benjamin

I don’t really understand the maths it takes to send humans behind the Moon and bring them back safely. And the more I sit with that, the more it genuinely messes with my head even tho my love for physics and my knowledge of physics is astounding to a point Somebody had to work out a path where the Moon’s gravity is pulling you in, the Earth is pulling you back, and you’re moving just fast enough and not slow enough not to get trapped by either. They had to figure out the exact angle to come back into Earth’s atmosphere too. Too steep, you burn up. Too shallow, you bounce off and drift into space. And they had to get all of that right at the same time, for real people sitting in a small metal capsule about 400k kilometres away from home. Nothing in that system is standing still. The Moon is moving. The Earth is moving. Even the Sun is pulling on everything. And still, some people looked at all of that motion, all of that chaos, and turned it into numbers you can follow. Go here. Adjust here. Come back here. And unlike nepa light, it infact works. There’s also that moment in the journey where the crew passes behind the Moon. No contact with Earth. No signal. Just silence, with a massive rock blocking everything they’ve ever known. The only reason they can stay calm in that moment is because someone, somewhere, did the maths and proved they’ll come out the other side. I don’t know what it feels like to trust something that much. To put your life in an equation when you’re that far away from everything. But I do know this for sure, whatever that level of thinking is, whatever it takes to reach it, it might be one of the most extraordinary things human beings have ever done...