Comments on: Mankind’s Greatest Adventure: Celebrating the Men and Mission of Apollo 11

By: metin2 yang

metin2 yang — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:55:20 +0000

metin2 yang
metin2 yang

By: Arjun

Arjun — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:30:06 +0000

I was just blown away to find out a few things about the Apollo program recently:

1. That mission control engineers and astronauts used slide rules for calculation. Jesus, they didn’t even have pocket calulators??!.
2. That the crew of Apollo 13 had to navigate manually to get back to Earth.
3. That the rocket carrying Apollo 8 crew, was only third Saturn V vehicle ever launched, the previous one having failed!
4. That the Apollo guidance computer which took men to the moon ran at a spectacular 1Mhz with a full 2KB of memory!

I salute the men who made of the Apollo possible.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:54:07 +0000

Following the dreams that make us human…namely exploring what’s “over the next hill” helps define being human. I think it quite sad that some would think such endeavors are “boondoggles” and not worthy of taxpayer money. If human exploration isn’t worth taxpayer dollars then what is? What happened to creating a vision of the future and then striving to meet it?

By: R. J. Vincent

R. J. Vincent — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:12:35 +0000

I remember watching the Apollo missions when I was a kid. A lot of us wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. As far as those people who thing the space program is a waste, where do you think the technology for your home computer, cell phone and many of the other gadgets we take for granted came from? As far as Virgin Galactic, their goal is to eventually make spaceflight affordable for everyone. I’ve heard it said that space tourism today is where aviation was in the 1920′s. It was a novelty only for the rich. Now flying is a commonplace activity. As the technology advances and the ships become larger and more capable, the cost per person will eventually come down. The current equipment is only the first phase of the project. Give it time. It took ten years to get to the moon the first time.

By: Tommy C

Tommy C — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:07:00 +0000

@Daniel: Virgin Galactic is tourism oriented, but Burt Rutan is a design genius; I would be tickled to just work within a thousand miles of him. Besides, tourism or just launching satellites, its the getting to space part that’s cool. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of exploration when it comes to private business. If you wanna do that, its all NASA.

@Matt: Yup, I’m hanging out at Marshall. I grew up in Athens, just a couple miles to the west, but I’m generally in Atlanta these days for school. I got a few friends over at UAH though, good school. I nearly ended up there myself.

As for the budget, I just looked it up and surprisingly it topped off at 5.5% of the budget in 1966, but it wasn’t even that high for most of the 60′s. I was thinking it was a good bit higher than that, too. Granted, they still had over $20 billion a year for most of the decade (over $30 for three years, and those are in 2007 dollars), so there was still a ton more funding than there is now. The funny thing is (well more sad) that most people still think that NASA comprises a massive portion of the budget. A recent poll said that an outrageous portion of America thinks that NASA has over a quarter of the budget (I wish I could find the article). Either way, they’ll make due with what they have.