I ate some moondust.
So did my father.
Resident of New Mexico around 1976-1982, by any chance?
Oh, and thank you for the suggestion. I watched it last night.
It was beautiful.
Well, one of the last steps before a LEM or CM was shipped out of the plant was to put it through a slow 3 axis rotation so all the loose nuts, bolts, and tools would fall out and collect in one space. The contract performance clauses also dicated that as the number of loose items grew, the contract would take a bigger penalty.
I had the series on tape, but gave them away as a present and haven’t gotten around to buying them on DVD.
I just corrected that on Amazon.com.
And Spider was my Favorite episode, too, followed closely by That’s All There Is and Galileo Was Right. But the whole series is excellent, and highly recommended to anyone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure.
The music from The Great Escape, one of my more liked movies, was so oddly appropriate in Spider.
No. I’m a planetary geology grad student. Schmitt came to my school to give a talk and my advisor had me and his other students take him out to lunch.
Yeah, well, if you’d watched the series or read the book upon which it was based on, you’d have gotten to see an indepth discussion of what humans did in space that machines couldn’t (and for the most part still can’t) do.
On a related note, if you’re interested in more views of the moon, I recommend the photography book Full Moon. Amazon even has a used copy on sale…
Also, I collected Alan Shepard’s autograph! 
Has anyone read of any astronaut’s impression of the series?
Thoughts to ponder:
[ul]
[li]Because the Earth is too fragile a basket to keep all humanity’s eggs in (Robert Heinlein)[/li][li]Because it may be possible to exploit resources from other planets & asteroids [/li][li]Because there’s been a fair bit of technology transfer out of the space program that we use in our daily lives. Hey, it gave us Velcro and Tang![/li][li]Because of the Hubble service missions, with resulting wonderful photographs and physics/astronomy data[/li][li]Because we can[/li][li]Because we learn a lot about the nature of the universe that we can’t from under a 60-mile deep atmosphere[/li][li]Because deciding what to research based on ROI is a terrible waste of talent. Bell Labs used to file a patent a day, the results of research for the sake of knowledge. Among other things, we got transistors. What’s left of Bell Labs is now concentrating entirely on research that will contribute to the bottom-line. As a result, it’s nowhere near as innovative or eclectic, and they’re no longer filing a patent a day.[/li][li]Because it’s just way cool to do it (says the geek who wishes she had a spare $190,000 to take a ride on SS1 once they start taking tourists up)[/li][/ul]
There are several reasons why it is better to send people on planetary missions, most of which has been posted here already.
Robots will go out and follow orders and get what they’re supposed to (provided they don’t malfunction). But they will have no insight. If in a sticky situation the robot will not be able to think of a way out. They will not experience the place. They will not be able to cognitively make a decision that will enhance the mission.
An example:
Apollo 17: Dr. Schmitt is toolin’ around the Moon and spots something orange. What is something orange doing this grey moon? He goes to investigate and samples the orange substance. It turns out to be orange glass, which is indicative of fire fountaining from a volcano. This orange glass tells us so much more about the Moon than the other returned basaltic samples.
Had Dr. Schmitt been a robot, he never would have noticed the orange glass, never would have ventured to investigate it.
There are so many more arguments I could give you. Think about the stories returned by the astronauts. All of humanity gets to live that experience through their stories. Do you think that people would have cared a fraction of the amount they do about the Apollo program if the astronauts were robots? It’s clear humanity wants humans to go explore - look at how we anthropomorphize the MER rovers. Humans should be the explorers because we are the ones who got us to where we are. Unless you think it’s time for the human race to pitter out and pass on to robots as the next phase of our evolution.
Did we?
Non-inclusive list of Soviet space firsts in the 1960s:
First artificial Earth satellite - Sputnik
First biological space traveler - Laika
First human in space, first to orbit earth - Yuri Gagarin
First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova
First spacewalk - Alexei Leonov
First craft to orbit the Sun - Luna
First craft to hard land on the Moon, or any celestial body - Luna 2
First craft to soft land on the Moon, return pictures of far side - Luna 9
First craft to orbit the Moon - Luna 10
Well we did land on the moon. 
I also thikn the US is the only contry to send humans on strictly suborbital flights with the first two Mercury missions, three by SS1 and numerous X-15 flights.
And let’s not forget that the Ruskies sent the first living being into space - a poor little pooch - with no intention of allowing it to come back (they don’t even know when it died). While the U.S. put up a monkey (forget his name) who returned and lived to be 28!
They were test pilots, and no one knew their names.
Actually I mentioned the Russian dog. I’ve been told that “Laika” is not a proper name but is a generic one for spitz breeds. The US space chimp, not a monkey, that went up in a Mercury flight was named Ham.
My apologies for missing that you posted this.
Also my apologies to the hominidae family for confusing apes and monkeys. I pray to Darwin to forgive me.
I thaught they electrocuted her.
This was a great, great series. It was just rebroadcast on HBO a couple months ago for the anniversary and I watched most of the episodes. My favorite bit might be when, after the fire, we see Stormy weeping in his study and then, next time we see him, he’s in the inquiry room putting all the blame on NASA. And then of course the end where Joe and Stormy remember when the astronauts gave them the picture.
I met John Glenn a couple years ago outside the men’s room at the Kennedy Center.
–Cliffy
I’ve heard conflicting reports, but the most popular story going around these days is that she died of stress shortly after take-off due to stress and overheating, something the Soviets didn’t want to publicize, for obvious reasons. (Some, cites.)
I love this series as well and have seen it a couple times.
I just posted to tell you all that my birthday is July 20, 1969. My name is the same as the Greek goddess of the moon (or was it the Roman?). My astrological sign is, of course, Cancer, with my ascendant sign being Cancer, the ruling plant for which is the Moon. I own all manner of Gemini series memorabilia.
[singsong] I know what your name is. I know what your name is. [/singsong]
If you were twins, now that would be cool.