Apollo

I watched a documentary on Apollo 17. It wasn’t of the highest quality but interesting all the same. A couple points mentioned:

1) If we got nothing more than the communications satellite out of the space program, that was pretty good.
2) One of the upper echelon from NASA (and I have no idea who this guy is) said that Mars needed to be our next step because he was absolutely sure we’d find fossils there.

I’m not an adherent of the “just add water” theory in regards to the creation of life. We have an ideal life-factory on Mother Earth. And yet nowhere do we see life evolving out of nothing. Not even primitive stages. Nothing. I don’t see anything to buttress the “just add water” theory.

Well, I suspect you and I won't miss anything other than the spectacle of it. The geology ought to be pretty humdrum except for specialists. And I'd say there's a zero chance we'll find any fossils. But who knows?

Here's an excellent documentary I just watched on Amazon Prime Video: The Lunar Rover: Apollo's Final Challenge.

Certainly the creation of the lunar rover is central to this. But the strong point is that it gives the kind of semi-detailed information missing from 99% of documentaries that are basically just glossed-over "beauty" shots of whatever the subject is. This puts a lot of stuff into context

This was a documentary for the curious made by the competent. If you don't have Amazon Prime Video, you can rent it here in HD for $2.99.

Interesting, both about the rover and the noise of a Saturn V taking off.  I hope they had awfully good ear plugs available for everyone.  (Fredric Brown, in a grim mystery about a human cannonball act, said he had excellent earplugs that kept out virtually all the sound, which proved to be a major plot point.  I can't recall the title, but it was one of those collected in Mostly Murder.)

I just watched Project Gemini: Bridge to the Moon.

This is by no means a fancy or high-budget production. But it is a good overview of the Gemini program.

Gemini’s active missions lasted only 20 months. The schedule was comprised of 2 unmanned flights and ten manned flights, beginning with Gemini 3 on March 23, 1965 (Gus Grissom) and ending with Gemini 12, Nov. 11-15, 1966 (Lovell, Aldrin).

This was definitely a crash-course in the four key objectives which were rendezvousing in space, space walking, computer guidance of the spacecraft, and how humans could fare in space on long duration flights.

They worked out a lot of bugs. Aldrin, at the very end, finally successfully did a productive spacewalk. His was the first training using an underwater facility. Aldrin was a scuba diver so he was very comfortable with this. And he perfected the “subtle” techniques required. All others had tended to go with a brute force approach.

During this 20 months, they eventually accomplished their goals, but not without many failures along the way. (They lost more than a few Agena rockets which were to insert a target vehicle into orbit to practice docking.) One of the hard successes was the crucial development of the fuel cell. Batteries weren’t going to be enough on a long missions such as that to the moon. But they had all kinds of trouble with them.

And very interestingly, during this 20 months, the Russians had zero shots into space. It was thought the there were two factors contributing to this: One, they were more interested in gimmicky one-off shots rather than building one mission upon the other. Two, with the change of leadership to Brezhnev, it was thought he wasn’t all that much interested in the space race or just didn’t know what to do with it.

Via the several glitches they encountered, it is said that this is also when NASA mission control learned to improvise and deal with difficulties. One of the more remarkable events was when Gemini 6 was scrubbed because the Agena rocket (which was to carry a targeting vehicle into space) blew up.

They could have then just delayed Gemini 6 and tried again later. What they instead did was send up Gemini 7 (which, among other things, was to be an endurance flight) and then (about a week later) send up Gemini 6 to dock with it. That sounds all good on paper. But what it required was de-platforming (whatever you want to call it) the Gemini 6 rocket from the launching pad, inserting the Gemini 7 in its place, and then turning around the rocket pad in a week (it normally took 3 weeks) to launch Gemini 6. They were able to do that.

During Gemini 8, Neil Armstrong was able to establish his reputation as the most cool-headed astronaut. While in orbit, the thrusters of their ship got stuck. They were docked to another vessel at the time. They were caught in a spin that would soon have them all unconscious. Armstrong was able to detach the docked vessel, turn off all of the thrust systems of his craft, break the seal of the controls for the reentry thrusters, and use the reentry thrusters to stop the spin and bring his craft under control. Mission procedures then required an abort of the mission and an immediate return to earth because of breaking the seal on the reentry thrusters. They landed safely.

Interestingly (and I forget the mission….it might have been Grissom’s), ground control punched in the wrong numbers into the guidance computer for reentry. The Gemini capsule was thus going to run short (or long) of the splashdown site by a couple hundred miles. Grissom (I think) was able to make some override corrections to reduce the miss by 60 miles. As Barbie said, math is hard. That reminds me of the story in Apollo 13 where Lovell has to program a very critical manual burn of the engines. He doesn’t trust his own math skills so he sends all the numbers down to mission control for them to double-check everything. Math is indeed hard.

I get the general impression that Aldrin, Armstrong, and Lovell (probably Collins and Young as well) were particularly talented astronauts, the cream of the cream.





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Yes, they did point out in the Gemini documentary that the astronauts didn't have much to do. But certainly it was a necessary step.

The bottom end of the capsule which I think is visually pretty cool:







I do believe I've had the opportunity to see one of the Mercury capsules up close. They used to have one at the Pacific Science Center. For all I know, they still do.

However, with a little more research (and according to this chart), the one at the Pacific Science Center is "an unflown mockup". I'm going to assume that was for training or PR purposes.

You really get an idea for how small they are. I've never seen an Apollo capsule up close. But apparently they were like a Cadillac compared to an MG Midget.



On second thought, maybe the Midget had more room.



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Bonestell also did art in SF magazines.  The others may also have done so, but his name I recognize.  Some of the art looks like stuff I saw in some books on rocketry/space when I was young.  I wonder if any of the articles were by Willy Ley, a German rocket fan who escaped to America during the 30s.  (I've read some material by him, one of which -- about the bombing of Peenemunde -- I read as a child.  It was interesting reading it as an adult and remembering that I had read it.  I've had similar reactions with other works, such as Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and Saberhagen's "Berserker".)  A space enthusiast, he died less than a month before Apollo 11 took off.  A crater on the far side of the Moon is named for him.

PBS just aired "Chasing the Moon" which covered much of the space program before Apollo 11. The episode ended with Apollo 8, the first mission in which man broke free of earth's gravity. Frank Borman and his fellow astronauts went to the moon and back in this first Apollo mission.  This is well worth watching.

The scene of the Saturn V lifting off, which I mentioned earlier, was in this episode. What a spectacular film clip.

Happy Birthday Brad! On this day in 1969, Apollo 11 returned to earth and touched down in the Pacific Ocean.

Given the day and interest in this string, I thought the following appropriate.

Moon

For the arm-chair astronaut.