Saw the movie Apollo 11, and last fall "First Man"

[question everything]

And from 50 years ahead, one has to wonder how we ever accomplished this. Especially with First man" it almost looked as if the structures were held by paper clips. The astronauts really flew by the seat of their suits.

Apollo 11 is comprised of real reels. And when they reported the heart beats of the crew members, I think that mine, too, was that high.

They showed all the people who came to Cape Kennedy (as it was still called, I think) and I was thinking of the certainty that NASA and the government had, to have the show in front of everyone, and I remembered the crowed that was there for the Challenger.

And to hear that there was a leak in a valve a few minutes before liftoff but it was fixed, kinda.

And an alarm sound right before the Eagle landed, on and off, and still ignored.

And while we know that they came safely home, I was worrying about the Eagle combining back with Columbia to form Apollo, again.

When I watched the movie Apollo 13, there was a 3 minutes silence - more, in real time - when everything was in suspense until Tom Hanks' happy voice came over. Don't remember why there was a silence. Here, as they were ready to splash down, there was a 17 sec silence, did not understand exactly why.

Was interesting to see all the reporters at Cape Kennedy sitting by pay phones. I don't know whether they had to pay, but each had a phone line reserved.

And when I saw all the Navy people on the aircraft carrier Hornet, getting ready to fish the astronauts and the capsule, I could see why men (only, then) chose to join the Navy.

And we could not help realizing that back in July 1969 may have been the last time that this country was united, happy, and proud. That many were encouraged to be engineers and physicists and mathematicians. How happy and proud they were all in Houston.

Yes, it was those days that made America Great, when there was an appreciation for studying, for knowledge, for commitment. Yes, by the government.

Sigh..

[CentralMass]

1. We were a little less greedy in those days.

[JayhawkSD]

2. Saw Apollo 13 in the movie theater.

When the return capsule emerged from radio silence and the parachutes appeared the audience applauded. Never before had I heard an audience go nuts applauding in a movie theater.

Think about the art involved in making a movie that kept people on the edge of their seats to that degree when they already knew the outcome.

"I could see why men (only, then) chose to join the Navy."

I actually joined the Navy quite a few years before that, and served in submarines, but... Yes, that was why.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Thing About A13

And you likely agree, was that Howard built GREAT suspense, even though, having been in HS at the time, I knew they got home safe!
That, IMO, is really good movie making. He made me concerned and nervous about the outcome when I knew the actual results!

[question everything]

11. And we were, still are, grateful

[tinrobot]

3. The silence is due to re-entry

They hit the atmosphere at very high speeds, causing a fireball around the spaceship. When that happens, radios can't get through until the spacecraft slows down enough for the chutes to deploy.

[anarch]

6. I was compelled to go read abuot it on wikipedia--it's the ionization of the air around

the spaceship that interferes with radio signals:

The communications blackouts that affect spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, which are also known as radio blackouts, ionization blackouts, or reentry blackouts, are caused by an envelope of ionized air around the craft, created by the heat from the compression of the atmosphere by the craft. The ionized air interferes with radio signals. For the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, such communications blackouts lasted for several minutes.[1] Gemini 2, for example, endured such a blackout for four minutes, beginning at 9 minutes 5 seconds into the flight.[2]

For Apollo missions, the communications blackout was approximately three minutes long.[3] For Apollo 16, for example, pre-advisory data (PAD) for re-entry listed the expected times for re-entry communications blackout to be from 0 minutes 16 seconds after entry interface to 3 minutes 33 seconds after entry interface (a total of 3 minutes 17 seconds).[4] For the Apollo 13 mission, the blackout was much longer than normal because the flight path of the spacecraft was unexpectedly at a much shallower angle than normal.[4] According to the mission log maintained by Gene Kranz, the Apollo 13 re-entry blackout lasted around 6 minutes, beginning at 142:39 and ending at 142:45, and was 1 minute 27 seconds longer than had been predicted.[5]

Communications blackouts for re-entry are not solely confined to entry into Earth's atmosphere. They apply to entry into any atmosphere where such ionization occurs around a craft. The Mars Pathfinder endured a 30-second communications blackout as it entered Mars' atmosphere, for example. The Huygens probe endured a communications blackout as it entered the atmosphere of Titan.[1]

Until the creation of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS), the Space Shuttle endured a 30-minute blackout. The TDRSS allowed the Shuttle to communicate by relay with a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite during re-entry, through a "hole" in the ionized air envelope at the tail end of the craft, created by the Shuttle's shape.

