Fifty years ago tonight, at the time I'm writing, Apollo 17 was returning to Earth for landing in the Pacific Ocean on December 19th. Apollo 17 was carrying 243 pounds of lunar rocks and other samples along with her crew.
NASA maintains a set of webpages containing Apollo history, including images, videos and so on. They include this video called On the Shoulders of Giants.
It was the end of an era. I was 18, 6 weeks from 19, in my first semester of "discount knowledge from the junior college" in the words of country song I heard once. I grew up playing with models of the capsules they used, and reading NASA educational and public relations documents. I launched model rockets in the school yard. I followed everything I could find on TV, and we got our first color TV around the time of Apollo 11; just in time for black and white video from the moon.
Yeah, they were talking about Skylab coming soon, and there was already talk about what might come after the first tentative steps to a space station. Serious talk surrounded the waste of throwing rockets away after use, which fed into the Space Shuttle - which never made its more ambitious goals.
I didn't really take that seriously. We'd been to the moon, and there was talk about spreading out into the solar system. There would be a permanent colony on the moon by the 1990s along with tentative steps to Mars and beyond. Instead, well, it was the end of an era.
I was 20 and working for Western Electric. I was past my model building days (far a while), but I also built all the kits when I was younger. Had all the X-Planes, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo kits. Built and launched Estes rockets, too. Even had a radio beacon in one on 11 meters.
ReplyDeleteI was just getting "certified" (getting my license if you will), to work on nuclear weapons. In this case the AIR 2A rocket. If I remember correctly 35K lbs of thrust for about 5.5 seconds then a W25 warhead would theoretically put paid to a Soviet bomber formation. Quite a step up to my Estes rockets with M80 firecrackers glued to the front of a booster engine.
ReplyDeleteYes, sad end to the Apollo moon missions. Though Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz did excellent jobs of continuing the Apollo mission, so I put the end of Apollo on 24 July 1975.
ReplyDeleteIf only we had kept momentum on the Apollo/Saturn program. They were actually getting to the point of reusability/refurbishability with Apollo, and were looking at recovering the engine sections of 1st and 2nd stages (kind of like with ULA's Vulcan. The shell is trash, but keep the engines and critical plumbing, using inflatable ballute shields and parachutes, though there was a proposal to use a massive helicopter to catch the 1st stage in the air. No, not kidding.)
Funny, when actual reusability of the shuttle was added up, it was less than what Apollo refurbishable would have been.
And Saturn components flew on the Shuttle. The Saturn's J2 engines were reworked into the SSME/RS25s of the Shuttle/SLS era. The solid rocket boosters were a followup from, yes, solid rocket boosters that were designed for the Saturn system.
Still, nobody has yet stepped on the Moon after we left. Yet. Hopefully we'll get there before the ChiComs.
Energy and physics are a cruel mistress. Perhaps the biggest missing link is the funding required to make us an interplanetary species. (*said funding would be a minor footnote in the spending bills just past)
ReplyDeleteYou nailed it. But funding MUST have its priorities!
DeleteWhy is it that after all these years, no one has ever taken a picture of the landing site on the moon and all the things we left behind.
ReplyDeleteThe Lunar Recon Satellite has done just that, along with photographing everything else.
DeleteBeans, I think anyone that would ask the question is so lazy they never would have fired up a search engine to look for answers, and incapable of doing the third grade-level arithmetic to figure the optical resolution of the biggest telescopes on Earth. They wouldn't know the term "optical resolution." They wouldn't know to look for satellite pictures and if they somehow saw them, wouldn't believe them.
DeleteThey'd have to go any one of the dozens of websites for amateur telescope makers, like this one:
https://telescope-optics.net/telescope_resolution.htm
to get the equation they need to plug a number into, look up the wavelengths for light, the sizes of the telescopes and what they want to see. Then they'd have to take those numbers and plug and chug into a calculator for God's sake! They might even have to convert between metric and imperial units!!
What they want is just a picture that shows the landing zones with the LEM big enough to fill their monitor, in 4k resolution. So they can say, "it's Photoshopped! I can tell by the pixels!"
I believe we are discussing a member of the class that doesn't believe we went to the Moon. Probably wondering why the astronauts didn't simply put up a quadcopter to take some pictures...
DeleteThing is, the photos from the LRO weren't big news. I mean, I saw it on science-based blogs, but main-stream media? Crickets. Because nothing important ever happened in the past.
DeleteSeriously, here's photographic proof of everything that people have said about the Moon. Landing sites, crash sites (splashes from failed landers or stages and other debris, plus fresh meteorite craters,) water, lava and pyroclastic flow evidence.
That silly little high-resolution LRO has provided so much prime data for everyone to use. It's one of the things that everyone who is doing lunar landers, from the Israelis to the ChiComs to SpaceX, is using. High enough resolution, along with radar data, to allow 3D images to be developed.
