Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

"We did it!"

Let's change the identity conversation to something more uplifting than Drumpf's racism. That big July 20th Apollo semicentennial is Saturday. Strongly recommend Thirteen Minutes to the Moon ("I was perfectly delighted with the seat I had..."-Michael Collins)
...Today, Mr. Collins still remembers the view of the moon as they closed in.
“It filled up a whole window, and it was absolutely three-dimensional,” he said. “The lights a lot lighter, the darks a lot darker, the delineation of them so clear. The sunlight was behind, and the sunlight was cascading 360 degrees around the rim of the moon. It made the most glorious spectacle you’ve ever seen in your life.”
But it is the view of Earth from 230,000 miles away, blue and white with a smudge of tan, that made more of a mark on him. “The thing that really surprised me was that it projected an air of fragility,” he said. “And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.” nyt
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Around the world, 650 million people had watched every step of their journey. Now the world wanted to see, in person, the first men to walk on the moon.
Collins said, "I was flabbergasted. I thought that when we went someplace they'd say, 'Well, congratulations. You Americans finally did it.' And instead of that, unanimously the reaction was, 'We did it. We humans finally left this planet. We did it.'" cbs
Or as Appiah writes: "I can love what is best in anyone's traditions while sharing it gladly with others." We chose to go to the moon... even if we Americans were originally motivated mainly by fear of the ungodly Russian commies.
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“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.” 
― Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

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SCIENCE SALON # 75

Michael Shermer with Charles Fishman — One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew us to the Moon

One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew us to the Moon (book cover)
On this July 16th, the 50thanniversary of Apollo 11, Michael Shermer speaks with veteran space reporter Charles Fishman who has been writing about NASA and the space program for more than 30 years.
In One Giant Leap he delivers an all-new take on the race to the Moon that puts Apollo into a new perspective in American history. Yes, the Apollo astronauts are the well-known and well-deserved public heroes of the race to the Moon. But the astronauts didn’t make the trip possible. It took 410,000 people to make the moon landings achievable. Every hour of spaceflight for Apollo required a million hours of work by scientists, engineers and factory workers on the ground — the equivalent of 10 lifetimes of work back on Earth. Fishman tells the story of the men and women who did the work to get the astronauts, and the country, to the Moon and back. Fishman and Shermer discuss:
  • When President John F. Kennedy rallied the nation to go to the Moon in 1961, the task was impossible. None of the technology or techniques existed to do it. Engineers, scientists and factory workers in every state in the USA created that technology in just 8 years. They invented space travel on a deadline.
  • Apollo is sometimes judged a disappointment because it didn’t usher in the Jetsons-like Space Age we thought it would. Fishman argues that the success of Apollo is the age we live in now — it opened the world to the digital revolution in ways that have never before been appreciated or written about. “The race to the Moon didn’t usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age,” he writes. “And that is as valuable a legacy as the imagined Space Age might have been.”
  • Secret tapes JFK made of meetings about space, along with other overlooked information from the Kennedy Administration, indicate that Kennedy himself was losing enthusiasm for the Moon race and the Moon landing by the fall of 1963. Had he not been assassinated, it’s not at all clear that Armstrong and Aldrin would have walked on the Moon in July 1969.
  • The on-board computer for Apollo was the smallest, most flexible, most powerful, most user-friendly computer ever created when it flew the astronauts to the Moon — and it did its mission with less computing power than your microwave oven has today.
  • Much of the most critical work to make the Moon missions possible was done by hand: the spacesuits were sewn by hand; the parachutes were sewn and folded by hand; the computer software was woven by hand; the heatshield was applied by hand, using a specialized version of a caulking gun.
  • The iconic image of astronauts unfurling an American flag on the Moon almost didn’t happen. NASA had not even thought about carrying a flag on the Moon missions until just weeks before the first mission blasted off.
  • Shermer ends by asking Fishman about the reputation of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who built the mighty Saturn V rocket that took the astronauts to the moon: how can we reconcile his genius and vision with his Nazi past, especially his involvement in the slave labor that built the V-2 rockets that rained death down on England in the final year of the war?
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Image result for trump apollo 11 cartoons

2 comments:

  1. I was fortunate to be old enough to remember the landing. I was sitting in my parents living room and we were watching the images on the TV of Armstrong descending on to the surface. Also, I was working in a lab in Alexandria Hospital when Wernher von Braun was a patient and died there. I never got to meet him. Access to his room was restricted even for medical technologists. There have been some amazing benefits, especially medical ones that were derived from the investment in science and technology related to space travel. I wonder if John thought about the landing when he wrote the lyrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FX4D1jU2m8

    ReplyDelete
  2. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/apollo_11_2019
    There is a film documentary that shows new found film from the day(s). It seem really good!

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