[edbermac]

4. It was pretty fragile.

I think the walls of the LM were 0.012 inches thick. And there is a radio blackout when the CM re-enters the atmosphere.

[calimary]

5. Yeah, no kidding. Those WERE the days that really made America great

Aspirational.

I’ve heard that word a lot lately, as a few of the candidates have put it into the political lexicon. Beto’s one, for example. Describing how it’s time for a national reinvigoration. Hope. A new day where we get back in touch with what America is supposed to stand for - in our hearts and in the world. A better future where we stop all this shit and get rid of all this shit and fix all this shit. When this living nightmare is finally OVER.

I keep telling myself that nothing lasts forever, and neither will this grim, shameful time. This too shall pass. Because that’s what all things do.

[Silver Gaia]

7. Your post exemplifies what I'd like to hear more of!

Thank you for those words. I'm so tired of gloom and doom and gnashing of teeth. I'm WAY ready to "stop all this shit and get rid of all this shit and fix all this shit." Let's roll up our sleeves and get on with it! Thank you again for your words.

[The_jackalope]

18. "This too shall pass."

"Cheer up," he said. "Things could be worse."
So I cheered up.
And sure enough, things got worse.

[calimary]

20. Yeah I get that.

Totally get that. But I still hold onto the “this will eventually end. Even the Roman Empire and the Third Reich and the dinosaurs and every “Thing That Would Not Die” didn’t last forever.

I’m getting mighty tired of waiting, though. Gotta admit.

[Dave Starsky]

21. Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

[calimary]

22. Beautiful and deeply unsettling. "...stamped on these lifeless things..."

I feel the same about that line in Yeats poem “The Second Coming” about the “rough beast...(that) slouches toward Bethlehem to be born”.

Most disquieting.

[llmart]

8. I just watched "First Man" a week ago.

I don't know if you've ever actually been to Kennedy Space Center, but if not, they have an amazing museum there highlighting the history of the space program. You could spend hours in that museum. Sometimes they even have real life astronauts there to answer questions. There are now many young women who are in the astronaut training program. Also, whenever there is a shuttle launch the crowds are phenomenal. The cars line up all along the roadside to KSC to watch.

I got married the weekend of the moon landing. I grew up in the 50's and in elementary school every time there was a space launch our normal school day schedule would stop so the teacher could roll in the black and white TV. This happened in every classroom in the school. There was a feeling of unity and pride. Years later I connected with a cousin whom I had never met and she told me that her father, my uncle, had been an engineer who worked on the LEM. My uncle was born in 1913 and he did not have an engineering degree, or any degree for that matter. Back then, if you had the skills and brains (and were a man of course), you could be an engineer. Fast forward to today and I now have a son who works for NASA at KSC and he's working on the Mars program. He came to visit me recently and I had a workman working in my basement and I got to talking with this guy who said he and his wife and two elementary aged children had just been in Florida to visit his father. He said that they had thought about doing the Disney thing in the same trip, found out just how much it would cost for a family of four and he decided to take his kids to KSC instead because his oldest, a girl, was extremely interested in the space program. He said she was just infatuated by the museum! All this was going on while my son was reading upstairs in the living room. So, I informed him that my son worked there and on his way out I introduced the two of them. I was impressed that this father made the decision to forego Disney for the space museum.

I just don't understand why the people don't realize that we have to demand more for our money. I don't understand why there isn't an uproar over the amounts of money spent on the idiot's every weekend trips to enrich his family at the taxpayer's expense.

[question everything]

12. Thank you. Yes, we visited KSC 20 years ago

and we heard the actual commands of the liftoff. Again, it felt as if it was live.

Several years ago we visited USC in Los Angeles, where the shuttle Endeavour is now stationed. Quite impressive.

[Javaman]

10. I grew up on Long Island and my neighbor across the street worked for Grumman...

He was working on the lunar module.

I was close friends with his son.

he would bring home these publicity photos of the astronauts all the time as well as PR photos of the Apollo 11 rocket.

It was a really exciting time. And offered a glimmer of hope in an otherwise sad time. Viet Nam, race riots, peace protests, etc...

