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The Last Man on the Moon


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9 hours ago, duncan II said:

I love seeing all this moon stuff. Read a couple of books on the 12 men who went. Sad to see them start to die off. To think that humankind has looked up to that object in the sky for hundreds of thousands of years and then these guys had the opportunity to walk on the surface. What an experience! Mankind's greatest achievement and a signifier of our potential.

Would be great to get back on topic. Can Huddersfield et al continue posting their memories and sharing the images they find and stop wasting the thread arguing with crazy folk? 😃 I was just too young to experience the excitement of watching the missions at the time.

Great stuff.

I read a superb book a few years ago which I've since lost so can't exactly recall the title, but the stories of the astronaut's lives and preparation along with detailed mission detail was great. If I find it next time I clear my loft, I'll post the title!

There's a few great stories that I have heard - I think Armstrong (maybe) told how one night shortly before launch he went to do some work (I forget the detail) & was surprised by noises coming from nearby. He checked & found an engineer fiddling about & so he asked him what he was working on. The guy apparently replied saying "I'm working on putting a man on the moon, sir". He said that he suddenly felt a huge surge in confidence that the mission would succeed realising that there were thousands of people who were focused on every minor detail imaginable.

(Just an edit to add obviously I have no way of knowing if that ever happened & it might be NASA PR, but it's such a great story I really hope it's true).

Edited by Huddersfield
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1 hour ago, Huddersfield said:

I read a superb book a few years ago which I've since lost so can't exactly recall the title, but the stories of the astronaut's lives and preparation along with detailed mission detail was great. If I find it next time I clear my loft, I'll post the title!

There's a few great stories that I have heard - I think Armstrong (maybe) told how one night shortly before launch he went to do some work (I forget the detail) & was surprised by noises coming from nearby. He checked & found an engineer fiddling about & so he asked him what he was working on. The guy apparently replied saying "I'm working on putting a man on the moon, sir". He said that he suddenly felt a huge surge in confidence that the mission would succeed realising that there were thousands of people who were focused on every minor detail imaginable.

(Just an edit to add obviously I have no way of knowing if that ever happened & it might be NASA PR, but it's such a great story I really hope it's true).

Similarly, I have a great book, but it's on t'other side of the world at the moment and I can't remember the author. It focuses on the space race, the early lead of the USSR and NASA's desperation to catch up. The event that struck me most (though, as mentioned, I don't remember it) was the death of the three astronauts on Apollo 1. Gus Grissom had been one of the original Mercury 7 - he'd made the second sub-orbital flight (Glenn's orbit was the third US manned launch, the first two were just parabolas.). When the Mercury capsule landed in the Atlantic he blew the hatch too early, water came in and it sank, nearly taking him with it (all this is from memory so might have the details wrong).

I've always had a soft spot for Grissom - look at the photos, he wasn't yer square-jawed space-hero type, unlike the rest of the Mercury 7. Years ago I was on Grand Bahama, just cutting through the pine barrens, and came upon a deserted group of buildings. Clearly long abandoned, one of them was a library with tattered books still on the shelves, visible through a broken window. Mystified I wandered round to the front of one of the buildings and it was covered by a faded mural of what was clearly a Mercury capsule being shot out of Kennedy, over Grand Bahama. Finally I found a plaque, and it turned out that this had been the place where the first two astronauts, Shepherd, I think, and Grissom, along with Ham who'd chimped the first, pre-human, launch, had been taken after being picked up from the ocean. A spooky place.

The descriptions of the Apollo 1 fire are horrific - pure oxygen in there. They could be heard banging on the side of the capsule but there was no way to open the hatch quickly enough (I've a vague memory that this was because they no longer used explosive bolts since Grissom's Mercury accident, which would be a tragic irony if I haven't imagined it). White had been the first American to space-walk, during the Gemini programme, once again pipped to it by the Ruskies.

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6 hours ago, Huddersfield said:

I read a superb book a few years ago which I've since lost so can't exactly recall the title, but the stories of the astronaut's lives and preparation along with detailed mission detail was great. If I find it next time I clear my loft, I'll post the title!

There's a few great stories that I have heard - I think Armstrong (maybe) told how one night shortly before launch he went to do some work (I forget the detail) & was surprised by noises coming from nearby. He checked & found an engineer fiddling about & so he asked him what he was working on. The guy apparently replied saying "I'm working on putting a man on the moon, sir". He said that he suddenly felt a huge surge in confidence that the mission would succeed realising that there were thousands of people who were focused on every minor detail imaginable.

(Just an edit to add obviously I have no way of knowing if that ever happened & it might be NASA PR, but it's such a great story I really hope it's true).

There’s a line like that in the film ‘Hidden Figures’. Probably taken from the story you’ve just told 👍🏼

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25 minutes ago, Debora said:

On January 27, 1967, during the tests of the Apollo-1 spacecraft, a fire broke out. His victims were astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chuffey. They burned alive. For a long time they were considered victims of an accident. However, the son of Virgil Grissom collected evidence proving that that day there was a deliberate killing ...... Colonel of the US Air Force Virgil Grissom, at that time the most deserved astronaut of America, was preparing to fly to the moon. He already had two space flights: a suborbital flight on Mercury in July 1961 and an orbital flight to Gemini-3 in March 1965. A year later he celebrated his 40th birthday. Glory awaited him ... But she found death. "He was killed," says Scott Grissom, son of an astronaut, today.

Three posts in, eight hours after registering & we get a 'space' conspiracy theory...hmm.

As conspiracy theories go, though, I'm afraid this one is worse than most. NASA had zero compunction about dumping people from missions (they were, after all, spending vast sums of taxpayer's money). Your only evidence on this one is the angst of a couple of bereaved relatives, one of whom thought he saw something that he thought might have done something that might have...well, you get the rest.

And why kill two other expensively trained astronauts? The Apollo astronauts were well-known for borrowing trainer jets for 'nipping home' for rest breaks, etc. Surely whatever the aeronautical equivalent of chopping the brake cable would have sorted him in a far less dramatic & questionable fashion.

Try again.

 

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Yep, the fact that no Americans flew into space for almost 2 years afterwards suggest that a catastrophic failure took place which required a massive amount of work to mitigate against for future missions.

It was Roger Chaffee btw...

 

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3 hours ago, Debora said:

On January 27, 1967, during the tests of the Apollo-1 spacecraft, a fire broke out. His victims were astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chuffey. They burned alive. For a long time they were considered victims of an accident. However, the son of Virgil Grissom collected evidence proving that that day there was a deliberate killing ...... Colonel of the US Air Force Virgil Grissom, at that time the most deserved astronaut of America, was preparing to fly to the moon. He already had two space flights: a suborbital flight on Mercury in July 1961 and an orbital flight to Gemini-3 in March 1965. A year later he celebrated his 40th birthday. Glory awaited him ... But she found death. "He was killed," says Scott Grissom, son of an astronaut, today.

Never mind Mr Smith of the Matrix jumping on you.  All one needs to figure out is who runs NASA (ie initiates of secret societies) and who they worship, then it becomes clear.

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2 hours ago, Kimba said:

Never mind Mr Smith of the Matrix jumping on you.  All one needs to figure out is who runs NASA (ie initiates of secret societies) and who they worship, then it becomes clear.

Scotty should look up tonight, I’m guessing it’s a full moon.

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