To the moon

Last week, we celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the moon landing. It was a wee bit before my time but I am sure I would have been equally riveted watching this as I was watching the Shuttle Launches.
What a great milestone in history. The stories and accounts are still fascinating to me, and the older I get the more fascinated I am about how they achieved what they did back then with what they had. Also, the emotional aspect of walking on the moon and looking back at your planet becomes ever more thrilling to me especially since we have not returned since 1972.

I was one of many kids who wanted to be an astronaut growing up. But I always considered myself more of a future Shuttle astronaut. This thing looked at least somewhat like an airplane and airplanes was what I was into since I can remember. Even as a mainly carefree kid eager to conquer the world who hadn’t yet learned about sacrifices and consequences, the thought of strapping yourself to the top of a 363 ft tall rocket weighing over six million pounds seemed to be best left to people way braver than me.

Ironically, all the manned Saturn V launches were successes, which can not be said about the Shuttle.

I think every aviation enthusiast should make the pilgrimage to see a Saturn V rocket at least once in their lifetime. What a beast! What a time to be alive!

Do you guys think, they’ll have chickens on the first Mars colonies? It seems Julio is eager to get rid of Chuck although I don’t think he’s catching on to Julio not-so-hidden agenda. They say it would take 7 months to reach Mars. That easily fits into the lifespan of a chicken. We all know the lifespan of a chicken is at least 18 years since that is how long Chuck and Julio have been around …

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6 comments on “To the moon
  1. John P Kalishek says:

    I remember watching the landing at my uncles lake cabin. I was 3.
    After folks sorta lost interest, NASA lost its way as well. It became more a bureaucracy than anything else and that culture enabled the two shuttle disasters.
    If Apollo 13 had the same management team as STS 107, those three would have been doomed

  2. Balint says:

    I can definitely see a historical moments in aviation comic strip coming soon :-)))
    Houston: chuck is that you?

  3. RG2Cents says:

    Yeah, Chuck. You’re so full of the right stuff. XD

  4. Jad says:

    For the one willing to live that historical moment, there is an awesome website putting together ALL the archives to propose an immersive real-time experience of the Apollo 11 mission 🙂

    https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

  5. Bernd says:

    SpaceX, unlike Mars One, actually says they’ll do return trips. But what SpaceX says about their vapourware changes quickly.

    I don’t think humans are going to Mars in our lifetime. It’s just too hard. And so expensive that only a huge multinational state-backed effort could achieve it. Think ITER muliplied by a thousand. Even building Concorde required the commitment of two nation-states, and without the state-contract they would have stopped long before completion. The trick was to make the contractual penalties so high that pulling out would be more expensive than continuing.

  6. eekee says:

    Erf… I wouldn’t call all of the crewed Saturn 5 launches successes. It’s only technically true in that Apollo 1 didn’t lift off.

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