Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 18, 2019 16:49:09 GMT -8
Apollo 11Rented on VUDUInfo: IMDBGenre: Space Race Type: documentary (2019) • 2.20:1 aspect ratio • HD and 4k Runtime: 93 minutes Starring: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins Quick Rating: An excellent visual recap of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon and back. Summary: Featuring never-before-seen footage in its highest resolution, Apollo 11 takes us straight to the heart of NASA's most celebrated mission that first put men on the moon.
 A visually moving summary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. There is no narration. The story is told in still photos, videos, and the original dialogue. The technique is effective for living these moments again, although you do lose some context. The first parts (preparation and lift-off) proved to be more interesting than the actually off-earth action which is condensed a little too much. Overall, you can’t help but be moved by the stunning, mostly high resolution, images that tell an amazing story. I got spoiled at the start a bit by some compelling footage I’d never seen before. I expected the rest of the documentary to have the same “wow” power. Near the start, they pan a high-resolution camera past the rows of computers in the mission control center at Cape Kennedy. That doesn’t sound like much because we’ve all seen those photos before. But not like this. That's a lot of computers. You will (as I was) be tremendously affected by the sheer scale and logistics of this whole operation. Even knowing how it ended, it seemed in doubt. You intuitively know there’s no way this can go smoothly. There are too many moving parts, too many systems, too much explosive force. I mean, really, double-check your encyclopedias to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. But it happened. It went off without (mostly) a hitch. I would imagine this fact surprised a number of people. There’s also a great shot (I’ve seen it before, but never in this stunning high resolution) as you pan up the rocket following the astronauts up the elevator. Again, you’re impressed with the truly massive scale of it all. Stunning as well were the colorful and clear photos of the crowds assembled to watch. The film is so good that, except for the haircuts and those crazy horn-rimmed glasses, you’d think this was shot just yesterday. But as fine of a documentary as this is, there’s so much more to the Apollo project. I saw a documentary once that centered only on the Saturn V rockets and the launching pads. It had shown ultra-slow-motion and extended footage of rocket burns and gave you a good tour of the truly massive pads underneath the rockets. And I wish I could remember which documentary that was. But this is definitely worth the $5.99 to rent it. But I hope this guy puts out a director’s cut with twice the footage. Some of the best parts were at the end and seemed rushed as they were jammed in and around the rolling credits as the quarantine vehicle is driven away from the carrier and into a transport plane. (I don't remember ever seeing that before.) They then are transferred to some kind of suite of quarantine rooms that were a little more spacious. But you could tell at the end that Armstrong wasn’t too happy to have spent 18 days there. One thing of note regarding the lunar phase is that they have some cleaned-up photos of Armstrong descending the Eagle that I have never seen in such clarity. And although Armstrong’s first words were planned, I don’t know if Aldrin’s were when he said “magnificent desolation.” But it was a great quote. There’s a nice moment when they are buzzing around the moon and they were noting that the moon had first appeared grey. But now it looked tan or slightly brown. Nixon gave a fine speech and I don’t remember hearing that in full. I guess you know it’s a good documentary when you think it should have been longer.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 18, 2019 17:22:17 GMT -8
I guess this will rank up there now with The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, though they're movies and this is a documentary. I don't suppose they mention the point about Aldrin taking communion after landing but before either of them left the lander (which I mentioned earlier in the thread, complete with a link).
Remember, the rockets consisted of thousands of parts, each made by the lowest bidder. And the astronauts knew that, of course.
Armstrong's first statement was indeed planned, and maybe even at a higher level. Apparently the plan was to say "one small step for a man", but he slipped up. (He denied that and said that it somehow didn't make it onto the tape, although there's no indication of the sort of time lapse that would imply.) Considering the circumstances (there was no guarantee the lander would take off from the Moon and rendezvous with the Apollo spacecraft), I think he can be forgiven.
