- 2915 - APOLLO - space mission and inventions? In 1971 the Apollo astronauts had Thanksgiving dinner in quarantine. Here we are 50 years later and back in quarantine again. This Covid 19 mission will cost much more than the Apollo moon mission both in dollars and in lives. We can’t seem to get out of quarantine on alternate years. It must be caused by election plagues.
------------------------ 2915 - APOLLO - space mission and inventions?
- Apollo’s moon mission was one of the other most expansive government initiatives in American history. During its peak years, some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 outside contractors took part in the program.
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- Budget estimates inflation adjusted costs at $98,000,000,000 which was several times more expensive than the Manhattan Project and the equivalent of almost $500 for every man, woman and child living in the United States in 1969.
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- President John F. Kennedy in his historic message to a joint session of the Congress, on May 25, 1961 named it the “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union.
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- On January 27, 1967, Apollo suffered its worst tragedy before it ever left the ground. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee climbed inside their Apollo 1 spacecraft for a routine prelaunch test. As they sat on the launch pad, a spark from some faulty wiring triggered a massive fire that tore through the cabin’s pure oxygen atmosphere.
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- A complicated latch system on the hatch made it all but impossible for the astronauts to escape, and by the time ground crews finally opened it several minutes later, all three men had died from asphyxiation.
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- The fire marked the first time that American astronauts were killed inside a spacecraft. It grounded Apollo for 18 months, but it also led NASA to make crucial design improvements that increased safety and performance during the following lunar missions.
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- Apollo’s first manned mission began in October 1968, when Apollo 7 entered low-Earth orbit to conduct a shakedown of the command and service module. During the 11-day flight, astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham made the first live television transmissions from inside a manned spacecraft.
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- Neil Armstrong wasn’t handpicked to command Apollo 11. NASA’s Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton adhered to an impartial rotation system for the Apollo missions. Each three-man team of astronauts served as the backup crew on a flight, and then became prime crew of their own mission three flights later.
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- For the first moon landing, however, Slayton considered handpicking a commander. Gus Grissom was the leading candidate before his death in the Apollo 1 fire, and Slayton later informally offered the job to Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, who turned it down in favor of retiring.
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- In the end, the historic Apollo 11 mission fell to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, who were the next crew in the rotation line. “I wasn’t chosen to be first,” Armstrong later said. “I was just chosen to command that flight, which turned out to be the first landing. Circumstances put me in that particular role.”
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- When Neil Armstrong took his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” in July 1969, he was wearing a spacesuit crafted by Playtex, a company better known for making ladies’ bras and girdles. The International Latex Corporation, the industrial division of Playtex, won a contract to build Apollo spacesuits in 1962, and later sealed the deal after besting two other companies in a design competition.
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- Playtex went on to create a pair of hand-sewn spacesuits that protected the Apollo astronauts from the elements while also giving them the freedom of movement required to collect moon rocks, conduct scientific experiments and drive the lunar rover. Playtex’s spacesuit division split off from the main company in 1967, and it continues to serve as a NASA contractor under the name “ILC Dover“.
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- Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during takeoff. Apollo’s second lunar landing mission took off on November 14, 1969, during a brief lull in a thunderstorm. All went according to plan at first, but just 36 seconds after liftoff, the spacecraft and its roaring Saturn V rocket suffered a lightning strike.
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- Moments later, a second bolt of lightning tore through the ship and wiped out many of its electrical systems. Inside the cockpit, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon heard the master alarm and saw their instrument panel glow with warning lights.
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- NASA considered aborting the mission, but a young flight controller remembered a method for switching the spacecraft’s Signal Conditioning Equipment to an auxiliary setting, which allowed the crew to reconnect the ship’s fuel cells and bring its navigation platform back online once in orbit.
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- Despite beginning its mission with a near-disaster, Apollo 12 went on to make a successful moon landing.
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- An Apollo astronaut conducted a secret ESP experiment. During his voyage to the moon and back with Apollo 14, astronaut Edgar Mitchell secretly carried out the space program’s only experiment in extrasensory perception, or ESP. Mitchell had a deep interest in psychological phenomena, and before leaving for the moon, he concocted a test to see if it was possible to transmit his thoughts through space.
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- While his fellow crewmembers Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa slept, Mitchell took out a collection of cards and spent a few minutes concentrating on a random series of symbols. Back on Earth, a team of psychics tried to read his thoughts and write down the order of the sequence. I was able to read two out of three hands.
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- The group reportedly guessed the right numbers 51 times out of 200, which Mitchell described as “results far exceeding anything expected.” A few years after returning from his moon mission, Mitchell continued his psychic research by founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a nonprofit group devoted to studying human consciousness.
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- NASA quarantined astronauts after the first few moon mission. NASA knew very little about the moon before the Apollo missions, including whether it harbored hazardous microbes or “space germs.” With this in mind, the crews of Apollo 11, 12 and 14 were quarantined after they returned home from their lunar landings.
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- The astronauts were required to slip into anti-contamination suits as soon as they were plucked out of the sea, and they were then sealed off for three weeks inside a converted Airstream trailer called the Mobile Quarantine Facility, or MQF.
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- In the case of Apollo 12, the astronauts were even forced to spend Thanksgiving inside the MQF, so a special turkey dinner was prepared for them. Luckily for the crews of Apollo 15, 16 and 17, NASA later concluded there was no risk of moon diseases and scrapped its quarantine measures in 1971. We are quarantined this year, 2020, but we are not requiring space suits.
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- By the time Apollo 17 ended in 1972, six different lunar expeditions had left the moon’s surface littered with everything from discarded spacecraft parts to scientific experiments and even a photo of astronaut Charlie Duke’s family.
