Thanks John!
BTW the new CNN documentary about Apollo 11 was excellent! Lots of new film clips and very well presented.
walrus
Yep, that's actually what got me going on this.
Cleanest footage I've ever seen of it.
Also liked how they noted the time as elapsed hours into the mission.
3 days to the moon.
Think about that for minute.
As a kid you don't really grasp the incredibility, it's just sci-fi reality.
Also love how they gave the heart rates at various critical maneuvers.
Like after the 3rd stage orbital burn getting ready for lunar injection (or maybe it was right after performing the lunar injection?) Armstrong was down to 80-something.
Another recently debuted documentary went into the story of the guy who
really "figured out" how to get to the moon:
John Houbolt.
NOT Von Braun.
VB was till hung up on mega-rockets.
The problem with getting one of those behemoths to the moon was weight of the fuel payload.
NO way realistically get enough off the planet to get there and back in a fixed vehicle configuration.
Needed to break the task up into component vehicles which could be discarded to reduce mass and thus fuel required for the lunar landing and escape, and return.
Although Houbolt didn't create the concept, his tireless lobbying for it was what truly made the landings possible within JFK's stated deadline of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. (Apollo 12 made it, too.)
Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" is also a great read.
Another thought:
The Space Race was actually one the best things to ever happen to this country, economically.
Plenty of jobs created and all kinds of consumer fringe benefits in technological advances.
Tang and Velcro, baby.
And the
AGC:
"The computer's performance was comparable to the first generation of home computers from the late 1970s, such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET"
As a kid I was entranced by the Gemini program.
Maybe that's part of why the moon landing didn't seem so world-changing to me, it was a foregone conclusion.
OF COURSE we were going to get there.
FIRST.
But with Gemini things weren't yet so certain.
We did our first space walk.
We practiced docking.
10 manned missions in 24 months, including:
Gemini V, 21–29 August 1965: First week-long flight; first use of fuel cells for electrical power; evaluated guidance and navigation system for future rendezvous missions. Completed 120 orbits.
Gemini VII, 4–18 December 1965: When the original Gemini VI mission was scrubbed because the launch of the Agena docking target failed, Gemini VII was used as the rendezvous target instead.
Primary objective was to determine whether humans could live in space for 14 days.
Gemini VIII, 16–17 March 1966:
Accomplished first docking with another space vehicle, an unmanned Agena Target Vehicle.
While docked, a Gemini spacecraft thruster malfunction caused near-fatal tumbling of the craft, which, after undocking, Armstrong was able to overcome; the crew effected the first emergency landing of a manned U.S. space mission.
In my 9-year old youthful naivete I remember going outside at 4:00 in the morning on docking day to see if I could actually see 'em.
For Christmas of '67 I got one of these:
In the background the Saturn boosters for the Apollo program were being tested and the Apollo program carried on where Gemimi ended, missing only a tragic beat before actually going all the way in December of '68:
Apollo 8: Dec 21–27, 1968
By Apollo 11 we'd already been there twice before.
What could possibly go wrong?
Your backyard might be too small: