Celebrating 40 years of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.
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If some say this never really happened, my father has the tech manuals at home to prove it. Nut jobs.
Looks good along with video today…but all we had live was audio. And Neil wasn’t talkative…nobody knew why it took him so long to land.
Still amazing.
Photoshopped!!! Note the lack of stars in the black immenseness of space. The stars we can see here on Mother Earth don’t magically disappear when viewed from the moon.
When you get computer nerds to do your photoshopping, you really do need to get someone with some space knowledge on board.===add the stars, take out the rocket motor noise, remove martian foot tracks, etc.
It happened 40 years ago today
No, I am not referring to Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.
Massachusetts Justice
Ted Kennedy was formally charged with the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on July 20, 1969. However, since the accident that killed Mary Jo happened deep in Kennedy’s Massachusetts territory, people knew there would be no way in Hades that he would be convicted.
Police Chief Dominic Arena was asked if he checked into the possibility that the accident was related to drinking. His response: “I did not ask that question of the senator. There was no other physical evidence at the scene that there might have been drinking involved. I’m not pursuing that line at all…. I’m still standing on the fact that there was no negilence involved.”
Of course, it helps good ‘ol Teddy that he waited until the morning AFTER the accident to report it to police. But that’s just a meaningless detail, right?
You can hear the live audio stream as it was exactly 40 years ago at http://wechoosethemoon.org/player.html
Where’s ALF, that was the best part!
#4–jb==your post has nothing to do with photoshop ™ but I have to admit such anniversaries should not go by un-celebrated.
The Lion of the Senate.
What is the “proper” response to *anyone* who runs his car into the water resulting in the death of his passenger?
On those facts alone, I would say nothing but personal memories. Hard to complain too much when someone in power avoids the outrages of the overly judgmental power structure. Course==he could have come out for making drunk driving legal, but he’s a politician and couldn’t put his private beliefs on display.
The moon landing was totally fake.
Everyone knows they really landed on Mars and not the moon. Why else do you think that so many of the satellite missions to Mars have “accidentally” failed?
The big question is whether our flag is still flying up there, or if it fell down. There’s a lunar satellite taking high-res photos right now, and even photos of the landing sites won’t convince the conspiracists…they live in a fact-free and evidence-free zone.
3 bobbo, a photo hobbiest
In my never-ending public-service efforts to erase ignorance everywhere, let me first ask whether you really believe that these “photoshoppers” in their calculated attempts to deceive the public just simply forgot to add stars to their creations? ie: “Stars? In space?… doh!”
Then ask yourself what would happen to these very faint points of starlight – the very same ones that disappear in the sky during the day – when the camera stops-down and properly exposes to the daylight intensities of light you see in the images.
RBG
Still sends shivers down my spine. It was phenomenal.
#4 jbenson2 receives a fail cat for trying to politicize this magnificent achievement.
#10
There are NO stars in the universe! 😀 Actually, this isn’t the first time this same reasoning debate about “stars” missing from the surrounding has been discussed. There are many “fake” space videos. Some are pretty clever and forces you to really observe hard to find what isn’t right in space.
Way cool.
It’s amazing we are the only form of life in the universe and yet so hard to spread out.
The computer that controlled the descent, crashed twice and they had to reset it each time. They came within seconds of aborting the landing because of low fuel. They had to hover over the landing area to find a spot without boulders. All, with one hand on the steering wheel.
#15 About 25 seconds of fuel left after landing.
This was the coolest thing to happen in my life. I remember sitting in front of the TV watching Walter and I believe Arthur C. Clarke as we listened to the audio and saw the animation of what they thought was going on. THAT was when the United States of America was on top of the world.
1969, what a year.
#10–RBG==I don’t have the faintest (sic) notion of what you are talking about. Daylight/Stars/Cameras shutting down. The pictures were taken at night because the sky is dark. Dark = Night. At night the stars come out. Has common sense totally left you?
Does remind me of the polish joke about going to Sun at night time though to avoid the heat. How could that be related?
Michael Collins put this in the front of his book, Carrying the Fire, which is one of the best books by any astronaut:
There are only two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse; one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and the retire to the house and at leisure figure out the way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safer, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds, but if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial” –Orville Wright
It was definitely the “Wonder Years”
#18, Bobbo, it was daytme on the Moon. Not one Apollo mission landed on the Moon at night. The foreground brightness forced the camera’s auto-exposure to stop down to correctly image the Moon, not the sky. Lack of atmosphere has nothing to do with camera exposure times. Learn how cameras work.
#16, QB, it was 17 seconds of fuel left according to NASA, but 25 is pretty close. Either way, I doubt I could sit down for a week after that one.
#21 BubbaRay
I’m still stunned at their piloting. No one will ever know how much fuel was left. The lower lunar gravity made the fuel slosh around a lot more so the low fuel sensors went off. That was on top of a bundle of other alarms going off while most of the world was watching.
Those guys were (and still are) amazing.
All in favor of sending bobbo, a photo hobbiest/bobbo, able to rank order the issues/bobbo, just wondering to the Apollo 11 landing site to personally see the descent stage, footy-prints, etc please say “Aye”.
#22, QB, Roger on the fuel status. I’ve been down to 15 minutes of fuel in IFR conditiions due to screwed up ATC handling and I wasn’t as cool as Neil Armstrong. Bullet sweating time. Neil and Buzz were/are great pilots, and we didn’t have the computer power in ’69 to send robots to the Moon to do the geology Harrison Schmitt and others did. Probably still don’t. No substitute for a human being. I’ll salute NASA for one of the finest achievements of man.
To think there is more compute power in a cellphone than what was on board the mission is amazing.
Here’s a pretty good article on LM Computer. Honestly I had never heard of rope memory until I read up on it today. These computers are pretty amazing, and yes, my iPhone or G1 are infinitely more powerful, but maybe not as robust.
The guys who wrote code for the Apollo program are real programmers – I’m just a wannabe compared to them.
Thank goodness they didn’t take United to the moon.
And it’s all for nothing.
Next year, no more shuttle.
Ares and Orion will get delayed, and have cost overruns, and inevitably get canceled.
By 2016, no more space station (which means, why bother with Ares/Orion – it won’t have a mission any more).
On the bright side – with NASA out of the space business, maybe SpaceX or SpaceShipOne will get somewhere.
Boot was a terrible place to be 40 years ago today.
So many men I watched with made the trip home to very different “honors”.
Chuck, the upside is that if we take the humans out of the picture, it costs 10X less to go places and we can go to lots more of them a LOT sooner.
I think we had to do Apollo for a lot of reasons. But the shuttle is a terrible ROI, and there’s not a damn thing a human can do on Mars we can’t do with robots, at trillions fewer dollars.
Too bad that Yuri Gagarin did not live to see this event. No matter what the politics of the day, this was a great event for humanity.
9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968