubles. If you count at that rate, that's $ 18 billion.
Project Н1-Л3 repeated the American project Apollo, which started three years earlier than the Soviet program. For several years, ships were built at a super-fast pace for landing a man on the moon. But on July 20, 1969, the information about the landing of the first man on the moon sounded like a bolt from the blue. American.
After Neil Armstrong visited the moon, the space race between the US and the USSR was almost curtailed. The hasty completion of the lunar program alerted even ignorant people. What could American astronauts find on the Moon, and what scared them so?
At first, NASA published a large memorandum, according to which they planned to build the first lunar city on the Moon almost in the next 5-6 years. But after that, six lunar flights passed, and the remaining six were curtailed. Moreover, three of the canceled flights were even paid for. The missiles were ready, the crews were prepared, all the equipment was purchased.
Why did it happen? Today no one can give an exact answer to this question. However, it is possible that very soon many cosmic mysteries will be solved. After all, the first steps have already been taken towards the development of the solar system.
Today Russia, the United States and Europe are fighting for the right to become the first country to carry out a manned flight to Mars. Already in 2018, the European Mars rover Exomars Rover should go to Mars. It is planned that he will take soil samples and draw up a detailed map of the area. Even India launched its Mangalyan space probe to Mars in November 2013. It is needed to test the technology of space flights to the Red Planet. China also announced its plans to explore Mars, after successfully launching the automatic interplanetary station Chang'e-3 to study the moon. NASA is testing a "flying saucer" designed to soft-land a spacecraft in the rarefied atmosphere of the Red Planet.
At the end of July, scientists made a sensational statement that a unique space engine had been created, thanks to which it would be possible to reach the moon in just four hours of flight, and to Mars in two and a half months. It was developed 15 years ago by British engineer Roger Shoer. For a long time, despite numerous tests, the engine could not be brought to mind. Many scientists even called it "impossible". However, today NASA researchers finally confirmed that the engine passed the test. This means, perhaps very soon, space travel to the Moon and Mars will become a simple routine.