They were all top pilots or scientists, I guess they’re the part of the populace most likely to want to get out of the atmosphere.
Yeah. Gene said that on every single mission, there were multiple times when they were seconds or inches away from total disaster. Every time. People talk about the miraculous recovery of the Apollo 13 team after the explosion, but he said that kind of near-fatal shit happened all the time.
…the danger factor woyuld have been 10x as high! their plan involved a spacewalk in lunar orbit, for one cosmonaut to enter the LEM-imagine if the guy had a problem in lunar orbit?
I think that is why the russians dropped their plans for this-it was simply too risky-and the world would have known, if a tragedy hd occurred.
You know, when I clicked on it and read it over, I thought “I can see why he said that.”
I have a comment to make, but I decided to start this thread to do so.
EJsGirl you said you had met Gene Krantz? Have you written a thread about the experience? How did you end up meeting him?
I think I might have posted it somewhere before. We had him come and speak to a group of school district superintendents (I was an organizer). We gave everyone a copy of his book at the conference, and after he spoke he autographed them for everyone who asked. He was a very nice man, a bit gruff perhaps, and had a huge presence in the room. He signed some things for my family, and we chatted throughout that day.
Absolute gentleman, and quick to praise the very young men who were working for him in the space program. He gave them much of the credit for it’s success. Also, I think he usually gets tens of thousands of dollars for a speaking engagement (1-3 hours), but because we are in education, he did it for free (which was the only way we could have ever gotten him- we had zero cash for high-powered speakers).
Hearing him talk about the space program and especially the Apollo 13 mission was amazing. Even though you knew how the story ended, you were riveted the entire time. I was hardly breathing.
If you saw Ed Harris portray Gene in Apollo 13, I can tell you that he absolutely nailed him.
Damned great guy.
Also their program was a political quagmire, I’m sure money was an issue, and their intended moon rocket, the N-1, kept blowing up on them in tests. And it became quite clear that we were going to make it ahead of them by the mid-60s.
At least, that’s my understanding. Unfortunately most of my space books are in storage 2500 miles away so I don’t have any easy cites at hand.
ETA: EJsGirl, that is so cool!
Also key was the NASA’s ability to put more advanced instrumentation of the rocket hardware. We were much better at this than the Soviets. It allowed us to model the hardware with more precision. This, in turn, allowed incremental improvements to roll out earlier (and saving the big bucks by fixing it earlier, rather than later in the program).
Me neither. I recommend reading The Right Stuff, and especially the first chapter, to get an idea of what these guys were like.
I think “the other things” are an allusion to civil rights.
I have a possible explanation why a lot of people assume the astronauts carried suicide pills:
Gary Powers may have had one.
He was the pilot who got shot down over the USSR in his U-2, was then held for a show trial, and eventually released. Michael Beschloss’ book “Mayday” has a photo of a purported suicide pin the Soviets claim belonged to Powers.
It’s possible that the Soviets made this claim for propaganda purposes. Anyone have further information on this?
In any case, I wonder if the whole suicide pill thing started there since the U-2 shootdown predated the manned spacecraft program by a year or so.
Strictly anecdotal, but my mother-in-law used to live just down the block from the Powers family on base, they knew them pretty well, and got close to Gary’s wife when he was shot down. She says the idea is ludicrous.
Gary Powers did have a suicide device. It was a poison-dipped needle hidden in a small holed drilled into a coin. It was discovered by the Russians and displayed at his trial. However, he had no instructions to actually use it, and even carrying it was not mandatory. IIRC, in his autobiography Powers said his last flight was the first one he carried it on.
I thought suffocation was a particularly unpleasant form of death because rising levels of CO2 trigger the “air hunger” sensation, which, according to some research, is a more aversive stimulus (i.e., worse) than actual pain. Certainly breathing from a balloon or the like rapidly induces a horrible feeling of needing to breathe. Is there some reason it would be different in a bigger enclosed container like the LEM?