Today is the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon.
Here is the wikipedia story about the space race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing#Scientific_background
There are still some people who think the landing was a hoax.
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
I have an Uncle who worked on the jet propulsion units on the Lunar Landing module - I'll bet you'd have a hard time convincing him it was a HOAX! He still won't talk about it much as he regards it as classified!
ReplyDeleteIf you ever get a chance and haven't go to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. They have a lot of the memorabilia from that era. The Saturn V rocket engine is pretty impressive!
If you want to throw enough money at something and get enough competition you'll get solutions!
The problem was that there was a tremendous amount of waste as well as benefit as the result of meeting the proposed deadline.
Maybe someday we can stop fighting over stupid things and as a species advance beyond this planet?
My dad worked for McDonnell-Dougless at the Sacromento test stands during the moonshots; was a QA inspector for the S-IVB stage of the Saturn V. Before that he worked for AeroJet in So. California. If he was still alive, he would tell you they were for real. McDonnell-Dougless was real proud of their rocket; it was the only major stage that could be restarted; Stage I and Stage II could only be lite once, but the third stage (S-IVB) put the Apollo unit into synchonized Earth orbit, and then lite up again to push them out of earth's gravitaional field and into a moon trajectory. Being part of the Apollo Project, he received commenative coins and photos from Apollo 11. My older sister has them now. Other than being in the Navy during WWII, there was nothing he was more proud of than being in the space program during the '60s
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