Apollo 11

[Terrier]

Fifty years ago this morning.


Apollo 11 in Real-time

Click to read more...

 

[LadyStanley]

Amazing accomplishment

 

[No Fun Shogun]

A sci-fi spaceship channel that I follow did a great tribute for Apollo 11 the other day, going into incredible detail on the Saturn V.

 

[Guardian17]

I wasn't alive when it occurred, but, my Dad said it was amazing.

 

[JMCx4]

I woke up from an impromptu nap (old man habit) in time to catch about the last 45 minutes of this evening's "8 Days: To the Moon and Back" on PBS. EXCELLENT documentary with original footage & still imagery wrapped around re-enactments of the Apollo 11 astronauts reactions to the round-trip adventure. It inspired me to order the DVD (another old man habit, I guess - it's available for streaming or from other media sources), so I can watch the whole thing at my future leisure.

 

[LadyStanley]

Visited Space Center Houston six weeks ago. Took tour through Johnson Space Center including opportunity to walk through building housing Saturn V rocket. It's huge. Rocket on display includes flight certified pieces from a number of cancelled missions.

(So large, they actually built the building around the rocket.)

I've attached close up of the little holes in the nozzle of the stage 1 (one of 5 such rockets) that help stabilized the exhaust for directed thrust.

 

[JMCx4]

Article from The Atlantic ...

What Is the Apollo 11 Landing Site Like Now?

The American flag is bleached white. But some of the boot prints will remain undisturbed for tens of thousands of years.

Marina Koren 8:00 AM ET (19 July 2019)

Ruby Aitken

Editor's Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.

About 4.5 billion years ago, according to the most popular theory of the moon’s formation, a mysterious, rocky world the size of Mars slammed into Earth. From the fiery impact, shards swirled and fused into a new, airless world, itself bombarded with rocky objects. In the absence of the smoothing touch of weather and tectonic activity, every dent remained. And then, one day, among craters both microscopic and miles-wide, two guys came along and stepped on the surface, carving new hollows with their boots.

Buzz Aldrin, seeing the moon from the surface for the first time, described it as “magnificent desolation.”

It was not so desolate when they departed. The Apollo 11 astronauts discarded gadgets, tools, and the clothesline contraption that moved boxes of lunar samples, one by one, from the surface into the module. They left behind commemorative objects—that resplendent American flag, mission patches and medals honoring fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, a coin-size silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from the world leaders of planet Earth. And they dumped things that weren’t really advertised to the public, for understandable reasons, such as defecation-collection devices. (Some scientists, curious to examine how gut microbes fare in low gravity, even proposed going back for these.)

Fifty years later, of everything that remains at the cosmic campsite, the American flag has had the worst time of it. ...

The photographic evidence for this came decades later, thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that still circles the moon today. The spacecraft’s camera photographed several Apollo landing sites. The NASA astronauts who flew to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s always brought American flags with them. In photos of later Apollo missions, you can see, amid all the pockmarked gray terrain, a little white smudge, and, right next to it, a slightly bigger, black smudge—a flag, faded from the glow of the sun, and its shadow. ...


Read more at: What Is the Apollo 11 Landing Site Like Now?

 

[Guardian17]

 

[adsfan]

I was 10 years old when Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the Moon. I watched it at my mom's house on our 17" Zenith color TV that was purchased in early 1968, partially to watch the Dayton Gems hockey games in color on Channel 22. The portion on the Moon was in black and white, which was kind of a joke on us! One of my brothers was there, he was halfway through his Electronics Technology degree. He joined us in watching Walter Cronkite and I guess Wally Schirra. The eldest brother was in Michigan with one year to go on his Physics degree. He was in the first year of PSSC Physics in high school, which was an educational upgrade in response to Sputnik. He later flew several times on a NASA airplane with a large telescope mounted vertically to do astronomical research work. He did some other work with NASA. I still have a 4" rubber Space Shuttle in my desk at work that he purchased at the NASA gift shop and gave me about 35 years ago.

I went to the University of Cincinnati as an undergraduate in Chemistry. One of the neighboring buildings was Rhodes Hall, the then new Engineering building where Neil Armstrong had his unmarked office. I saw him a few times on campus, usually running up the steps from the parking lot to Rhodes Hall when he was coming in to teach. One time in the winter, when it was around zero degrees with a 30 or 40 mph wind blowing, I cut through the building to get out of the bitter cold for a few seconds on my way to morning classes. (Later on, I found out that I could go down a floor and take a tunnel to Zimmer Auditorium, a hallway across it, then to the A4 Biology/Chemistry building without going outside again.) I stopped in the ground floor men's room. I didn't pay any attention to the guy who was on my right. I turned around to head for a sink when he looked up in the mirror at the adjacent sink and I saw that it was Neil Armstrong. He was always a very private person as told to me by my Engineering student friends, so I didn't dare speak to him. It was my close encounter with one of the 12 men who walked on the Moon. When I saw him outside on the steps, it was always 30 to 50 feet away, rather than 3 feet away.

When I was in graduate school, the lady who typed up my thesis, used to be a secretary at NASA in Houston. She knew Ed White, one of the three astronauts who was killed in the Apollo 1 pad fire in 1967. I think that tragedy galvanized the space program and the US to meet President Kennedy's deadline and to do it in their memory. It is sort of strange to have so many connections to the space program, but they employed about 400,000 people at the peak as employees and contractors in a nation of 200 million, so chances are that you would know somebody at NASA or know somebody who knew somebody at NASA.

 

[JMCx4]

Another Apollo 11 piece from The Atlantic, with a musical bent ...

The Moon Landing Inspired Pink Floyd’s Most Overlooked Song

A bluesy, atmospheric piece that the band improvised live on the air during the Apollo 11 mission deserves to be more than a footnote of musical history.