My dad and I would drive past Grumman all the time. There would be these signs on the road, "no photographs allowed" but you could clearly see the mock up's of the the Saturn rocket. I loved seeing it. I had always dreamed of being an astronaut. Neil Armstrong was my childhood hero.

Looking back now, from the long tunnel of old age, there was a hope that things would get better. we were all still in shock, in a way, from Kennedy's assassination and Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were still alive and there was no Watergate yet. There was still this feeling of, "we can figure this out".

but alas, all that went away. And I long sometimes for that small time frame of youth, where the worlds problems were still outside my grasp, where hope was something so real and possible. Cynicism hadn't wormed it's way into my heart.

It's times like this when I reflect upon that part of my life, that I still think, "what might have been". I gaze out the window from time to time and ponder what life had been like if Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy had lived.

if the insanity of nixon never came to be and another Kennedy was president. And the long slow degradation of society at the hands of the long game institutionalize republicans hadn't taken place.

I still look at the moon and think of all the things we left behind on that barren surface. I will always hate nixon for so many reasons. but choosing to stop the Apollo program will be high on that list.

[llmart]

13. Don't forget Carter...

The messages President Carter gave me was to care deeply about the environment and conservation, to think about those things and people outside your little world, and to forego conspicuous consumption for the greater good of the planet. Then Reagan came along with his "greed is good" mantra and emphasis on material things and I suddenly felt like I didn't fit in any longer. If you're not materialistic nowadays, you get looked at like an alien.

[Javaman]

15. President Carter was not a man for our times...

He is too good a human being and sadly, the American public didn't realize that.

[DavidDvorkin]

14. The rejection happened during the Apollo program

Last edited Mon Apr 1, 2019, 03:00 PM - Edit history (1)

I don't remember at which point exactly, but I remember sensing the change in the national mood.

I started working at NASA Houston in 1967. The country was supportive. When Apollo 11 lifted off, the country's spirit went with it. It was exhilarating. By the time I left, in 1971, right after Apollo 15, the country was not only not supportive of Apollo, it was actively hostile to it and to NASA in general.

Maybe some historian will be able to pin down the moment it all changed and the forces behind that change. The change is not recent, however.

[AZ8theist]

16. This country was hardly "united, happy, and proud" back then...

The Vietnam war was raging on with no end in sight. The TET offensive had just occurred the year before. MLK and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. The riots in 68.

While I followed the space program and watched every single moonwalk during the Apollo series, there were issues going on back on Earth. Yes, Neil Armstrong brought the world together for a fleeting moment, unfortunately it didn't last.

[OceanPete]

17. Unsung American hero

Robert R. Gilruth
Had the great fortune of spending many nights with Bob and wife Joe over bottles of dark rum while he recounted the story of his life. He had designed the first supersonic airplane wing and upon the selection of Chuck Yeager as pilot was told the he (Yeager) was the most disposable pilot they had! Bob then received his first lesson in politics as he walked out of the oval office with check in hand, freshly signed by JFK, to start NASA’s “moon program” when accosted by LBJ (Big guy!) who asked him how his Senator from Maryland had voted on the project’s bill. Bob said the Senator had voted against it at which point LBJ made the offer of a better deal of land and buildings south of Houston for the project instead of expanding the facilities at NASA’s headquarters in Suitland MD. Bob aka the “geezer” was director of both Mercury and Apollo programs and left NASA because they insisted on continuing to put men in space as opposed to robots and Bob thought that a big mistake because of the risks involved. Cape Canaveral was renamed for JFK after his assassination by LBJ. Bit of reality... upon splashdown of Gemini astronauts next to US Navy Destroyer USS C. S. Sperry (DD 697), fully equipped to pick them up, we were told to "standby" until aircraft carrier with press aboard could arrive hours latter leaving two guys absolutely desperate to get out of their capsule bobbing in the sea!

[The_jackalope]

19. "That's one small step..."

Hearing "That's one small step..." on TV that day was one of the most uplifting moments of my life.

I was space crazy. I had been an amateur rocket builder since 1964 (think Homer Hickam), with aspirations to become an aerospace engineer. Watching that feat reassured me that the human race was capable of anything. I don't believe that any more, but for a few shining years, it seemed that the stars were within our grasp.