40 years ago - Apollo 11 to the moon

[Baclava]

Apollo 11 Image Library

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/images11.html

(tons of pics)







Interior of Lunar Module



Still the best pic of them all

[stevebreeze]

1. aside from the awesome pics, it is well worth remembering the economic help

we received as an offshoot of the space program.
Basically think if it is on a micro chip it may not have happened if not for the space programs need to reduce size and weight.

[Baclava]

3. We are a society who put men on the moon 40 years ago...before we put wheels on luggage.

The equipment they were using looks like a bad sci-fi movie by todays standards.

Kids don't have dreams come true like that anymore, do they?

[Baclava]

4. And without microchips there would be no megapixel pics to look at on the internet

And they went to the moon on the power of the sliderule.

(I bet you kids still think it was the sky gods that invented the computer.)

[slutticus]

2. that earth-rise pic is one of the most profound photos ever taken...

...and probably the most profound that will ever be taken.

I can't even describe what I feel when i look at all of humanity in one glance.

Its like simultaneously the infinite and the infinitesimal.

[Baclava]

6. Yeah - we are at the bottom of the puny scale after that view

"Earthrise" only happened because we built the biggest bottle rockets....evar...

[ChimpersMcSmirkers]

7. I can never see that pic enough. What a beauty.

[Baclava]

12. I love the smell of rocket fuel in the morning

[pipi_k]

14. Pale Blue Dot

The only other image that competes with "Earthrise" is the one of the earth from the outer edges of the solar system...out by Uranus or Pluto, I believe...

Even the solar system seems puny in that photo...

[Baclava]

16. Voyagers are still flying

Spreading our seed to the stars

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/24/AR2005052401434.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NASA says both Voyagers are headed towards the outer boundary of the Solar System in search of the heliopause — the region where the Sun's influence wanes and the beginning of interstellar space can be sensed.

Voyager 1 is departing the Solar System at a speed of 39,000 miles per hour.
Voyager 2 is departing the Solar System at a speed of 35,000 miles per hour.

Sometime in the next 10 years, the two spacecraft will cross an area known as the termination shock where the million-mile-per-hour solar wind slows to about 250,000 miles per hour.

After reaching the termination shock, the Voyagers will continue on to cross the heliopause in another 10 to 20 years.

Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars:

Voyager 1, in 40,000 years, will float by within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of a star known as AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis.


Voyager 2, in 296,000 years, will sail within 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) of Sirius, which today is the brightest star in Earth's sky.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are destined to wander through our Milky Way galaxy eternally — unless they crash into something we can't yet calculate.

http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Voyagers20years.html

[Vidar]

5. 40 years since the US did anything worthwhile. Everything seemed possible

in 1969.

[Baclava]

9. Actually, the dream began in '61 - just proves anything is possible

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade.

[Vidar]

11. I know it well. We watched every Mercury takeoff on a small black & white

television in the elementary school gym. At 13, I explained the moonshot to my grandfather who drove a caisson in WWI. The space program was a small price to pay for a nation's sense of wonder.

[Baclava]

13. Me too - on a B&W tee-vee (with tubes)

Still amazing

[Vidar]

15. When I did my student teaching (1980), my supervising teacher's

husband was a tv repairman with his own shop. I don't think the profession still exists.

[L. Coyote]

8. Lest we forget, this was possible with warfare technology reapplied.

Human warfare made this possible.
In many ways, it is too bad we developed the capability in the first place because those were developments to better kill others. Rockets were not developed for space exploration.

[Baclava]

10. Of course.. the Saturn V was Wernher von Braun's baby