Armstrong was a Purdue graduate. When I arrived there in September 1969, you can be sure there was a lot of campus pride. We even got questions about him in French class.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 18, 2019 20:44:16 GMT -8
To get into a little more detail on Apollo, I found a couple good videos on YouTube:
The Saturn V Story
The Instrument Ring from the Saturn V Rocket
Don't let the geeky guy in this second video put you off too much. He gets into some very interesting aspects of the instrument ring, something that was built by IBM. Just this one part is almost beyond comprehension as to its complexity. Way cool stuff.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 18, 2019 21:12:13 GMT -8
Yeah, I guess that would be fair to say. Both of those are very good movies. This documentary is obviously not as Hollywoodized. But they’ve done a good job with the story. Be sure to watch that YouTube video I linked to about The Saturn V Story. I found that just as entertaining. But not as moving. My words failed me. The majesty comes through in the Apollo 11 documentary that is very emotional. I watched it on a 48” big screen TV (which is small by today’s standards). But it really is made to be watched large. Basically Kennedy gave his life for this project because from what I’ve read it’s reasonable to assume the budget would have gradually been scaled back….something that was happening to some extent anyway. But as “The Saturn V Story” points out (and I agree), America’s resolve was redoubled after Kennedy’s untimely death and the death of the three Apollo astronauts. Also, we must admit, there’s no way this end-of-decade deadline is made without the help of a very talented ex-Nazi. Wernher von Braun was absolutely central to this endeavor. And although he never got to build the mega-rocket he first proposed (and I forget the name of it), he did get to build the Saturn V with the Rocketdyne F-1 engines. And that wasn’t exactly chopped liver. And although they did have one or two explosions in testing these rockets in a jig, after they ironed out a couple things, they never had an accident. A couple of the problems are explained briefly. Much too briefly. But you sort of get the gist of it. They also go into some nice detail on the crucial part of any rocket: the cylinders that hold the fuel. There was some major league technological innovation that went into those. Another interesting aspect is that because of a design modification to the first stage, they had to lighten the second stage. To do that, instead of having two separate propellant tanks, the two tanks shared a wall thus making the rocket lighter via less tank and by thus being able to make the stage a little shorter. Again, this is a pretty good video considering you can get it for free on YouTube. The one on the instrument ring is fascinating. And according to this article, there is a museum for the Saturn V at The Kennedy Space Center. I don’t know if that’s where that video was shot or not. Also see: Three Saturn Vs on Display Teach Lessons in Space HistoryHere’s the Saturn IB at the Alabama Welcome Center that you had mentioned. Very cool: |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 19, 2019 8:05:15 GMT -8
Via Apple News (it seems to do a good job of tracking my interests) I’ve been reading a lot of esoterica about Apollo and the space missions in general. One of the interesting anecdotes came from a NASA engineer or contractor who attended a meeting that included Wernher von Braun.
This engineer admitted that he assumed von Braun was just a figurehead at this point. Yeah, he may have done some work in the past, but he was now more or less a spectator, a charismatic PR person, and was little involved in all this new big stuff that was going on.
Then he heard one of his colleagues ask a highly technical question for anyone to answer. von Braun spoke up and answered the question in great detail, proving to this fellow that he was indeed still quite a rocket scientist.
What I didn’t know was that von Braun was pushing for a manned mission to Mars after Apollo (which seems a logical goal). He was very disappointed when that happened. And it is said he is somewhat fortunate that he died in 1977 because fairly soon after in the 80’s his files were declassified and they were not complimentary of his wars years in Germany.
Life is indeed complicated.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 19, 2019 8:35:44 GMT -8
As Tom Lehrer sang about von Braun:
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some say our attitude
Should be one of gratitude.
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
Did it say how much he knew about the Nordhausen concentration camp, where the A-4 aka V-2 was built? (Note, by the way, that von Braun and his Peenemunde team had nothing to do with the Fi-156 aka V-1 pulsejet buzz bomb.)
