Just a note about 2:40.8 vs. the 2:35 I posted. I was counting from liftoff; not from ignition.
Ha, you did fine… I was going to commend you for coming so close!
Man, just listening to this in real time… it really brings it home for me. I wasn’t born until '73, so I missed it all, yet I’ve always been fascinated by the Apollo missions. Still, I can’t believe we (humankind) did this.
Just wow.
Good christ… that CSM/LM connection kinda gave me the shivers.
These guys had balls of tungsten carbide.
My pop-up window still looks like it’s connected, but I haven’t heard a peep in quite a long time.
Seems like a good time to bring up this upcoming show on the History Channel. Moonshot. Monday the 20th, of course.
Looks like the amped up dramatizations are going to make it a little on the campy side, but I’m down for the emersion of it all.
ETA: Are there any other Apollo or Moon specials coming up?
It’s been going for me. Try reloading.
They communicate every couple minutes or so on average. Although, between stages 2 & 3 seemed to be the longest.
If you don’t at least hear the static crackle, I don’t think you’re getting the stream. But they’ve been talking a ton now, since the CSM separated.
Is there anything donuts can’t do? From doughnuts to liftoff, Apollo 11 launch was blast - CNN.com
I entirely agree.
Human nature gets in our way. We can hardly agree on anything; even obvious ideas (“all men are created equal”) take centuries or millennia for a majority of people to get on board and make it happen. But it’s worse than that: put up a monument somewhere. No matter how grand, no matter how beautiful, no matter how worthy, some asshat little fucktard is going to vandalize it. Every great human achievement is fraught with peril from the same antagonistic tendencies of that little vandal. Noble ideas appear in Congress and are shot down by one party merely so the other party doesn’t gain prestige. People are going to oppose the idea for the hell of it, and use some crabbed, idiot logic to justify their intellectual vandalism.
But the rub is, that justification to besmirch the grand idea is going to be believed by many, and applauded by many.
Unless we can convincingly prove that the effort required for things like manned missions to Mars and moonbases will have a clear, short-term economic benefit to the minority of wealthy and powerful, the vandals are going to have their way, and those achievements will remain unachievable.
Also of interest: Houston, We Erased The Apollo 11 Tapes : NPR
Thanks Elendil, these are great articles.
I was just coming back to say I did that. It worked. I also have the site opened in a browser and I can hear it there. (But I have that browser hidden so that I can’t hear it, else I get a slight echo.)
Welp, looks like we’ve got 3 days of nothing but distance and communication. I’ll probably just keep the audio running in the background, until Monday. :-p
Heh. I was scratching my head all day.
They just reported Apollo 11’s speed as 9000-ish feet per second (and 38000 miles away from Earth). When they left orbit, they had accelerated up to 27000-ish feet per second. I kept thinking “Why are they slowing? They’re in a Vacuum!”
Ans: Gravity. They are still climbing uphill! :smack:
mlees, I was wondering the same thing, and came to the same conclusion. I never realized they were decelerating because of earth’s gravity well. Will the moon’s pull eventually counteract it?
Yes.
This seems like a good place to post some random space-related thoughts…
The whole countdown sequence was always incredibly exciting…I loved hearing “ignition sequence started” … “liftoff. We have liftoff.” And I hate what NASA has done with it lately – tarting it up with some expository marketing verbiage about how grand the mission is that they’re now embarking on. “Liftoff on the shuttle Endeavour, and the trip to the space station where we’ll polish up the doorknobs and launch Japan’s entry into the new orbiting satellite technology and blahdebladefingblah…”
Only 16 at the time, but I distinctly remember being less than thrilled with Armstrong’s first words. The real thrill – the hair standing up, can’t breathe, this is so cool thrill, came with “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” I would’ve thought those words perfect and should’ve been the ones to have been memorialized forever.
jsc1953: For as long as you have been posting, whenever I see your username I think of Johnson Space Center.
You should meet my twin, ksc1953.
I never worked with KSC.
What time on Monday will the Eagle touch down?