Happy Birthday Apollo 11

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

Just in case you managed to ignore all the media attention, today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission.  

 

 

A little before my time, I wasn't born until nearly a year after this mission happened, and I was also too young to appreciate the later Apollo missions when they happened.  But I do now.  I'm in awe of what an incredible machine the Saturn V rocket and its payload were (especially given the technological limits of the time), what audacity it took for human beings to dare to reach for the moon and believe they could actually make it happen, and what courage it took for three guys to climb on top of that thing and ride it right on out of Earth's gravitational sphere.  

[lawnchairboy]

"That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt--this was the cause of the event's attraction and of the stunned numbed state in which it left us.  And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being--an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality."

[roadscholar]

I was 21 and galavanting off to Southern Cal with friends on Summer break though might've caught a glimpse of it on the telly. Growing up 40-50 miles away you got kinda jaded by the whole thing, walk out in the yard and watch rockets take off, no biggie..

 

I'm glad I got to see the movie in IMAX, everything about it was simply amazing. One thing I hadn't realized was the orbiting of Earth part to gain enough speed to slingshot them out of the gravitational pull (TLI, trans lunar injection), just something else to remind you how complicated and amazing feat it was at the time.

 

What appalls me is how many young people (20 somethings) refuse to believe it happened, Steph Curry evidently doesn't and we have a young woman in our dualsport club, otherwise smart as a whip that doesn't either,  though I try to embarrass her in front of the group to watch the movie or any documentaries every chance I get : ) Is there a collective denial being perpetrated on that generation for whatever reasons, seems pretty ridiculous. 

 

An anecdote from the early days not pertinent to space flight although more about the security of it. One day in 1964 my cousin and I played hooky from high school and went down to the Jetty's in Cocoa to surf. After a few hours the waves died down and were only breaking inside the jetty, Frank took a break on the beach. I was sitting on my board in the channel legs dangling in the water and noticed some movement to the right. Then the water started boiling and something big and black was coming up out of the water about 20 yards away. My first thought was it's a big ass whale and I better start padding! Then I realized it was a submarine surfacing to enter the port. I don't think we even knew there was a Navy base in there then, thought it was just for pleasure boats which you had plenty of time to move for. I bet those guys were laughing their asses off looking out their periscope..

 

 

[John in VA]

I was 14 and I remember it well. Glued to the TV all night listening to Uncle Walter give the play-by-play. Amazing achievement back in the slide-rule days!

[Rougarou]

 

 

 

 

I did a tour of Johnson Space Center in 2004ish,....I did not know at the time, but the tour guide stated that our laptops had more computing power than mission control did during the moon landing.......and a quick lookup shows that the iphone5 was 1300 times more powerful than the computer on Apollo 11........and we complain when the BSOD appears preventing us from checking our emails

 

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

19 hours ago, lawnchairboy said:

"That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt--this was the cause of the event's attraction and of the stunned numbed state in which it left us.  And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being--an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality."

 

That "achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being--an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality" - brought a number of people in mission control to tears when the Eagle touched down.  It also famously left Walter Cronkite rather speechless.  

 

 

[poodad]

On 7/16/2019 at 11:08 AM, Joe Frickin' Friday said:

Just in case you managed to ignore all the media attention, today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission.  

 

 

A little before my time, I wasn't born until nearly a year after this mission happened, and I was also too young to appreciate the later Apollo missions when they happened.  But I do now.  I'm in awe of what an incredible machine the Saturn V rocket and its payload were (especially given the technological limits of the time), what audacity it took for human beings to dare to reach for the moon and believe they could actually make it happen, and what courage it took for three guys to climb on top of that thing and ride it right on out of Earth's gravitational sphere.  

 

Here's a little something to put the power of the Rocketdyne F-1 engines (the engines on the first stage of the Saturn 5) into perspective.

 

The five of them burned 40,000 lbs of liquid oxygen and kerosene per second.

 

The fuel pump on each engine was powered by a 55,000 horsepower turbine. 55,000 horsepower just to pump fuel into one engine.

 

The Rocketdyne F-1 engine was designed in the late 50s, and is still the most powerful liquid fuel rocket engine ever produced. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

15 hours ago, poodad said:

 

Here's a little something to put the power of the Rocketdyne F-1 engines (the engines on the first stage of the Saturn 5) into perspective.

 

The five of them burned 40,000 lbs of liquid oxygen and kerosene per second.

 

The fuel pump on each engine was powered by a 55,000 horsepower turbine. 55,000 horsepower just to pump fuel into one engine.

 

The Rocketdyne F-1 engine was designed in the late 50s, and is still the most powerful liquid fuel rocket engine ever produced. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ayup, those engines are entirely ridiculous.   If you haven't seen them closeup, they're overwhelmingly large, especially as presented in their five-engine launch configuration.  Here's a good shot with Wehrner von Braun in the foreground:

 

 

Little known fact: for flight, the engine bells were wrapped in protective insulation to protect each one from the radiant heat of the others' exhaust plumes, and also to protect all of them from the peculiar backflow of hot gases that happened as they approached Ludicrous Speed while still in the atmosphere:

 

 

And just in case anyone is interested, yes, you can purchase the Haynes Manual for the Saturn V.   

[twistyguy]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chasing-moon/

If you have yet seen this documentary on PBS  American Experience, you should make the time to watch it--absolutely fantastic. Lots of new footage and information I had never known about.  For example they played the audio during the fire in Apollo 1.  Very sobering.  It really made me appreciate how incredibly dangerous the whole mission was and how it affected the families of the astronauts. Really well done 3 part series.

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

4 hours ago, twistyguy said:

It really made me appreciate how incredibly dangerous the whole mission was and how it affected the families of the astronauts. Really well done 3 part series.

 

The fact that it was indeed a space race, at least until Apollo 11, certainly added to the risk.  But as the space shuttle program showed, even without that pressure there's more than enough danger.   Apollo 13 threaded a logistical needle to barely get the crew home alive after their oxygen tank exploded, and if the program hadn't been shut down after Apollo 17, it seems likely there would have been a major disaster before long.  It was bad enough losing two space shuttle crews, but at least we were able to recover the bodies; that would not have been possible in some Apollo disaster scenarios.

 

Back around 2010, Randall Munroe (author of the XKCD webcomic) posted this comic:

 

 

As of today, out of the twelve humans who have walked on another world, only four are still living.  Munroe's projection is right on schedule; if the trend continues, then all of earth's Moonwalkers will be gone by 2030.  

 

(Of secondary interest: the mouse-over text on that comic at the XKCD website says, "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.")

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

Here's the timeline of significant events during the Apollo 11 mission.  On this day 50 years ago, the three astronauts crossed the boundary at which the earth and moon exerted equal gravitational influence on them; instead of coasting upward against Earth's gravity, they would now begin falling toward the moon under the influence of its gravity.   At this point, NASA stopped reporting their speed relative to Earth, and began reporting their speed relative to the moon, as it made more sense.  It turned out that the guy they picked to explain this to the media was a poor choice:

 

Quote

Mike Collins later related how Phil Shaffer, one of the flight dynamics controllers in the MOCR struggled to explain the truth to reporters: ''Never has the gulf between the non-technical journalist and the non-journalistic technician been more apparent. The harder Phil tried to dispel the notion, the more he convinced some of the reporters that the spacecraft actually would jiggle or jump as it passed into the lunar sphere. The rest of us smirked and tittered as poor Phil puffed and laboured, and thereafter we tried to discuss the lunar sphere of influence with Phil as often as we could, especially when outsiders were present.