Just found this site which has tons and tons of PDFs on NASA documents, blueprints, etc. for free! Just some of the things available there:
That’s not even a tenth of the stuff that can be found at that site!
Dude, your title is so misleading.
Yow! Dodged the bullet on that one! I thought we were about to be invaded by giant Space Prawns! :eek:
I failed everything except Date of Birth.
This site has got a lot of nifty pictures, including my all time favorite of a Saturn V launch.
I have some DVDs that I’ve often described as “porn for engineers” – the “Mighty Saturns” DVDs available from spaceflightnow.com. They have stuff like a full-up Saturn V booster (the Boeing stage) static firing over and over again from about 10 different angles, with surround sound. Crank up that bass and let the good times roll!
When I was a kid, I used to send letters to NASA, worded something like this:
I had addresses on file for all the major space centers and NASA offices. I’d probably send 5-10 of these letters a year, and I did it for a couple of years. You would be amazed at the stuff they sent me! I had an entire large box filled with 8 X 10 photos, pamphlets, manuals, you name it. Anything they could stuff in a manila envelope. I remember receiving about a 200 page operations manual for Skylab once. That was very cool, although way over my 10 year old head. But I treasured it. They also sent me sew-on patches from almost every mission.
When the mail arrived at my house it was always a big event. I never knew what was going to show up.
That kind of stuff made be a life-long booster of NASA. No matter what they screw up, I still remember how some guys there would spend the time to stuff things into envelopes for a little kid in Canada.
Last time I was home I looked for my box of NASA stuff, but my mom threw it out in her last move. Sigh.
I grew up in Houston, and every year or so, my Dad and I would drive down to the JSC on the way to my grandparents’ house and fill out the little card they had for getting free stuff.
They sent me all sorts of stuff like ** Sam Stone** just mentioned- tons of 8x10s from about oh… late Gemini through Apollo-Soyuz, and then some early Shuttle pictures.
I still have them somewhere at my parents’ house in a box, it’s probably 60-70 8x10s at least, plus a bunch of fact sheets on different things and some manuals.
I feel much the same way as ** Sam**- they spent the time to send me neat stuff as a child, so I’m pretty much a big fan of NASA these days.