Falling space junk (Hold the anchovies)
The realisation that I am/was a complete spaceflight junkie was kicked into me by the series of comments on miss_soap's journal. Of course, it's obvious now that I think about it. As a (pre) teen I grooved (for it was the seventies) on the Apollo coverage, Reg Turnbull, James Burke, Gerry Anderson's diesel-powered heavy plant, the Apollo-Soyuz mission, Skylab, Mir, Buran, pre-86 Shuttle, Tomorrow's World and even Maria von Schell in an ugly beige jumpsuit.
Mind, this is the same Tomorrow's World that published a book in which they went on at great length about mining for manganese modules on the seabed, as evidenced by the Hughes Corporation's Glomar Explorer. The fact that this was a cover story invented by the CIA to divert attention from the real project - raising a sunken Russian K-boat - is... Unfortunate, given the circumstances of this post.
Which is that it's beyond me why anyone would give credence to the Apollo hoax rumours. I've spent the last couple of days wandering through NASA, Encyclopaedia Astronautica and Wikipaedia and my impression remains that anyone who voluntarily straps themselves onto the point end of a huge firework built by gummint contract is significantly braver than I am. Fancy spending a week in a small cone with two other blokes and no bog (See, if it had all been done by Hollywood, the bizarre American prudery when it comes to bodily functions would have ensured that all space vehicles came with an upstairs closet, rather than adult Pampers. Seriously. Read the story of the Apollo 8 mission) then descending to another planet in a device about the size of an Austin Mini, with a flight computer about as powerful as a mid-80s HP programmamble that crashed repeatedly during that descent? Not my idea of a good time.
It became depressingly clear during the Challenger investigation that is was a miracle any of it worked at all.
This explains why we're earthbound. (found via reddragdiva and sclerotic_rings)
Mind, this is the same Tomorrow's World that published a book in which they went on at great length about mining for manganese modules on the seabed, as evidenced by the Hughes Corporation's Glomar Explorer. The fact that this was a cover story invented by the CIA to divert attention from the real project - raising a sunken Russian K-boat - is... Unfortunate, given the circumstances of this post.
Which is that it's beyond me why anyone would give credence to the Apollo hoax rumours. I've spent the last couple of days wandering through NASA, Encyclopaedia Astronautica and Wikipaedia and my impression remains that anyone who voluntarily straps themselves onto the point end of a huge firework built by gummint contract is significantly braver than I am. Fancy spending a week in a small cone with two other blokes and no bog (See, if it had all been done by Hollywood, the bizarre American prudery when it comes to bodily functions would have ensured that all space vehicles came with an upstairs closet, rather than adult Pampers. Seriously. Read the story of the Apollo 8 mission) then descending to another planet in a device about the size of an Austin Mini, with a flight computer about as powerful as a mid-80s HP programmamble that crashed repeatedly during that descent? Not my idea of a good time.
It became depressingly clear during the Challenger investigation that is was a miracle any of it worked at all.
This explains why we're earthbound. (found via reddragdiva and sclerotic_rings)