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- The most unusual relic might be “Fallen Astronaut,” an aluminum sculpture designed by Belgian artist Paul van Hoeydonck and secretly left on the moon in August 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. Scott believed that the minimalist artwork should serve as a memorial to those that had died in the pursuit of space exploration, so he placed it alongside a plaque inscribed with the names of 14 lost American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts.
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- The Apollo program wasn’t all about getting us to the Moon. Innovation and technology developed for those lunar voyages often have had second lives here on planet Earth. Here are some examples:
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- Freeze-Dried Meals In 1965, developed for the Gemini missions and improved for the Apollo program. Coated in gelatin to prevent crumbling, provided appetizing meals for astronauts, like shrimp cocktail, chicken & veggies, and butterscotch pudding. Today it is still available in camping supply stores for the overnight hiker. Of course, “astronaut” ice cream remains a best-seller at museums.
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- The Dustbuster was invention in 1971, NASA partnering with Black & Decker.
Moon. It was designed to collect lunar rock and soil samples for Apollo 15, NASA had Black & Decker develop a lightweight, battery-powered drill vacuum to suck up particles from hard-to-reach Moon crevices. This underlying technology was used to create the handheld, cordless vacuum cleaner that has sucked up dirt in hard-to-reach home crevices for the last 40 years.
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- Temper ("Memory") Foam was invented in 1968, by NASA scientists at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. The open-cell polyurethane silicone plastic foam was used for more comfortable and more shock-absorbing seat cushioning in air and space crafts. Mattresses today use it in the popular “boxed” mattresses like Tempur-Pedic, Nectar, and Leesa.
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- Anti-Fogging Coating was first used in the later Gemini missions in 1965-66. Moon Use: To prevent fogging on capsule windows during take-off and on helmet visors while on the Moon, which would have been catastrophic. It is today used in consumer-grade ski goggles, diving masks, and eyeglasses.
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- In 1977, when former NASA engineer Marion Franklin Rudy brought a unique production idea to the shoe company. A process known as “blow rubber molding,” where hollowed-out plastic parts are formed and filled with compressed, dense gases, is used to provide extra comfort and protection in Apollo-era astronaut helmets.
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- In 1978 in the Nike Air Tailwind company, Rudy helped Nike develop a shoe with a hollowed-out heel filled with compressed air providing extra cushioning, shock-absorbing, and buoyancy. Nike Airs remain a bestseller to this day.
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- First developed by NASA and Goodyear for January 1971’s Apollo 14 mission a “Rickshaw,” a mobile equipment transporter pulled by Alan Shepard across the lunar surface, rolled on tires made out of this flexible rubber specifically developed to remain pliable even in extreme cold temperatures.
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- Today Goodyear uses the material to create studless winter tires that provides traction in the snow without destroying road surfaces.
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- Early 1970s, NASA working with Cleveland Clinic Foundation to develop the rocket engine turbopumps that shot the Apollo 11 crew to the Moon. Using similar technology, NASA engineers designed a “left ventricular assist device” (LVAD) that kept blood flowing in a patient while they wait for a heart transplant. This cardiac pump has saved hundreds of lives.
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- In 1967, in the aftermath of Apollo 1’s deadly fire during a test exercise that claimed the lives of three astronauts, NASA engineers redesigned the spacesuits to be fireproof. Made from ultrafine glass filaments coated with Teflon, “Beta cloth” proved to keep astronauts safe for the rest of the Apollo program.
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- A modified version of the fireproof fabric is now used in tensile roofing for domed sports stadiums across the world, including Dallas’s AT&T Stadium, London’s Millennium Dome, and Atlanta’s Georgia Dome.
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- On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the Moon. A decade before Apollo 11, on September 14 1959, the Soviet Union crash landed a spherical probe called Luna 2 onto the lunar surface. Impacting at a speed of more than 6,500 miles per hour, it’s believed that the stainless steel “pennants” that the Soviets wanted to scatter across the Moon were vaporized upon contact.
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- On July 31, 1964, we finally were able to see what the Moon looked up close. Filled with craters, pock marks, and rocks, the lunar surface revealed itself in grainy images taken by the Ranger 7 before it also crashed landed.
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- In September 1968, months before the first humans, two “steppe tortoises” were actually the first Earth-bound beings to orbit the Moon in the Soviet Union’s Zoid 5.
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- After their long trip to the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin were mighty hungry, so they ate their dinner earlier than the mission had planned. That meal consisted of peaches, sugar cookie cubes, coffee, and bacon squares.
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- Shortly after landing and before stepping on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin took communion while sitting in the lunar module. Sipping wine and biting off a piece of a wafer, Aldrin said his prayers quietly while Armstrong looked on. For years, NASA kept this act of faith quiet due to an ongoing lawsuit around Apollo 8’s reading of Genesis.
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- While Apollo 11’s landing was in black and white, a global audience got to see the crew of Apollo 12’s descent to the lunar surface in beautiful color. Unfortunately, those live broadcasts are now lost to history of the inadvertent mistake of pointing the camera directly at the Sun, which destroyed the SEC tube inside.
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- On July 30, 1972, the crew of Apollo 15 landed on the Moon with smuggled specialty stamped envelopes. When they arrived back on Earth, the envelopes were sold by a German stamp dealer for a reported sum of more than $150,000. In exchange, the three astronauts were to have trust funds set up for their children. However, when the plot was uncovered, the astronauts were reprimanded and their space exploring careers ended.
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- During the Apollo 14 mission on February, 6, 1971, Alan Shepard pulled out a six-iron that he had smuggled on board in a sock and hit two golf balls across the lunar surface. The last one, as he said to the TV-watching audience around the globe, soared “miles and miles” thanks to the lack of gravity.
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- A long hit for man, an even longer hit for mankind.
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- November 24, 2020 APOLLO - space missions 2915
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