Monday, June 09, 2008

As I was ruding while I was sayly interrupted...

My apologies for the dearth of posts, but grad school work just knocked my blogging schedule right on its keester.

Okay...historically, what's been going on:

Well, tonight was the first night of "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions" on the Discovery Channel. I have been pleased with the footage they've shown but they really just threw people right into the narrative with no prep. The space race really goes back to WW2 when the Germans were working on missiles and the Americans and Brits were building A-bombs and the Soviets were looking on with concern. I wouldn't have minded a bit more prep-work, heck even a pre-show just about that at 8pm EST. But that's water under the bridge.

This is definitely a show worth watching and worth buying on DVD. First, it's probably one of the last times we get to see interviews with some of these people. We're down to TWO of the original SEVEN Mercury Astronauts. The mission control staff and the engineers aren't getting any younger either and the New Nine and Astronaut Group 3 aren't spring chickens themselves.
Second, people, your kids need to see this. We went to the moon with computers that were less sophisticated than what's in our CARS. We went on kerosene, oxygen, hydrogen and slide rules.

Think about that.

Also, just for grins here's my favorite crew of the entire history of the US space program:


(NASA Image found at: GRIN)
This is the crew of Apollo 12. Left to right: Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon and Alan Bean. They made the first pinpoint landing on the moon and actually brought back pieces of another space probe that had landed years before. In addition, they were probably the closest buddies of the Apollo crews and had more laughs on the way to and back from the moon than any other crew.
I'll take people who enjoy their jobs for $200 Alex.

You can read the Apollo 12 Flight Journal HERE and the Apollo 12 Surface Journal HERE

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