Harrison Schmitt spoke in my city many years ago, and I went there. The one thing I remember about it was that they really didn’t like the salmon salad that was in their meal packs.
Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7) died three years ago and went to my High School. The science building was called Cunningham Hall after him. He became an anti Global Warming crank in his later years.
But not in that order?
It appears that the March 6 launch date (which is also my birthday) is being scrubbed, due to the rocket having to be returned to the maintenance building. The next feasible date will be after April 1st, and this is no April Fool.
Man, if I were one of the astronauts, I would really not feel confident about this rocket at all.
I wouldn’t either, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Seriously, after all the Redstone mishaps, I’m sure that Alan Shepard had misgivings too. But he went ahead and did it anyway. Pretty sure that today’s crew feels the same way: “This may work, or this may not, but somebody’s gotta try it, so why not us?”
There have been about 350 US astronauts so far, of which Apollo 1 (3 died), Columbia (7 dead) and Challenger (7 dead) resulted in 17 deaths, with Apollo 13 a very lucky not 3 dead, which I will not count. That is a historical rate of one in 20 dying. The question is: has the situation improved or worsened in recent years?
IDK, but thinking about recently reading that tanTrump is a manopolla (that translates literally as a dick hand, no mention of the size, but I liked it) that fucks everything he touches, I would not like to board that Artemis ship.
BTW: Has nobody told him that Artemis is the first born twin sister of Apollo, and that the name was chosen for gender balance reasons? Good that he does not read and has no culture, changing the name of a ship mid course brings bad luck.
Buzz Aldrin, too. I wonder why.
I think that despite the myth being an astronaut is no rocket science: they are just glorified aircraft pilots. Look at them. People who read the Bible aloud while orbiting the moon, as if there were not better things to look at. I guess they would have brought their guns with them if allowed, just in case some baddie showed up. If you want to know what kind of person someone is I recommend taking a good look at their spouses. Have you seen the astronaut’s wives? They look like tanTrump’s first two wives on a good day – or is it the other way around? Tacky tasteless conservative.
I think the thing to marvel is why not more of them turned out to be complete and utter morons in later years.
So, since Columbia there have been 70-something US astronauts, and none have died? Seems maybe a bit safer, but we cannot rule out the null hypothesis to a highly significant level, I think.
One aspect complicating the calculation of the odds is that astronaut’s deaths happen in clusters, the last two events killed seven each, like the flies in The Brave Little Tailor. But they also fly in groups. Only not always of the same size upwards and downwards when re-supplying the ISS, for instance. I will not try to calculat the odds: we will see anyway what happens when they start.
Definitely not true for Buzz Aldrin - he has a Ph.D in astronautics from MIT and had a big part in creating orbital rendezvous procedures. Indeed, he wouldn’t shut up about it and they called him “Dr. Rendezvous”. But they weren’t laughing during his Gemini flight - as I recall, there was a computer failure, at which point Buzz pulled out charts and calculated a rendezvous manually. Trust me, that’s not glorified pilot stuff and definitely qualifies as “rocket science”, though Buzz was ALSO a fighter pilot.
To be fair, Buzz was a little different compared to the other Apollo astronauts. The rest were mostly drawn from military test pilots, but that group should also not be thought of as mere pilots. These were very smart people who absorbed a tremendous amount of training in fields having nothing to do with flying, such as geology. One of the commanders estimated their geology training amounted to a master’s degree.
There were a lot of serious scientists in the shuttle program. The guy who led the first Hubble repair spacewalks, Story Musgrave, is a medical doctor and holds around six other master’s degrees. Most people couldn’t accomplish what he’s done in a dozen lifetimes. Though to my knowledge, he doesn’t believe anything overtly crazy.
But then there’s Butch Wilmore, who was stuck on the ISS last year. He was trained as an electrical engineer and test pilot and is also a young Earth creationist. After coming back from the space station he appeared at that ark encounter museum.
Which is to say, being really smart or even a scientist doesn’t necessarily insulate a person from believing silly things. I think that’s quite scary and explains some of what we’re seeing in the world right now. It’s also not new - there have been a lot of Nobel laureates who held crazy beliefs. I’ve certainly known otherwise intelligent people who believe in nonsense. It makes me a little cynical.
I guess they’re prone to lunacy
Yeah, he might wake up and find that one of the Artemis 2’s crew is a Canadian, and then force a last minute crew change.
Much the same attitude that Vladimir Komarov had: He knew that if he didn’t fly, that his friend Yuri would be going in his place.
If I were about to fly into space, around the moon and farther from Earth that anybody has ever been I wouldn’t balk at the risk, I would try to minimize it as far as possible, but the reward fairly justifies enormous risks, to me at least and I suspect that most if not all astronauts would see the situation in the same way.
Is that really so? OK, they will be 4,000 miles farther from the Moon than the early missions ever were: they orbited really close to the moon, under 100 miles. But was the moon back then in the apogee or in the perigee? Where will it be now? How can they know, when they don’t even know when Artemis will be launched? If they launch at the perigee the 4,000 miles dont really count. Wikipedia states for the Moon perigee: 362600 km, apogee: 405400 km. The difference is bigger than the 4,000 miles they will be farther than the Moon. Why do they claim to know they will be farther from the Earth than any other human ever?
I call bullshit. From the current US administration (and I use this term loosely) and NASA under the direction of this badministration, not from you, Frodo. Don’t get me wrong. Just fighting ignorance and misinformation. Or being corrected by people who know better, perhaps @Chronos Maybe I am overlooking something.
Maybe they will be farther from Earth than ever before, maybe not. We will know when they are there, because it will depend on the orbit of the Moon then. But not today, they can’t say that for sure.
Assuming they get there at all and don’t blow up on the way there. (–> see: badministration)
Or he will say that proves that Canada is the fiftysomethingst State of the USA, not an independent country, and they should kiss his ass. You never know whith him.