He is. He’s a tall white dude standing 6’2” tall.
Delayed until March at least:
Dang!. Hydrogen is a pain in the rear to work with.
Dumb question, but why can’t manned space rockets use solid fuel the way ICBMs do? Is it because they need the flexibility of being able to un-fuel the rocket, or only fuel it to a certain level, like if they want 73% full instead of 100%?
The white “booster” rockets on the side are solid fuel. Similar to the ones used for the shuttle. The usual reason given for not using more solid fuels for manned rockets is that they can’t be throttled or turned off once started.
Many reasons. Ability to throttle the level of thrust is a major plus for liquid fuels. A solid booster is either on or off. A premature OFF prior to burnout usually involves an explosion.
Bummer.
Does anyone know if the Apollo program had any Jewish astronauts? Of course, nowadays we’re going to have Muslim, Hindu, etc. and of course even openly non-religious astronauts too.
The predecessor to the current lunar mission architecture was called Constellation. It would have used a large rocket called Ares V, similar to SLS, to launch most of the hardware for the Moon mission. But the crew would have launched separately on a solid-fueled rocket called Ares I. (The Ares I / Ares V convention was an hommage to Saturn I / Saturn V.)
Ares I was basically a lengthened version of a Shuttle booster, with an upper stage and crew capsule installed on top.
One major preoccupation was that these solid rockets don’t burn evenly, resulting in vibration / thrust oscillations. On the Shuttle, having two boosters plus the inertia of the tank and orbiter would even out those vibrations to an acceptable level; but on Ares I, it was estimated that the astronauts were at risk of serious injury from the oscillations, and various mitigation systems were proposed.
The Constellation architecture was cancelled around 2009, although one prototype of Ares I, called Ares IX, was launched unmanned in October 2009.
Google is your friend: No Jewish astronauts flew in space during the Apollo missions (1961–1972). The first Jewish Americans in space were Judith Resnik and Jeffrey Hoffman in the 1980s. While no Jewish astronauts were in the Apollo astronaut corps, Jewish engineers like Judith Love Cohen (Apollo 13) and Jerry Wittenstein (Apollo 11) contributed to the program.
It did not. The first Jewish NASA astronaut to go into space was Judith Resnik. She first flew into space on the Space Shuttle in 1984, and died in the Challenger disaster in 1986.
I met Hoffman once - he gave a talk at the Haifa, Israel Rotary Club about 30 years ago. He seemed like an impressive dude.
No; but Buzz Alsren did self-administer Holy Communion while on the Moon.
That was the first meal ever consumed on the moon, the wafer and wine of Holy Communion.
In Webster TX, the communion kit he used is displayed in the lobby of his former church. And the stained glass windows of that church have some moon rocks embedded in them (okay, body, maybe tiny pebbles). That’s the Presbyterian Church there in Webster.
Let’s see whether I have this right: Buzz Alsren is actually Buzz Aldrin. When Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the moon, the first thing they did was to eat and drink Jesus flesh and blood, a meal sponsored by a secular state. Violating the rules he had agreed to when he accepted his job he brought back some moon rocks for personal use and embedded them in glass that is on display in a church in Webster TX. There is such a thing as a communion kit, and Aldrin’s historical kit, the one he used on the moon, is on display on the same church. And nobody has stolen it. Yet.
Right?
Out of curiosity: what does a communion kit look like? There must be pictures of the proud owners, even if pride is a sin.
There’s a picture in the article below. It’s just a small chalice.
So he really smuggled wine to the moon and drank it with his superior before a mission critical er… step.
He didn’t smuggle anything. NASA knew he brought it as part of his personal allowance. In fact, they asked him not to mention it specifically over communications, because of the lawsuit over the Genesis read in Apollo 8. It was a private ceremony that he conducted during the moment of reflection that he requested from Mission Control for everyone to observe. His personal observance of it was the self-administered communion. Also Neil Armstrong did not participate in the communion with Buzz.
But the event wasn’t discussed publicly at the time, in part because there had been the Genesis reading on Apollo 8 the previous year, which had given rise to a lawsuit.
(Oops, ninja’d. Is Ninja a religion?)
NASA allowed alcohol? Really?
And the moon pebbles in the glass were also part of his personal allowance? Sounds cheesy to me.
And this sentence
makes no sense. Not if the words “private” and “everyone to observe” are used in a consuetudinary way.
And that font used to write
This silver Chalice was used in Holy Communion on the Lunar surface by Webster Presbyterian Church Elder Col. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Apollo 11 July 20, 1969
is horrible, looks almost but not quite like comic sans, and the weird random capitalization reminds me of someone who makes me puke.
No, I don’t feel better now, but I had to write it.
I fail to see where you were ninja’d, but of course Ninja is a religion in this board.