tranquility base here
oh my flist, it is so hot i cannot cope. i had a dentist appointment this morning and spent the rest of the day going from a/c to a/c, ending up at my sister's to watch raiders of the lost ark which is as good as it ever was. "i hate snakes, jock! i hate 'em!" "c'mon, show a little backbone, will ya?" heh. if you too live in an unusually overheated part of the us, i hope you're staying cool and hydrated. take care of yourselves.
my sister and i probably should've watched something space-y, since today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. (check out the googledoodle.) hundreds of millions of people watched it on tv - a fifth of the world's population, the biggest tv audience ever up to that point - something like 93% of american tv's were tuned in to see something that looked kind of like a deformed metal marshmallow sitting on a base made of space tinfoil resting on another world. those tv signals bounced off a satellite dish in a little town in middle nowhere, australia, to get from the moon to us. nixon had a speech prepared in case the landing failed, and a priest stood ready to consign the astronauts' bodies to space. obviously that didn't happen, but you can't blame the guy for being nervous. a lot was riding on apollo 11 - we had to beat the soviets to the moon, we'd spent hundreds of millions of dollars in an unprecedentedly short period of time to do so, during a very chaotic decade, and a majority of americans didn't even think it was a good idea.
after neil armstrong's one small step, of course, it was a different story. (briefly. ten years later, 53% of americans still didn't think it had been a good idea.)
you wanna know some random moon landing trivia? :D once the lunar lander touched down on the moon, before he got out, armstrong took communion. (he brought communion wafers into space.) the crew had to fill out a customs form for the moon rocks they brought back. private contractors included the hammond organ co, which makes, you know, electric organs, but which also built clocks and timers for apollo 11. velcro covered 3300 square inches of it (that's almost twenty-three square feet of rocket). and the moon has a smell! moon dust is very clingy, so armstrong and aldrin brought it back into the landing module on their suits, and apparently it smells like something burnt, like the air after a fireworks show.
here's a neat article about four folks who worked on the apollo program and whose lives were changed by it - a black engineer from segregated louisiana, the first woman to sit in mission control (who was blonde, beautiful, and texan, and attracted attention for just those reasons), a working-class kid who was hired to help insulate the landing module, and one of the navy seals who helped pull the astronauts from the ocean after they returned to earth.
and here's another one about a navy lieutenant on the recovery ship, who was assigned to be nixon's aide for the time the president was on board.
to celebrate the anniversary, huntsville, alabama (aka rocket city, for its role in developing a lot of rockets over the years), got out its dancing shoes and partied down.
yesterday mary robinette kowal shared some info on twitter about how astronauts pee, including the tidbit that it took so long to get yuri gagarin suited up for his space flight that he had to pee by the time he was being trucked to the launch pad, so he got out of the truck and watered the tire. every cosmonaut since has done the same before they launch.
i think space is fascinating, and the fact that we got men to the surface of the moon and brought them home in one piece, using less computing power than is contained in the average smartphone, is still impressive as hell. (cue that famous photo of margaret hamilton and the tower of code.) i know the money we spend on space exploration could be put to use here on earth. i don't care. i know we have to try and fix the planet and not just plan to leave it. but human beings have sent a spacecraft light years away to pluto, past it, and out of the solar system. we've put a lander on a comet. we've done some astonishing things out in space. i've never lived in a world where space exploration wasn't demonstrably possible, and i bet most of you haven't either. it's an incredible thing, to be able to push people away from earth's gravity so hard that they fetch up on the moon, to send them to live in space for a year, and to be able to believe that someday they'll go even farther than that.
in the very early 60s, john f kennedy announced that we'd put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. when he made that speech, we hadn't even sent a person into space, much less to another orbiting rock, but we got men to the moon and back with five months to spare. and if you don't think that's fucking incredible, i don't know what to tell you.
my sister and i probably should've watched something space-y, since today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. (check out the googledoodle.) hundreds of millions of people watched it on tv - a fifth of the world's population, the biggest tv audience ever up to that point - something like 93% of american tv's were tuned in to see something that looked kind of like a deformed metal marshmallow sitting on a base made of space tinfoil resting on another world. those tv signals bounced off a satellite dish in a little town in middle nowhere, australia, to get from the moon to us. nixon had a speech prepared in case the landing failed, and a priest stood ready to consign the astronauts' bodies to space. obviously that didn't happen, but you can't blame the guy for being nervous. a lot was riding on apollo 11 - we had to beat the soviets to the moon, we'd spent hundreds of millions of dollars in an unprecedentedly short period of time to do so, during a very chaotic decade, and a majority of americans didn't even think it was a good idea.
after neil armstrong's one small step, of course, it was a different story. (briefly. ten years later, 53% of americans still didn't think it had been a good idea.)
you wanna know some random moon landing trivia? :D once the lunar lander touched down on the moon, before he got out, armstrong took communion. (he brought communion wafers into space.) the crew had to fill out a customs form for the moon rocks they brought back. private contractors included the hammond organ co, which makes, you know, electric organs, but which also built clocks and timers for apollo 11. velcro covered 3300 square inches of it (that's almost twenty-three square feet of rocket). and the moon has a smell! moon dust is very clingy, so armstrong and aldrin brought it back into the landing module on their suits, and apparently it smells like something burnt, like the air after a fireworks show.
here's a neat article about four folks who worked on the apollo program and whose lives were changed by it - a black engineer from segregated louisiana, the first woman to sit in mission control (who was blonde, beautiful, and texan, and attracted attention for just those reasons), a working-class kid who was hired to help insulate the landing module, and one of the navy seals who helped pull the astronauts from the ocean after they returned to earth.
and here's another one about a navy lieutenant on the recovery ship, who was assigned to be nixon's aide for the time the president was on board.
to celebrate the anniversary, huntsville, alabama (aka rocket city, for its role in developing a lot of rockets over the years), got out its dancing shoes and partied down.
yesterday mary robinette kowal shared some info on twitter about how astronauts pee, including the tidbit that it took so long to get yuri gagarin suited up for his space flight that he had to pee by the time he was being trucked to the launch pad, so he got out of the truck and watered the tire. every cosmonaut since has done the same before they launch.
i think space is fascinating, and the fact that we got men to the surface of the moon and brought them home in one piece, using less computing power than is contained in the average smartphone, is still impressive as hell. (cue that famous photo of margaret hamilton and the tower of code.) i know the money we spend on space exploration could be put to use here on earth. i don't care. i know we have to try and fix the planet and not just plan to leave it. but human beings have sent a spacecraft light years away to pluto, past it, and out of the solar system. we've put a lander on a comet. we've done some astonishing things out in space. i've never lived in a world where space exploration wasn't demonstrably possible, and i bet most of you haven't either. it's an incredible thing, to be able to push people away from earth's gravity so hard that they fetch up on the moon, to send them to live in space for a year, and to be able to believe that someday they'll go even farther than that.
in the very early 60s, john f kennedy announced that we'd put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. when he made that speech, we hadn't even sent a person into space, much less to another orbiting rock, but we got men to the moon and back with five months to spare. and if you don't think that's fucking incredible, i don't know what to tell you.