"Roger, Tranquility" ....

archimedes

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.... "We copy you on the ground"

Our universe got a little bit larger a half century back, and so now, here is a place in The Cafe to chat about space travel and such.
 
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I was seven years old. We drove a couple hours to my Aunt Dixie and Uncle Gordon's house to watch the moon landing. Arrived in the middle of the night before.

Before the landing my Aunt went on a little walk with us kids across the Southern California desert, and we discovered a tarantula. Having grown up in New Mexico she reached right down and let it crawl right up her arm. A beautiful woman in a 60s mini skirt, with a gigantic spider on her arm. Nothing on TV, not even the first man on the moon, could have been more impressive to me at that age. :D
 

dotCPF

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Space and astronomy are one of the things that led me into the flashlight world. Always looking for a better red-capable light.

It's funny now that I think about it, the two things I studied/ did the most require darkness, and led me to being so comfortable in it I often don't use flashlights out at night. For someone who loves flashlights so much, I spend so much time in darkness...

Wish I were alive for those moments, I can't even imagine how mind-blowing it would have been. It's something many take for granted today, almost as "old news." I vividly remember watching Columbia in 2003 break up. I will never forget that breakfast.

BTW I think the best red light out there is the Zebralight H502pr.
 

MAD777

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Re: "Roger, Tranquility" ....

I always remind my kids that humanity went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in just 66 short years. I watched the landing on TV in high school class.

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk
 

KITROBASKIN

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...and led me to being so comfortable in it I often don't use flashlights out at night. For someone who loves flashlights so much, I spend so much time in darkness...

Similar here, but unlike the archimedes peak, I still like to have some serious lumen/lux horsepower on the hip when needed.

PBS aired the Apollo Project (?) recently. It was so great to look back at those times. Curiously, the hair style for most men back then is often times very similar to what many guys are wearing today. Even the protesters saying poor people need more resources instead of space flight, were in awe of the take-off of the Saturn V rocket. A rocket that never failed, as reported by PBS, Wernher von Braun's (and crew) accomplishment.
 

peter yetman

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If you get the chance you should stream this....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000704p

It's a BBC drama using the actual transcripts from Apollo 11.
It's riveting.
I remember them bringing out a TV at school that was the size of a small fridge, for us to watch the mission. I've never forgotten it.
They were saying on the radio today that the mission actually united the whole world for just a few moments. Apollo 11 belomged to everyone.
Have a listen if you can, please.
P
 
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bykfixer

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I was 5 when it happened. I don't remember it.

But I did listen to the David Bowie tune at work today.

When the Columbia tradgedy occured my first wife was at the beginning of labor so I stayed home from work. I remember thinking "well that doesn't usually happen does it?" :eek:
She said that as I thought it.

I remember the news people must've been thinking that too until somebody broke in and advised the stunned anchor folks that things just went very wrong. They were silent like nothing happened then someone said something about the situation not being good at all. :fail: They sucked that day.

My first born arrived later that evening. :thumbsup:
 
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scout24

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Both my maternal grandparents passed in the last 8 years, my grandmother about 5 years ago. Going through their house, we came across a photo my grandfather had taken of their black and white television as Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface. It was that monumental an event. I think it was almost incomprehensible to them back in 1969 to send men to the moon and get them safely back home.
 

harro

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I was seven at the time, and probably like a lot of others, crammed into a small primary ( Elementary ) school hall, and trying to get a glimpse of it on a black and white TV set. I do remember the TV set being something like the ' Radiation King ' set, from the old Simpson spread, in the epp where Homer and Abe went walkabout reliving memories. A pretty amazing time. The room was quiet, even though there were probably a couple of hundred kids there. Once he jumped off the leg, the noise in the room was amazing. Ahh memories...…

If you ever get the chance, watch the movie called ' The Dish '. An Aussie flick about the dish at Parkes in New South Wales, that was one of the three to receive transmissions from the mission, and the one that actually received the pics of the first step. Starred among others, Patrick Warbuton as the NASA rep in Australia.
 
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peter yetman

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That's one of my favourite movies. I just picked up a new copy on Ebay for next to nothing.
We're clearing out the loft at the moment and last week i found my scrapbook from the Apollo 11 mission, amazing.
P
 

bykfixer

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The fairly new movie "hidden figures" is a story about what it took to figure out how to get a craft to return to earth once it had reached the earths orbit. Good movie in a lot of ways that tells the story from an under dog person perspective, yet without an adgenda during the Jim Crowe laws period in Virginia.

It also showed a few things if you watch carefully of just how dumb people were back then. Example was the capsule had safely returned and nasa wanted to pluck it out of the water to analyze. It sank. Here you have this big ole heavy metal thing with the door open (ie hole in the side letting in water) and no floatation devices under it and engineers were shocked when it sank. Next time it had a bunch of floatees under it. Duh.
 

StarHalo

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If you've got a High Def TV or display somewhere, CNN's Apollo 11 feature is a strongly recommended ride; you've already seen the usual clips from the cape, the control room, the moon itself on TV before, but a lot of it was shot on movie-quality cameras and then transferred to broadcast quality tape which made it look unremarkable - now you can see the full quality and resolution of the footage as NASA archivists see it, and it's stunning, seeing sights and sounds from 1969 as though they were shot recently, a pristinely kept time capsule right there on your screen.

CBS has posted the livestream of the news broadcast of the moon landing in its entirety, 5+ hours of the newsday with Walter Cronkite and co., commercials and all; we're watching it over in the Videos Thread.

Also, thanks mom and dad:
48340209847_526bc58f0f_o.jpg
 
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KITROBASKIN

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The gemini capsules (if you have not seen them in person) were really small. Claustrophobics need not apply. At our school in those days, an astronaut came and gave a talk (don't remember who) and I remember he said there was a height limit in order to be an astronaut.
 

peter yetman

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The BBC thing I've been listening to, said that the #11 command module was the size of a family car inside. I had no idea, it looked so big in the pictures.
P
 

mightysparrow

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In July, 1970, our family traveled from our home in Minnesota to the Houston area to visit cousins. I was eight years old. While there, my parents decided to take us to the NASA headquarters, mission control and training facility in Houston, for a tour. To our great disappointment, when we arrived at the NASA facility, we found the entire complex closed to visitors for that particular day. My mother approached the guard booth and begged the men inside to make an exception. They said they could not. My mother again asked if we could just come inside and take a peek at the facility, as we had come a long way to visit and would not likely be able to make another visit. She mentioned about the three of us kids being very disappointed.

All of sudden, to our surprise, the chief administrator came out to tell us we would be allowed inside the complex and taken on a guided tour by him. He then took us on an unprecedented, insiders' tour of every part of the complex, including the simulated moon surface and other areas no visitor was allowed to see. But the part of the tour I was most unprepared for and could not have anticipated in my wildest dreams came at the end of the tour:

We were seated in front of the facility, where a phalanx of armed security guards brought out a small container with a clear dome on top. When the container was passed to me, to my great thrill and utter awe I could see I was holding what was at that time the most valuable substance on earth: a sample of rock from the moon. I could not believe they let us handle one of the few samples that had been collected only one year after the first humans stepped foot on the moon.

When we were back home in Minnesota, my mother sent the administrator a long letter of thanks, along with a gift. He wrote a warm letter back to her in response. My mother (84 now) recently told me that, when they let us into the NASA facility, a carload of tourists from Japan was turned away. We still can't believe our luck on that sweltering day in Houston all those years ago, and the generosity of the administrator, who surely had many tasks he needed to accomplish that day, but who nevertheless chose to give us a priceless and unique experience we will treasure for the rest of our lives.
 
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