The coolest thing I've seen this month · 4:31am May 2nd, 2013
Apollo 11 ground control, possibly during a training run. The guy leaning forward and about to fall off his chair is Gene Krantz, flight director and interesting guy.
I was once in a lunar landing LARP. Three astronauts sat in a mock-up of the Apollo 11 capsule, linked by audio to three controllers at a mock-up of ground control, and we simulated a moon landing. It was very cool.
This is just as cool: The air (okay, vaccuum)-to-ground chat, controller chat, out-the-window video, attitude data, and Neil Armstrong's heart rate, all synced up. See Neil's heart rate shoot up to 150 after the fourth system alarm. Did you know they landed on the moon with about 3 seconds of fuel left? I didn't.
Admiral Biscuit pointed out this article which explains what the alarm codes meant & why they made Armstrong's heart rate go up. It also says that "jobs" (the way operating systems see different processes) and job priorities were invented for this mission!
.
FLIGHT: Go/no go in 10 seconds.
CAPCOM: Brony, open your computer's audio mixer and shift the balance toward the right speaker.
LMP: Roger. Balance shifted right.
FLIGHT: Going round the horn. CONTROL.
CONTROL: Go.
FLIGHT: RETRO.
RETRO: Go.
FLIGHT: TELCOM.
TELCOM: Go.
FLIGHT: CAPCOM, we are GO for awesome.
CAPCOM: Brony, you are GO. Click for 17 minutes of awesome.
To paraphrase a great Italian astronomer, "And yet it does not play."
Bad Horse, I am disappoint!
No, seriously. This sounds exactly as awesome as you make it out to be. But for whatever reason, it won't play for me.
this is awesome. I can't stop listening
That was fun
1048379 Sometimes it won't play if you're insufficiently cool. Firefox or Chrome will make you cooler.
1048412
Chrome apparently doesn't make me cool enough. I must be some sort of exothermic black hole.
Can't play, because being at work nerfs my coolness factor by at least 20%
Oh lawd, I should be shot for that.
1048418 Copy that, Bradel. Coolness level critical. Initiate sonic rainboom in t minus 5. Over.
SONIC RAINBOOM!
he says. On May 1st.
But yeah, it's pretty awesome. I remember going to Space Camp way back in middle school, and being really bummed-out that I got stuck playing the role of CAPCOM instead of getting to be one of the cool Pilots. I came out of it jumping because it was one of the coolest things I've ever done. Space is awesome.
1048447 DID YOU LEARN THE MAGIC OF FRIENDSHIP?
1048451 No, but I did A.D.D. my way to being the worst CAPCOM the camp counselors had ever seen.
Excuse me while I run 5 laps, that was amazing!
That was incredible. Awesome[1] in concentrated form.
I fiddled with the audio settings and I got the best results by using headphones and a center balance. I could hear both channels well enough and it provided for the most plugged-in experience.
[1] In the traditional sense of inspiring awe, too.
Quite awesome.
Here's another cool space related video. For full effect, watch it in 1080p, fullscreen and blast it LOUD on good speakers. Freakin' adrenalin rush...
[youtube=OnoNITE-CLc]
1048447 he says. On May 1st.
Isn't it cool how I can be precise and misleading at the same time? It's a Dark Arts skill.
1048459 No, but I did A.D.D. my way to being the worst CAPCOM the camp counselors had ever seen.
Did they say that?
1048661 Here's another space-related video: Elon Musk at TED. I thought the dotcom billionaires investing in space were stupid until I heard him say that fuel is only 1% of the cost of a Space Shuttle mission.
I still think space travel is currently relatively unimportant compared to research on aging, gene therapy, cancer, economics, education, reputation filtering and recommendation systems, search, social stratification, biofuel, and neural interfaces, and attracts more than its proper share of attention. And a manned space mission (to Mars) is not worth more than 100 new Hubble telescopes. But if they can really do orbital missions for 1% of the NASA cost, that's worthwhile.
You know, you can always pick Kranz out of the crowd, I always got a kick out of looking for him in the older Gemini footage.
I worked with a guy who helped design and build the Apollo Lunar Module. Strange, but very smart guy. He was way up there in the tech arm of the company, not down in the trenches with the rest of us, but I figure he earned it.
I remember, another tech once made fun of him because he was having issues figuring out his new phone, that it was kind of sad that the big boss of technology was having issues with a blackberry.
"You know that his fingerprints are on the moon, right?" I asked him.
Nothing I'll ever do in my life will come anywhere near to being as cool as what those guys did.
Oh I've got a space video too, hang on...
This might actually be the same as Tyek's. I haven't seen the other videos in this thread yet, because I don't have flash on this box
The heart rate monitor was a nice touch.
1048718 Well, not in so many words. What happened was (and this was ages ago, so don't take this as gospel) that I began daydreaming as I am wont to do, and when I came to, it turns out that I was waaay behind in the script. So rather than just pickup up where we were supposed to be, I just quickly read everything at the shuttle as fast as I could.
Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Anyways, the mission went off without too many problems, since the pilots had their own script and they hadn't been waiting for me to tell them to hit the appropriate buttons. I was talking about it with the camp-councilors afterwards, and they asked me what made me think that I was supposed to speed-shout everything when I realized that I was behind. I didn't really have an answer for them (but in hindsight the answer was "I was a stupid child") and when I asked them what people usually did in that situation, they responded that they'd never really seen CAPCOM screw up since it's a pretty easy job.
I asked them if that made me the worst CAPCOM, and I remember the male councilor answering "Well, you definitely weren't the best, that's for sure" and then breaking off the conversation. I didn't really think much of it at the time, but in hindsight it must have been pretty hilarious for them.
1048718
I agree. All areas of science deserve a lot more funding and space travel probably shouldn't be our main concern. I think it's sad that hundreds of billions of dollars get more or less wasted by the US on its military every year.
This is a bit late, but you might appreciate this article:
Tales from the lunar module
My brother sent it a while back (he's now working flight test for Virgin Space), since he thought I'd be interested.
1265173 That makes the recording more meaningful--you can't tell from their voices whether an "Alarm 1202" is important.