Our next-door neighbour worked for Rockwell, building the Shuttle at Palmdale. He gave us a tour once, and I got to stand on the catwalk abaft the nozzles of the main engines. Awesome. The last year of high school I got into ‘Advanced Career Training’ at Rockwell. We were learning to read blueprints and make orthogonal drawings. Somewhere I have a couple of ring magnets with white magnetic discs that were used in the Shuttle building process (for notations of some sort while reading the blueprints).
I kind of remember the big push to teach Sciences in schools when I was in single-digits. Dad was a Naval officer (later, in the FAA), so I was exposed to hardware at an early age. My (at the time) best friend’s grandfather worked for Convair (I think), and they had an Atlas missile on display on its side where he worked (in San Diego). I, of course, was ‘ate up’ with the space program. It seems a shame to me that the Let’s Teach Children Science agenda of the ‘60s withered away to be replaced with Readin’, Writin’ and 'Rithmatic. Yes, there were children being ‘left behind’ and coming out of school without basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills; but in getting back to the basics we lost the inertia we needed to keep science education moving forward.
I was 11 and remember listening on the radio at school in New Zealand. I had listened to earlier Apollo missions on Voice of America shortwave.
There was no satellite receiver in NZ so we couldn’t see it (or any other international TV) live. Not wanting to miss out for long, the government instructed the airforce to have an aircraft waiting on the ground in Sydney to get videotape from the Australian ABC and fly it back to NZ to get it on our TV that night. Here’s the story They were exciting times.
1969 was a great year. Muscle cars were daily drivers, the SR-71 ruled the sky, the Concorde and the 747 made their first flights and we landed on the moon. It was as if humanity was moving full tilt into the 21st century.
Any irony aside, *Apollo 13 *is one of the finest space movies ever made, and super-appropriate to watch in celebration of the anniversary…and, indeed, the soundtrack is fantastic.
If you haven’t seen the recent documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, you really should. It is excellent in every sense, and the music is absolutely breathtaking. Watch the segment on the Apollo 11 launch here. The part starting about 1:40 in sends shivers up my spine every time I watch it…it has no words, and needs none.
I didn’t wake up until seven, so I missed the launch.
The animation that played was rather choppy. I’ve been hearing some audio, but right now it’s quiet and has been for several minutes. I clicked on the ‘click to launch pop-up layer’ link and a small window popped up, but I get a message that says ‘Over capacity. Try again later.’ I just tried again, and I get the little ‘broadcast tower’ animation that’s on the Live Transmission panel. I assume this means that I can navigate away from the browser window and let the mission play out in the pop-up window.
There’s a saying that ‘Flying is hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror’. Fortunately I’ve not experienced the latter; but even as much as I like flying, maintaining straight-and-level on a long cross-country at 130 mph in a Cessna isn’t as much fun as taking off, landing, practicing stalls, and whatnot. At this stage in the mission there’s not much going on. This is where Uncle Walter should be talking. It would be nice if the website had something going on during the lulls. (Yes, I could watch videos and look at the photo gallery; but I have to start working in ten minutes.)
Bricker and trupa, well said. I couldn’t agree more. As I see it, space exploration is vitally important as an expression of the human spirit, for the value of the knowledge gained, as insurance against the extinction of humanity, and as a reflection of national purpose and greatness. But as the years go by, I unfortunately find myself less and less confident that we will ever approach the pinnacle that the Apollo program represented. More’s the pity, and shame on us.
I highly recommend both of these excellent, award-winning documentaries:
It was ultimately disappointing because the streaming audio crapped out on me a minute before launch. I reloaded but got the “over capacity” message. The launch animation was pretty cool, though. I didn’t realize that they threw away stage 1 almost immediately after launch.
My audio crapped out too, during launch. Around T-minus one minute. But I did get to see the clock tick down, and the screen erupted in animation. Pretty cool as far as those things go. I am leaving the audio streaming as it they wind up for the Trans-Lunar-Injection… coming up to the GO/NO GO point… I wonder if they’ll go?! The suspense is killing me!
I’m not sure the animation they’re showing is real time, though. I believe it took a few minutes before they jettisoned the first stage, right?
Thanks, Johnny. Yeh, the animation they showed seemed like less than a minute, and went from launch to end of staging, so they’re taking a few liberties. But the audio is all real time.
Folks may wish to download the NASA Apollo 11 press kit [PDF]. Mission trajectory starts on page 26, which states that stage 1 burn was scheduled for 2m:40.8s and stage 2 burn was scheduled for 6m:29s. Seemed much shorter when I was “watching” it.
