I happen to be in Huntsville this weekend. The local news is understandably obsessed, more so than it seems to be in Memphis.
Aye, me too. I was totally engrossed in the Apollo missions. It saddens and angers me that short-sighted fools have kept us in LEO ever since.
I think we need to unleash Neil deGrasse Tyson on them. When it comes to mankind's current space situation, no one gets pissed like him. His rants are always a thing of beauty.
I still recall sitting in the cafeteria amazed we were there, a man was about to take the first steps on the moon. It was a moving experience since my interest in science has always been strong and I knew full good and well what we had accomplished as a specie, not so much as to who did it as a country. Linda M. was sitting next to me and as much as I had the hots for her in her short little skirt hiked near to shrubbery it was not even regestering through the glory of the moment. I am humbled, and I am saddened by the passing but in the end he did the deed, his foot was the first. Goodbye and Godspeed.
One of the very few people who rightfully deserve to be called 'hero'. I wish we had more of his sort today.
A fitting tribute to the man would be to have a real live Mars walk. Its time to get rid of NASA, they have held back space travel long enough. We should have built a proper station on the moon and then set our sights on Mars. The boondoggle of the ISS is just pathetic. I have a question. When was the last time an American traveled more than 250 miles from earth? In the 60s these guys went 250,000 miles but the ISS is about 220?
And the stupid has started: http://gawker.com/5937942/fox-news-...s-death-is-really-about-obama-spreading-islam
And now, a word on the greatest American hero from the greatest American zero. Three things that I will never forgive Bush and Obama for are involving us in the Middle East, wrecking the economy, and the destruction of America's manned space program.
This is what America has become. A thread honouring a great person devolves into stupidity and partisan politics. Your nation is fucked.
How so? Apollo 11 was the peak of America doing great things. We are no longer doing those great things. It was the peak of America having a vision of the future. We no longer have that vision. Apollo 11 landed the first men on the Moon. Now we can't even put a man into LEO. Partisan politics? Like Mikey the Clown, you're ignoring that I included Bush in that post, so how is it "partisan"? But you're right about one thing: our nation is fucked.
Okay, in crunching the numbers on this site, about when an astronaut died, if you exclude things like the Challenger and Columbia disasters, as well as astronauts killed during training, 2012 leads the way with 4. (Only one of whom predates the shuttle program, BTW.) 1991, 1993, 2001 tie with two each. From 1967 (when the first non-work related death of an astronaut happened) until 1982, no astronauts died. The next gap was nearly 4 years. (John Swigert of Apollo 13 died on 12/27/82, the next astronaut to die outside of Challenger's crew was Stephen Thorne on 5/24/86.) Since then, we've lost one a year, save for the years already mentioned when we lost 2 and 1988, 1989, 1997, 2000, 2003 (minus the Columbia crew, of course), 2005, and 2011, when no astronauts died. Given that there's only two Mercury astronauts still alive, seven of the sixteen Gemini astronauts (including those that flew on Mercury) are gone, and there's twenty surviving Apollo astronauts (I can't find a page which enumerates how many shuttle astronauts there have been, only a listing of all astronauts in every US program. Which isn't helpful at all.), I think we can expect to see a spike in the number of astronaut deaths from old age and/or disease, in the very near future. What it looks like we're unlikely to see, is a spike in the number of new astronauts going into space. (Oh, and three of 2012's astronauts deaths have come since July 1st of this year.)
One of the things I respect about Armstrong is that when he got to the moon, he took communion. No, really.
Beat me to it. Aldrin even waited until Armstrong, an atheist, was out on the moon's surface in order to avoid offending him, and also because all the world would be focused on Armstrong right then, rather than on him. Sorry, Apostle, you got that one all wrong.
According to the author of First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong (which I read two or three years ago), Armstrong was a deist. And, according to Aldrin's account in his 2009 book (quoted at length in apostle's link), "Neil watched respectfully, but made no comment to me at the time."
Both news to me. I didn't read the article Apostle linked to, but I read an account of the incident by Aldrin quite a few years ago and he was very clear on having done it while Armstrong was out on the surface of the moon taking that "giant leap for mankind." It would appear that there are multiple versions of the story circulating.