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 19, 2019 18:51:25 GMT -8
It’s hard to beat that one, but I can certainly do worse:
A Kraut with an aerospace fetish
Who shot lots of stuff at the British
And to his bomb builders
He'd pay not one Gilder
But for American bucks was not skittish.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 19, 2019 19:41:56 GMT -8
Not bad at all. Of course, that was only part of Lehrer's song. Here are the other stanzas:
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun, A man whose allegiance Is built on expedience. Call him a Nazi he won't even frown. "Ah, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
You two can be a big hero Once you've learned to count backward to zero. "In German, or English, I know how to count down, Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
The other stanza I included goes between the last two. I'm pretty sure I remember it right, though there's one word in the first stanza I'm not sure about. Of course, the punctuation and versification is my own guess based on how it's sung.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 19, 2019 20:46:25 GMT -8
That’s a good line. One of the things that most amazes me is the scale of the project (“Project Apollo” as I’ve learned it was called for Congressional budgeting request purposes) and how it could have ever gotten done. Consider the core rope memory (also known as LOL memory for “Little Old Lady” memory because, according to Wiki, “Software written by MIT programmers was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories.”) Wiki also says this was “first used in the 1960s by early NASA Mars space probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) designed and programmed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Instrumentation Lab and built by Raytheon.” There must have been hundreds, if not a thousand, crucial tasks that either had to be invented from scratch or perfected and altered for space flight. How was this all managed? One interview I read from an engineer or manager at the time noted that there was a “can-do” attitude minus the usual managerial games of hoarding money, power, and influence. One guy said that was the surest way to find yourself out of a job. He had noted that major and fundamental design changes (particularly following the Apollo I tragedy) were implemented in weeks. He noted that today, a single major change could take six months to a year to wend its way through NASA’s bureaucracy. Apollo really was remarkable from a number of different angles. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 20, 2019 5:55:06 GMT -8
Incidentally, there's a special on Apollo 11 at 10 a.m. EDT on Neil Cavuto on either FNC or Fox Business.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 20, 2019 10:48:52 GMT -8
There's a pretty good documentary from 2012 included in the basic Amazon Prime Video subscription: Apollo 11: First Steps on the MoonIt includes many good insights from the three astronauts as well as Gene Kranz and others. In particular, there is the best exposition I've heard of the actual landing. The LEM, right from the start, was close to the 35-feet-per-second abort speed cutoff. For some reason, they were on pace to overshoot their chosen landing site as well (the two likely being connected). The thought was that this error in speed, having already occurred, might likely get worse. It didn't. Then during further descent, they received two different computer alarms. The first was explained as the kind that means "I can't process all information being given me, so some tasks are incomplete but I'll continue processing other tasks." That apparently wasn't so bad. They were still getting good radar data, etc. But then a different program alarm comes on. This one was of the type that said "I'm thinking about going into sleep mode and rebooting because things are so bolloxed up." When landing on the moon, you don't want a Blue Screen. And that's what was threatening to happen. But they were still getting good radar data and other crucial signals so they were still a go. Amazingly, this was happening in real time and somehow the flight controllers made instant decisions concerning these things. There was no time to huddle for a conference. And then there came the warning that fuel had reached a specified danger limit. Kranz eventually had CAPCOM stop all chatter but a readout of the time remaining until the fuel ran out. The given estimate is that the were six seconds from an abort. All in all, this is a pretty good documentary.  |
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Post by artraveler on Jul 20, 2019 11:01:01 GMT -8
In English and German I've learned to count down
And I"m learning Chinese, says Werner Von Braun
This was the mid 60s and the idea of a Chinese challenge was considered absurd by most people
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 20, 2019 13:14:28 GMT -8
I think the Russkies, the Godless Chinese Communists, the limp-wristed Europeans, and the Americans should get together and collaborate on a permanent colony on Mars. The stumbling block isn't international cooperation. (This thing would be so damned expensive, it's a good thing to share.) It would be whether today's Wehner von Snowflakes would refrain from doing so because it might somehow increase CO2 levels on Mars.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 20, 2019 14:29:37 GMT -8
I think the plan may be to make it an international consortium (you probably have the participants about right) to go to the Moon. Mars may require an even larger group. Maybe by then they'll be willing to let Israel help out. They'll probably be more useful than the heavily Arabized EU. Japan and South Korea might also help, though they'll have to be careful that their participants don't feud with each other. Australia and India might contribute as well.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 20, 2019 18:57:54 GMT -8
Get ready for a two-bit opinion…
It is amazing that the moon landing brought the world together for a moment in unity (or at least curiosity). And when it was successful, quite rightly the British cheered, the Australians cheered, the Japanese cheered, the Polish cheered, and I think even some of the French cheered. I’ve always thought of our liberally-defined Commonwealth Nations as our friends through thick and thin.
That idealism has taken a buffeting in the intervening years. The Left has seeped in their poison, especially in Europe, turning most of the population against us. That’s sad. We should be in this together.
That said, I do think we stand a fair chance of avoiding WWIII if we could get together in a joint venture with the Russians and the Chinese. For a brief moment, Apollo changed our perspective of mankind, the universe, and our place in it. But nature abhors a vacuum, especially when so many people of ill will infect us with their psychoses.
I never bought the mindless blather that when looking at the famous photo called “Earthrise” that itshowed how fragile our earth is. That’s complete baloney. If anything, it showed earth as an oasis in a vast and mostly dark universe. It’s strong and bright and glowing. It’s home. But having seen it from afar, we could begin to think of it as a jumping-off point, the Home Island we can always come back to but from which adventure and opportunity beckon.
The purpose of a Mars colony would be “Because it’s there.” Sure, the geology can be explored. And for the naive, we can look for life, expecting to find it merely as an automatic product of water and time. But it would be about building a home away from home just to see if we could do it and then to see where the venture would lead.
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