So 40 years ago today, the Apollo 11 mission launched

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Frank

Frank

My dad tells me stories about how he and his grandfather watched the moon landing intently live on TV. His dad, my grandfather, could never be bothered with such useless nonsense as he would say.
 

Except the moon landings are all fake, they were done on a soundstage and all of the footage you see was falsified. All of those little details that prove me wrong will be ignored.

Also, Buzz Aldrin is a liar and a coward and *gets punched in the face*


in case you can't tell, I am far from being serious
 
S

Steven Soderburgin

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM36P59sJPo:3ox3c4s1][/youtube:3ox3c4s1]

:)
 
Hylian

Hylian

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation ... on-landing

This month marks the 40th anniversary of humankind's first steps on the moon. Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men--one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.

1. The Apollo’s Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn’t rule out the possibility that they might explode on takeoff. NASA seated its VIP spectators three and a half miles from the launchpad.

2. The Apollo computers had less processing power than a cellphone.

3. Drinking water was a fuel-cell by-product, but Apollo 11’s hydrogen-gas filters didn’t work, making every drink bubbly. Urinating and defecating in zero gravity, meanwhile, had not been figured out; the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it.

4. When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s landing four miles off-target.

5. Pilot Neil Armstrong nearly ran out of fuel landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash. Apollo engineer Milton Silveira, however, was relieved: His tests had shown that there was a small chance the exhaust could shoot back into the rocket as it landed and ignite the remaining propellant.

6. The \"one small step for man\" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.

7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.

8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.

9. The flag was made by Sears, but NASA refused to acknowledge this because they didn’t want \"another Tang.\"

10. The inner bladder of the space suits—the airtight liner that keeps the astronaut’s body under Earth-like pressure—and the ship’s computer’s ROM chips were handmade by teams of “little old ladies.”
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Shegokigo

Shegokigo

hylian said:
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.
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"Oh Buzz, by the way, don't forget, on your way do.....
*slam*
Oh fuck...."
 
C

Chazwozel

Shegokigo said:
hylian said:
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.
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"Oh Buzz, by the way, don't forget, on your way do.....
*slam*
Oh smurf...."
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:rofl:

That would have been the funniest shit right there.
 
S

Steven Soderburgin

Chazwozel said:
That would have been the funniest shit right there.
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If the two men who first walked on the moon died tragically????????
 
Rob King

Rob King

6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.

7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.
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Could you imagine something like this happening? If the first step is too high to get back into the lander. Or if they locked themselves out.

That would be a horrible, horrible way to go.
 
C

Chazwozel

Kissinger said:
Chazwozel said:
That would have been the funniest poop right there.
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If the two men who first walked on the moon died tragically????????
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too soon?

you can't visualize Buzz scrounging for a set of keys in his pocket? Or Neil bopping him on the head with the American flag ala Three Stooges.

we're you absolutely born without a sense of humor?
 
Covar

Covar

9. The flag was made by Sears, but NASA refused to acknowledge this because they didn’t want "another Tang."
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:rofl:

I just picture that quote of "another Tang" being said so bitterly by some NASA engineer.
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

I heard James Burke (from BBC Connections) give a speech at my university some time back. He told about his experience covering the Apollo Mission for the BBC, and part went something like this.

e was responsible for explaining the scientific motivations for going to the Moon, the motivations which stay valid after you beat the Russians there. As he reports in the Connections book, the British media put more emphasis on this than the Americans did, so British interest remained relatively high during the later missions, when NASA’s TV ratings in the United States were dropping. At the time, the significance of all this was probably less apparent, and Burke was busy enough just trying to translate NASA tech-speak into something people could understand.

Part of this job involved reading through NASA’s manuals for the equipment which would be used on the Moon. These machines were not simple devices, nor were their instructions straightforward. Each manual had to have a full description of possible failure modes, with contingency plans for each eventuality, and all written with such detail that both the astronauts and the Mission Control people could handle all possible malfunctions without going back to the original engineers. The result, Burke said, was something like this: “If X-Y-Zed, then gobbledygook. If X-Y-Zed-Beta, then gobbledygook squared.”

Finally, after a whole page of bullet-pointed technical jargon, came the last contingency plan:

“If all else fails, kick with lunar boot.”
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Also 40 years ago today my Muther was 8 & 1/2 months pregnant with yours truly... In Texas with no A/C
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

Covar said:
9. The flag was made by Sears, but NASA refused to acknowledge this because they didn’t want "another Tang."
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:rofl:

I just picture that quote of "another Tang" being said so bitterly by some NASA engineer.
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You would not believe how happy Buzz Aldrin was when he was told that the guys were going to get to take some "Tang" to the moon. Then he was so disappointed to learn that it was orange drink and not actual "Tang"
 
CynicismKills

CynicismKills

Kissinger said:
Rob King said:
That reminded me of this:

In Event of Moon Disaster

I got chills when I first read this.
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Oh yeah, me too.


Man, it's amazing what we did, particularly considering how little we knew about what was going to happen or what could go wrong.
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I got chills. Just imagining them having to cut communications and the two men having nothing but each other and the silence until the oxygen runs out.
 
Jake

Jake

Chazwozel said:
Kissinger said:
Chazwozel said:
That would have been the funniest poop right there.
Click to expand...
If the two men who first walked on the moon died tragically????????
Click to expand...

too soon?

you can't visualize Buzz scrounging for a set of keys in his pocket? Or Neil bopping him on the head with the American flag ala Three Stooges.

we're you absolutely born without a sense of humor?
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My first image was Buzz trying to jimmy the lock with a moon coat-hanger while Neil is giving him seven kinds of hell.
 
Hylian

Hylian

Chibibar said:
http://wechoosethemoon.org/

Follow it "real time" as it happen 40 years ago... on the WEB!! :)
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the fact it is powered by AOL and it has an AOL icon in the beginning kinda turned me off from the site
 
CrimsonSoul

CrimsonSoul

I couldn't cut communications if I were in mission control. I'd have to stay with those brave men to the very last it's the lesat I could do for them
 
Piotyr

Piotyr

I think I'm more impressed that the astronauts all made it back safely to Earth after landing on the moon than the actual landing itself. It's one thing to make a one-way trip, but another thing altogether to do the round trip.
 
Shegokigo

Shegokigo

I was really hoping for "more" from that link. It was quite bland. (The Moon Disaster one)

Now had they said "And we will broadcast We are the Champions by Queen after cutting communications", now that might have been a tear jerker. :tear:
 

Shannow said:
Hmm, 40 years ago. hey Ed, was this about the time of your second, or third marriage?
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I've only been married once. The Green Mile is so long I don't want to go through the pain of watching multiple wives die.
 
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