Forty years ago men from Earth first landed on the Moon. Over the next three-and-a-half years, five additional successful missions followed. At the time Armstrong and Aldrin left footprints on the lunar surface man had only been in space for a little over eight years. And the impetus for their lunar stroll, the single motivating words that awakened the superhuman efforts of intellect and courage, was a single speech from President John F. Kennedy a little over seven years earlier. I have no doubts in my mind that this is the crowning tangible achievement of mankind.
I just read one of those scale analogies that really brought the accomplishment out to me quite clearly. Imagine the Earth as the size of a basketball. Before Apollo, the highest altitude we attained in a spacecraft, Gemini 11, was 850 miles (the shuttle can operate between 120 and 600 miles in space). This is about 1 inch off that basketball.
In this analogy, the Moon is about the size of a baseball … 23 feet away. That’s right. Going to the Moon is thus over 275 times farther than the farthest we had gone up to that point. The task involved lifting three men and two spacecraft to Earth orbit, injecting them into a course for the Moon, braking at the Moon to enter lunar orbit, separating the two spacecraft, descending to the surface in one vehicle, exploring for a set amount of time, lifting off the lunar surface in part of the lunar lander, re-entering the command capsule, leaving lunar orbit for a course to the Earth, and entering Earth’s atmosphere at just the proper angle to avoid burning up on re-entry or bouncing off into the void of space.
Only about 175,000 separate things that could go wrong in that plan.
And all done with primitive computers. Computers that had to be constructed, essentially from scratch, to do the jobs the nerds with the glasses and slide rules didn’t have time to do (though they found the time, if only to double-check the computers). Several times I heard the oft-repeated observation that there’s more RAM in someone’s cell phone nowadays than there was in the lander that brought the astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up safely to the command module. (I am currently trying to find the most accurate manifestation of that statement.)
But the thing is, it worked. It worked and was repeated five times. True, Apollo 13 did not reach her objective, but her crew returned safely to Earth thanks to the incredible ingenuity at Mission Control. Aside from the tragic deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in a fire during a simulation test on the launch pad, not a single astronaut died during the actual implementation of the Project Apollo mission objections. That is amazing.
Twelve men walked on the Moon. Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan, and Schmitt. As of this date, July 20, 2009, three of them have passed on to explore a different universe: Conrad, Shepard, and Irwin. And the youngest of the remaining is Duke, who’ll be 74 in a couple of months.
To paraphrase a quote from Arthur C. Clarke (which I am still hunting down): The amazing thing is not that we sent men to the moon to walk her surface. No, the amazing thing is that we stopped sending them …
I just read one of those scale analogies that really brought the accomplishment out to me quite clearly. Imagine the Earth as the size of a basketball. Before Apollo, the highest altitude we attained in a spacecraft, Gemini 11, was 850 miles (the shuttle can operate between 120 and 600 miles in space). This is about 1 inch off that basketball.
In this analogy, the Moon is about the size of a baseball … 23 feet away. That’s right. Going to the Moon is thus over 275 times farther than the farthest we had gone up to that point. The task involved lifting three men and two spacecraft to Earth orbit, injecting them into a course for the Moon, braking at the Moon to enter lunar orbit, separating the two spacecraft, descending to the surface in one vehicle, exploring for a set amount of time, lifting off the lunar surface in part of the lunar lander, re-entering the command capsule, leaving lunar orbit for a course to the Earth, and entering Earth’s atmosphere at just the proper angle to avoid burning up on re-entry or bouncing off into the void of space.
Only about 175,000 separate things that could go wrong in that plan.
And all done with primitive computers. Computers that had to be constructed, essentially from scratch, to do the jobs the nerds with the glasses and slide rules didn’t have time to do (though they found the time, if only to double-check the computers). Several times I heard the oft-repeated observation that there’s more RAM in someone’s cell phone nowadays than there was in the lander that brought the astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up safely to the command module. (I am currently trying to find the most accurate manifestation of that statement.)
But the thing is, it worked. It worked and was repeated five times. True, Apollo 13 did not reach her objective, but her crew returned safely to Earth thanks to the incredible ingenuity at Mission Control. Aside from the tragic deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in a fire during a simulation test on the launch pad, not a single astronaut died during the actual implementation of the Project Apollo mission objections. That is amazing.
Twelve men walked on the Moon. Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan, and Schmitt. As of this date, July 20, 2009, three of them have passed on to explore a different universe: Conrad, Shepard, and Irwin. And the youngest of the remaining is Duke, who’ll be 74 in a couple of months.
To paraphrase a quote from Arthur C. Clarke (which I am still hunting down): The amazing thing is not that we sent men to the moon to walk her surface. No, the amazing thing is that we stopped sending them …
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