Lunar landing anniversary

[slothead]

Just watched Nova on PBS about Neil Armstrong and the moon landing. July 20th 2019 is the 50th anniversary and I'm about to make plans to do something celebratory. As a life long science nerd I've followed all of the NASA and other space endeavors. I remember taking my brother's transistor radio on the school bus to listen to broadcasts of the early Mercury and Gemini flights.

Sometime around July 20th I'll probably end up at the Cradle of Aviation museum on Long Island in NY. Ernie - if you see this suggest a day that would be ideal for a visit.

[dw5555]

They never went it was all staged.. :whistle:

[kidvoltage]

[dreinecke]

[slothead]

David - thanks for the repost.

I remember watching the landing with my father, who only had a 6th grade education, so none of the technical stuff made any sense to him but we were glued to the TV nonetheless. When I rewatch the "Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed" segment where Walter Cronkite get choked up, it does the same to me.

When I look up at the moon I remember there are human footprints there that will last for ages because of no erosion from wind or water. Reminds me what humans can accomplish when truly motivated. Until we do the same on Mars it stands as our crowning achievement as a species.

[olskoolslotz]

I was only 6 yrs & 9 mos old at the time of Apollo 11. I've been enjoying the 50th anniv programming watching what I can. The best part is sharing this again with my father who's now 79 years of age. In the early-mid 60's he was an AC Electronics co-op student working toward his PhD and Masters at Auburn University. He was working on missile guidance systems during this time with his professor & other students and they were working in cooperation with the Operation Paperclip German engineers at Huntville's Marshall Space Flight Center. He's been telling me about trips they made to Huntsville and meetings held with Wernher von Braun's group of guidance engineers with names he recalls of Gerhardt Drawe and Dr. Walter Haeussermann. I've been collecting recent documentation for him on these guy's in the past couple of weeks because his refuses to own a computer. But one of the best things has been going over his Aug 1967 PhD dissertation which entails Saturn V stage II guidance. He's been revisiting his work and says to this day he is still quite impressed with what he's reading. Just today we were talking about stage 1 guidance being open loop meaning it's only taking pre-programmed computer commands and not receiving or reacting to any feedback data. Stage 1 is accelerating the vehicle while performing roll & pitch maneuvers. At 40 seconds into stage II guidance goes closed loop beginning to react to feedback data and here's where they really begin efforts to take aim at their objective. Also at this time he says the vehicle retains only 25% of it's initial launch weight. Stage II burn time is roughly six minutes, all of his computations are metric and timed in seconds. So he has a 120 page dissertation with programming that works to perform not quite 6 minutes of flight time. He has no idea of what or if any parts of his work were used or developed further but after he's re-read his dissertation he feels that some of his work may have had some influence. His unique insight has been interesting and great fun to discuss.

[Broman62]

Slothead...thanks for the reminder :flags-waveusa: :flags-waveusa:

Dave...what a great story and awesomeness pictures...they were TRUE HEROES!!!

:flags-waveusa: :flags-waveusa: :flags-waveusa: :flags-waveusa:

[slothead]

Yes, great story about conversations with your dad and the work he did. One documentary said a modern digital watch contains about the same amount of processing power the Apollo crafts had 50 years ago. It's lost to history how much calculating was done by hand with a slide rule prior to computers and calculators.

Sometimes it seems the less life asks of us in terms of learning and skill, the less we can actually do. Like the 8 year old girl who was outside my office where there was an analog clock (moving hands) and asked her mother "what's that?". I know teenagers and college aged 'kids' who literally can't tell time from a non-digital clock because they never had to learn how to. Everyone I knew growing up could tell time by the 1st or 2nd grade, and had the times tables memorized before the end of the 4th grade. Things we will never forget, except for instances of brain injury or disease.