The 50th anniversary of the first moon landing is Saturday · 7:06pm Jul 18th, 2019
This Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing.
There's a great website showing video from the landing module of the moon landing, synced up with their communications with ground control, altitude data, and Neil Armstrong's heart rate: http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com
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.
Another web page,
http://klabs.org/history/apollo_11_alarms/eyles_2004/eyles_2004.htm
gives technical details about the computer, and 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!
Neil Armstrong channels Big Mac:
Quoting Fred Blonder,
Armstrong was notorious for being unflappable in the face of disaster. In 1966 when he commanded Gemini 8, he successfully brought the craft back to Earth after one of its maneuvering thrusters got stuck on and threw them in to a spin. Once when he was piloting the Lunar-Lander Simulator, it went out of control and he bailed-out, parachuted to the ground, then returned to his office and began reading. One of the other astronauts ran to his office and said "Neil, I hear you punched-out of the simulator this morning." Armstrong looked up, said "Yup", then turned back to his reading.
There's a documentary about him called First Man, which I hear is very good.
Here's an amusing video from 1962, in which Neil Armstrong's parents were on the TV show "I've got a secret", and their secret was that their son had been selected as an astronaut.
https://youtu.be/zd7eWKCOk-A?t=3D3D279
And here's a great pony story about the moon!
Hoofprints, by GhostOfHeraclitus, posted 31st Mar 2014.
This Oct. 29th will be the 50th anniversary of the Internet, a fact which I enjoy pointing out to people who claim that technological progress is still as fast as it was in the past.
also https://www.fimfiction.net/story/219586/lunas-return-trajectory and obviously https://www.fimfiction.net/story/247031/the-mare-who-once-lived-on-the-moon :}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZkVzzdWBzw - in russian .... (you know, you can't say 'Moon' without saying 'Earth' first .....)
Man, can you imagine how much time it took to build that sound stage? And on the moon no less!
Adventure strange! No such in Story we,
New or old, true or feigned, see.
On Earth he seem’d to move
Yet Heaven went above;
Up in the Skies
His body flies
In open, visible, yet Magic, sort:
As he along the Way did sport...
...Yet doth he briskly run,
And bold the danger overcome;
Who, as he leapt, with joy related soon
How happy he o’er-leapt the Moon.
--Thomas Trahern 1637-1674
To be clear, First Man is a "based on" movie, not a documentary, but it was indeed very good. (Though with some fairly major artistic license-taking.)
This Apollo 11 documentary is absolutely fantastic if historical accuracy is your goal, because it's cut together entirely from film and audio shot and recorded contemporaneously. There's absolutely no footage or dialogue in it newer than August 1969. (The soundtrack is a modern composition for the documentary, but only made use of instruments/techniques that existed at the time.) The behind-the-scenes of it deserves its own documentary, as far as I'm concerned, but there's been some great reporting on it at least.
5090792
Stanley Kubrick was a dedicated man.
Thanks for the information; I knew some of that, but not all of it.
"a fact which I enjoy pointing out to people who claim that technological progress is still as fast as it was in the past"
Ah, and you don't? Nice. I agree, but most people seem to think it's as fast or faster.
(If that's in one of your essays somewhere, I must have missed it; I don't think I've read nearly all of them, for a start.)
5090923
re the documentary:
Oh, indeed! I was fortunate enough to be able to see it in a theater (I think it only ran for a week at the local one I go to, and as I recall I got either the last or second-to-last showing). Quite an experience.
(Not all the footage was from Apollo 11 itself, but it's still authentic period footage.)
5091000
I drove three hours to see it in IMAX; totally worth it. I need to pick up the BluRay so I can watch it again.
And yeah, all the footage wasn't actually from Apollo 11; they only had cameras mounted on the lower stages for earlier test flights. EDIT: Oh this video talks about them, great!
As close to the moon as you can get without a rocket:
5091037
Nice.
Aye, it was interesting getting that look behind the scenes, and at more of the program, too, I thought.
5091000 I don't think I've written about it on fimfiction, but I did give a presentation on it at a TransVision conference maybe, holy cow, 15 years ago. I can send you those slides sometime if you PM me with an email. I wrote more on the subject in 2013, but didn't post it anywhere.
5091686
Hm, neat, and thanks.
Have you considered writing about it on FIMFiction?
Until seeing "First Man" earlier this year (for all it's not entirely accurate), I had no idea the landing was such a close thing.
As for the rate of technological development, it reminds me of a famous saying in economics: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." It seems like there's a lot of advancement going on, but that in many areas we're hitting diminishing returns--either more effort is required to generate comparable advancements, or the same degree of advancement yields less transformative effects on life. Mind if I PM you for the slides, too?