Jason Heller Jul 20, 2019

For seven and a half minutes on the night of July 20, 1969, Pink Floyd took thousands of BBC viewers to the moon. Of course, two men were already there: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronauts who became the first human beings to set foot on the lunar surface. However, the members of Pink Floyd—David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright—weren’t using science, calculus, and technology to transport people through space on that fateful evening. They were using music, specifically an improvised and largely forgotten song called “Moonhead.” ...

(The) BBC tapped Pink Floyd to appear on a special Apollo 11–themed episode of Omnibus titled, with perhaps with the slightest dearth of decorum, “So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?” This irreverent sentiment was reiterated in the middle of Pink Floyd’s performance of “Moonhead,” when an unidentified narrator breaks into the song to exclaim, “So they’re there, a quarter of a million miles away, up there on the moon, and early tomorrow morning they’ll step out and see once and for all if it’s green cheese or not”—referring to the fact that, in the wee hours of July 21, 1969, Armstrong would leave Homo sapiens’ first boot print on the moon, followed about 19 minutes later by Aldrin. For good measure, a young Judi Dench and a young Ian McKellen—pre-Dame and pre-Sir—read lighthearted poetry on the program.

“Moonhead” was included on numerous bootleg recordings over the decades, sometimes alternatively titled “Trip on Mars.” But it wasn’t officially released until 2016, on the Pink Floyd box set The Early Years 1965–1972. The song’s obscurity isn’t that hard to understand; Pink Floyd was more or less an underground band until The Dark Side of the Moon was released, and “Moonhead” was an ephemeral, extemporized thing, as fleeting as a wisp of lunar dust. Plus, it was overshadowed by the other song that was played on the “Green Cheese” episode of Omnibus: a new single by a barely known singer-songwriter named David Bowie that had been written and recorded as both an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and as a vehicle to capitalize on the Apollo 11 craze. That song was “Space Oddity,” and after being briefly banned by the BBC for being too depressing for that triumphant time, it became the most famous rock anthem about space. The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. had raced to the moon, with the American team emerging clearly victorious; so did Bowie win rock’s own inadvertent space race against Pink Floyd.

Apollo 11 continued to inspire musicians in the months to follow. Eminent rock bands such as The Byrds released songs such as 1969’s “Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins,” which celebrated the achievements of the three Apollo 11 astronauts, including orbiting Michael Collins, relegated to the dark side of the Moon as Armstrong and Aldrin strode lunar soil. Far less famous than The Byrds, but no less captivating, was Lucia Pamela, a singer whose 1969 novelty record Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela resembled a collection of show tunes broadcast from the deepest reaches of the galaxy. Eventually, popular music’s obsession with space took on different forms, as the Apollo program wound down, the Viking program took unmanned probes to Mars, the Voyager program carried musical messages beyond our solar system, and the space shuttle became fully operational. But in “Moonhead,” Pink Floyd encapsulated one of rock and roll’s—and one of humanity’s—most astounding eras.

 

[JMCx4]

I was 10 years old when Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the Moon. I watched it at my mom's house on our 17" Zenith color TV that was purchased in early 1968, partially to watch the Dayton Gems hockey games in color on Channel 22. ... One of my brothers was there, he was halfway through his Electronics Technology degree. He joined us in watching Walter Cronkite and I guess Wally Schirra. The eldest brother was in Michigan with one year to go on his Physics degree. He was in the first year of PSSC Physics in high school, which was an educational upgrade in response to Sputnik. He later flew several times on a NASA airplane with a large telescope mounted vertically to do astronomical research work. He did some other work with NASA. ...

I went to the University of Cincinnati as an undergraduate in Chemistry. One of the neighboring buildings was Rhodes Hall, the then new Engineering building where Neil Armstrong had his unmarked office. I saw him a few times on campus, usually running up the steps from the parking lot to Rhodes Hall when he was coming in to teach. One time in the winter, when it was around zero degrees with a 30 or 40 mph wind blowing, I cut through the building to get out of the bitter cold for a few seconds on my way to morning classes. ... I stopped in the ground floor men's room. I didn't pay any attention to the guy who was on my right. I turned around to head for a sink when he looked up in the mirror at the adjacent sink and I saw that it was Neil Armstrong. ...

When I was in graduate school, the lady who typed up my thesis, used to be a secretary at NASA in Houston. She knew Ed White, one of the three astronauts who was killed in the Apollo 1 pad fire in 1967. ...

Ladies & gentlemen, I give you ... The Six Degrees of adsfan ...

 

[LadyStanley]

Smithsonian compressed Apollo 11 mission into 25 minutes. Cool video.

 

[Stubu]

I still keep wondering about Apollo 18.

 

[LadyStanley]

I still keep wondering about Apollo 18.

A number of the space-certified pieces of the Apollo 18 Saturn V rocket are on display at Space Center Houston.

 

[JMCx4]

I woke up from an impromptu nap (old man habit) in time to catch about the last 45 minutes of this evening's "8 Days: To the Moon and Back" on PBS. EXCELLENT documentary with original footage & still imagery wrapped around re-enactments of the Apollo 11 astronauts reactions to the round-trip adventure. It inspired me to order the DVD (another old man habit, I guess - it's available for streaming or from other media sources), so I can watch the whole thing at my future leisure.

My wife came across my unopened "8 Days" DVD this weekend while desperately seeking video entertainment @Week 3 of our shut-in. So this evening I finally watched the entire show. Excellent video production describing the key Apollo 11 events, and more than one teary-eyed moment during the mission. A definite must-see for anyone at an age of cognizance in the Summer of 1969, and for anyone with an interest in how far technology has advanced since then.

 

[LadyStanley]

I just got my copy of Apollo 11 documentary delivered.