I was corresponding with a friend about my recollection of the lunar landing. Here's what I said:
I have two recollections. One was seeing the lunar landings at home. It was a summer night, and we had relatives over. We watched it on a B&W TV with rabbit ears.
I also have a recollection, I think in 5-6th grade, of TVs set up in the school hallways to play NASA coverage of the lunar mission. That must have been Apollo 8, a year before.
On the other hand, I think the actual mission took place during Christmas break, so I don't suppose we were seeing live coverage. It may have been a replay.
In retrospect I think it's very interesting to actually travel to a place which painters and poets and stargazers and SF writers have seen and eulogized for thousands of years. All those thousands of years looking up at the sky and gazing at that distant, luminous body. Then, in 1969, some human beings actually have a chance to leave the earth and go there for the first time. That's remarkable.
We've always seen it from afar. Seen it from earth. To be able actually make a trip to the moon, touch down, and look back at the earth from the moon, instead of looking at the moon from the earth, is a remarkable reversal in human perspective. To literally reach out and reverse our viewpoint.
All the more remarkable when you consider the primitive technology of the time.
I also think the Viking 1 exploration of Mars was equally historic. To see another planet from the surface of the planet.
In addition, I think that other unmanned probes which have explored our solar system, as well as the Hubble telescope, have been very interesting.
At the same time, it makes us aware, more than ever, of what a special planet we inhabit. It's by far the most interesting, as well as hospitable, planet in the solar system. Indeed, the only hospitable planet.
And, of course, the sheer scale of the universe imposes a severe limit on how much we can explore. We've already done about as much as we can do.
It was a fairly unique period to live through. An experience which human beings living in the past never had. And while future human beings from now on have the same experience (manned/unmanned exploration of the solar system), we've lost the element of surprise or suspense since we now know what the other moons and planets of our solar system look like up close.
From the standpoint of the computers and electronics it is pretty scarry to consider how primitive the Apollo systems were. Hand-woven rope core memory and such. Yeesh. Not the sort of thing you'd want to have to bet your life on.
ReplyDeleteThe rest of the technology used in Apollo actually hasn't improved by much.
Rocket engine design hasn't changed. Indeed, some of the best engines flying today, like the RL-10, were designed in the late 1950's. While jet engine technology has made huge strides during the past decades, rockets have remained virtually unchanged.
Structural design has only seen marginal improvement. Like Apollo, the aerospace industry today continues to rely largely on aluminum alloys to make lightweight structures. Use of composite structures is an improvement, but that gets you improvements on the order of 20% in weight reduction. It is not a quantum leap.
I think I was at the beach with my family. Don't remember it a whole lot.
ReplyDeleteI remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, and how for three days there was no TV shows, or entertainment, but just news.
And I remember where I was when the twin towers were hit.
But it is quite incredible to think of walking on the moon and looking at the Earth come up, or perhaps it's always up, and watch the Earth go down at night. And to see the Sun in a different way as well.
And God made this Moon perfectly set where it is. Amazing!
Steve, I have some of those same recollections -- dad waking us all up in the middle of the night, to watch a bad transmission from the moon on a b/w TV with rabbit ears. And I too recall Frank Borman reading from Genesis on Apollo 8 at Christmas.
ReplyDeleteI saw a TV profile of astronaut turned rocket scientist Franklin Chang-Diaz, who is working on a prototype for a plasma rocket called VASIMR, "an acronym Variable Specific Impulse Magneto-plasma Rocket. So, VASIMR is a very different type of propulsion system unlike the chemical rockets that we have today, which use hydrogen and oxygen or some other chemical compounds that burn, produce a lot of heat and what we do is sort of the same thing except that we, we go to much higher levels of temperature of this reaction and there’s actually no burning going on. We are heating a fluid, which happens to be a gas, to such an extent, that it becomes plasma. ... A soup of charged particles not unlike the sun and the stars, the hotter the exhaust, the better the rocket."
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/story/article/251-transcript_franklin_chang_diaz_extended_interview.html
This could only be used to launch rockets from space to other locations, but it will really cut down on the time to some farther-away places.
I have been fascinated by the Jupiter system, the close-ups of Saturn, and also the "methane weather systems" on Titan. It's true we're seeing all this stuff for the first time, and some of the wonder is out of it, but I do hope they continue to aggressively explore these regions of the Solar System.
David Gadbois said:
ReplyDeleteFrom the standpoint of the computers and electronics it is pretty scarry to consider how primitive the Apollo systems were. Hand-woven rope core memory and such. Yeesh. Not the sort of thing you'd want to have to bet your life on.
What's that old computer joke about man landing on the moon with no more than the computing power of a Commodore 64, but that no system has ever run Windows without eventually crashing? Not sure that's quite right, but it's something like that anyway! :-)
But yeah, it was truly amazing what we accomplished considering the technology of the 1960s.
Also, I think there's something to be said for the sorts of men (and later women) who undertook these first forays and ventures into space. Our first astronauts weren't merely "astronauts" interested in "exploration," per se, I don't think, but they were also adventurers and risk-takers and maybe even slight daredevils in a way. If I remember correctly, many (if not most or all) of these early astronauts, including the ones on the Apollo missions, were originally experimental test pilots. It takes a certain sort of a personality, I think, not only to do the things these guys did, but also to want to do the things these guys did. (Cue: The Right Stuff.)
Maybe I'm foolish to think so but I tend to think of these early astronauts in a similar vein as some of the almost audacious and even reckless explorers and adventurers in the Age of Discovery (e.g. da Gama, Columbus, Magellan). (Although there are a lot of dissimilarities as well.)
On the other hand, I think the Cold War and the Space Race with the Soviets caused us to take tremendous risks -- risks which we might not necessarily have taken otherwise. Risks which were arguably imprudent and irresponsible (if not worse). For example, from what I understand, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee's deaths in Apollo 1 might've been prevented but we were keen to push forward without proper regard for hazard assessment and so on (among other things).
BTW, there's a great little documentary called In the Shadow of the Moon that details the Apollo program, etc.
The rest of the technology used in Apollo actually hasn't improved by much.
Rocket engine design hasn't changed. Indeed, some of the best engines flying today, like the RL-10, were designed in the late 1950's. While jet engine technology has made huge strides during the past decades, rockets have remained virtually unchanged.
Structural design has only seen marginal improvement. Like Apollo, the aerospace industry today continues to rely largely on aluminum alloys to make lightweight structures. Use of composite structures is an improvement, but that gets you improvements on the order of 20% in weight reduction. It is not a quantum leap.
Speaking of rockets and such, I thought these two articles were pretty cool.