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[The Moon] Tranquility Base, here...
ASimPerson
Cold...... and hard.Registered User regular
Cold...... and hard.Registered User regular
40 years ago, at 20:17:40 UTC (4:17 PM EDT, 6:15 AM Sydney, 9:15 PM London) the Apollo 11 Lunar Module ("Eagle") touched down on the surface of the moon.
It was a culmination of decade's worth of frenzied work via one of the largest peacetime expenditures in the history of the world. In 1962, President Kennedy defended the dramatic uptick in the Space Race in a speech at Rice University:
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...
But the history of these events dates even further back, to the early experiments with rockets by Robert Goddard, whose work was picked up a young Werner von Braun, who was captured by the US Army at the end of World War II. After developing many of the US's early ballistic missiles, the US government allowed von Braun to turn his attention to space with the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. (Indeed, the first manned Mercury flight in 1961 used a modified Redstone rocket, which was based on the V-2.) For the Apollo program, the Saturn V was developed, which is still one of the two most powerful rockets ever developed, depending on who you ask.
Meanwhile, NASA's run-up the Moon included testing the various equipment and procedures to just get into space, get into space with a crew, and get to the moon.
For coverage of the event, your best that I've been able to find so far is probably NASA itself, so if you have anything else please post below.
I highly suspect that most of us were not around 40 years ago. Nonetheless, there's still a chance that going to the moon or the space program has impacted you in some way, and if that's the case, feel free to share. As for me, well, there's a reason why most of my history section focused on the rockets. When people ask me where I'm from, I usually say "Huntsville, Alabama" because there's a slim chance they know where that is (I'm actually from nearby Madison). The main reason this area is noteworthy at all is because that is where most of said rockets were developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Indeed, the reason my family moved there at all was because my Dad worked on the International Space Station from 1989 to the late 90's. I've always been fascinated with the concept of astronomy and outer space, and for whatever reason to me at least there seems to be a general lack of coverage surrounding the anniversary.
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Anyways, this thing still baffles me and makes me feel incredibly small, even 40 years later. Sometimes I'll walk out through the parking lot to my car after work, look up, stare at the surface of the moon and think, "Man, someone's been there." It's incredibly humbling.
moon
goodnight
cow
jumping over the moon
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
:whistle:ZERO TWO:whistle:
Kids... don't make me tell you again... about the scooching.
ZERO
TWO
WHOAAHHHHWOOAAAHHHH BABY WE BE MAKING LOVE (ON THE MOON)
At least we're getting (500) Days of Summer next Friday!
It's just... awesome.
I gotta update my 'From the Earth to the Moon' to DVD someday.
Also, find me a copy of 'In the Shadow of the Moon'.
And I'm going to see 'Moon' tomorrow at the festival. Yay!
gonna have to wait for the DVD i suppose
it looks baller
(besides those other 5 times)
Somebody walked on the fucking moon. Wrap your head around that.
It is beautiful and stupid and horribly expensive yet monumentally important and, By God, so wonderful, despite it all, just wonderful.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
PS: This porn I'm watching looks like people are fucking the last scene of 2001 (or second to last, really).
He completely ad-libbed that bit.
Fffff. Mind if I ask where abouts you are? Because the only showing times I could find for Auckland have already passed which is fuckin' annoying because for some reason I assumed this might hit the major theaters.
edit; bleh, gonna have to wait for a dvd release I think. Also moon landing, woo. Fuckin' awesome.
steam
(click it)
That huge .gif of us in comparison to the other planets then the sun, then all the gigantic stars doesn't show how tiny we are as well as that does, to me at least. Imagine seeing that, or looking from half way there if you had vertigo. Looking down while floating in a high orbit must be so fucking bizarre, feeling that the only thing holding you there is the weak hold of gravity and your speed. Shoot a bit too far one way and you fall back into earth (or probably skip off the atmosphere and into space since your angle of attack will be too low), go the other way and you fly off into infinite nothingness.
I watched a bunch of the documentaries that they were playing on nat geo/history today, and one of them had one of the guys from Gemini talking about how they couldn't afford to leave anyone up in orbit, so one of the NASA higher ups said if the guy doing the spacewalk died, the pilot would have to make sure he came down. Problem was, the pilot couldn't pull him back in because the hatch was too small, and he couldn't close the hatch and come down with him outside because the oxygen tube would get stuck in there, so he would have to go through reentry with the hatch open and superheated plasma about a foot from his shoulder, then whatever was left of the other astronaut would probably get stuck in the parachute, then he would have to deal with the door being open when he landed in the sea. So he agreed to that, but him and the other guy agreed that if he died he would cut the umbilical and leave him up there, and maybe try to push him down towards the atmosphere.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
I thought this exact same thing today.
"That's a dude standing on the fucking moon"
It never ceases to amaze me.
I don't know about that. I think antibiotics has it beat.
I just learned that Moon is showing at a theatre in a few weeks for the Brisbane International Film Festival.
gonna go to that flick
also the nasa shuttle landing on the moon was totally a hoax
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Amazing.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
What spring does with the cherry trees.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Moon the moon (check today's Dinosaur Comics) and our reaching it from our terrestrial home is a pretty amazing feat.
this is the worst bond movie by far