Don't know if Sambo is a denier or just unaware. I would not be surprised if he was just not aware of the Lunar Recon Orbiter and its accomplishments. A lot of people out there haven't heard of the LRO.
DANG ! I looked it up. Very cool
DeleteApollo 11 landed on the moon a couple of weeks after my 18th birthday. I watched it on TV in the OSU student union in Columbus Ohio.
ReplyDeleteLike many events, it ended up being the end of an era and no-one recognized it until after the fact (although - and it betrays my lack of knowledge of the space program - if there were no significant plans to continue, then effectively the leitmotif was already there).
ReplyDeleteI was (barely) 5 when I watched the moon landing at my aunt's house. I didn't understand the implications; my interest in space at the time being limited to Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot, Lost in Space and vaguely remembering a more adult show called Star Trek (I didn't like it as much because the Captain was always kissing girls..). My folks got me a toy LM with a motor and a plastic Neal Armstrong popping out of its door and that sent me to the World Book Encyclopedia (I could read at age 3 and honed my skills on the Encyclopedia until in 3rd grade they said I was reading at a freshman in college level, whatever that meant.) I began 1st grade that year and inhaled space exploration by the ream in the school library. In 3rd grade I wrote a book report about Gus Grissom and left out that he died in Apollo 1 because the library hadn't updated it's biographies and I knew nothing about researching periodicals. I believe I was personally responsible for the school purchasing a few dozen updated biography books. Ever since my fuse was lit in July of 1969 I watched every Apollo mission, even 12 which had almost no coverage. I was not really worried about Apollo 13 because I thought NASA could do no wrong. I distinctly remember Apollo 17 and their footage of turning point rock. It made me sad when the last usage of a capsule was the political stunt of Apollo-Soyuz, but I was hopeful for the upcoming Space Shuttle. Little did I know it would be 6 years before the first launch, but I was happy it finally went. I got to see 2 Shuttle launches when I was older and still vividly remember them. We are definitely in the manned space exploration doldrums right now but who knows, there might be some excitement yet ahead. I hope so.
ReplyDeleteWe are definitely in the manned space exploration doldrums right now but who knows, there might be some excitement yet ahead. I hope so.
DeleteIt's looking better than it has in at least a decade. The entire decade of hiring the Russians to take American astronauts to the ISS was an embarrassment. Progress on Starship hasn't been as fast as most of us hoped. They're under contract to NASA to do a flight of the lunar or Artemis version of Starship by '24. Unlike the other contractors we keep reading about, including Artemis itself, I think they have a bigger chance of making it.
My dad knew all three Apollo 1 astronauts. He hated Tom Wolfe's interpretation of Gus Grissom in "The Right Stuff" (both book and movie) as my dad said he was a consummate engineer and one of the smartest guys dad ever met. Considering some of the brainiacs my dad knew, that's saying something.
DeleteGrey, when I said we're in the doldrums I suppose I meant of people leaving low earth orbit. That hasn't happened since '72. I am glad we can at least launch to the soon to be decommissioned and deorbited ISS, but that's not 'sexy', I guess, although I'd give my left nut and two teeth to go myself. I'm glad SpaceX is out there doing good work and hope they make a valuable contribution to manned space exploration. If I wasn't old and worn out (and with a family) I'd love to go to Mars, if they can find use for a diabetic veterinarian...
DeleteTo Beans, I'd have loved to be born twenty years earlier and have talked to any of the Apollo, Gemini or Mercury astronauts in depth. I did meet Charles Duke at a Boy Scout Jamboree when I was 12 but was so overwhelmed I barely asked any questions. I did tell him I watched him on the moon and wished I was there and he got a kick out of that.
I was in "casual", waiting for my Tech School assignment. Believe it or don't there were a few Airmen that actually tried to tell me that the Moon landings were a hoax! I politely informed them that I had been playing with (microwave) stripline receivers just for fun, and if they pointed an S-band antenna towards the Moon they'd get audio and telemetry, just like I had done. Didn't have the equipment to decode the telemetry but could plainly see the data wavetrains being transmitted - since I used to play with color TV repair AND with Radio Control I could recognize the waveforms... I just couldn't decode anything. Bummer, huh?
ReplyDeleteFifty years. Been too damn long. Go, SpaceX, go!
Not bummer; excellent! I had been playing with electronics in the Apollo days, but had zero knowledge of microwaves.
DeleteIt's a little disappointing about the Airmen who didn't have the initiative to try to answer the question themselves.
As the X-Files said, "The Truth is Out There." From radio telemetry to photographic and radar data, to laser targets. But it's easier to deny than open one's mind. Sad.
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