Apollo and later
Jul. 20th, 2009 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinMy parents tell me I was watching on TV when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon. I have to take their word for it, since I was barely one year old and have no memories of the event.
I do remember bits and pieces of some of the later missions. I have really distinct memories of watching TV at our place in Ohio and seeing a Saturn V taking off, and my father explaining how the stages of the rocket would fall off as it got higher. I was concerned about what was going to happen to the people riding in the lower stages. Dad said there weren't any, but I insisted that some of the markings on the side of the rocket were windows. Then I made a crayon drawing of a rocket with USA written on it separating into pieces.
I also remember seeing some Walter Cronkite-narrated footage of an Apollo command module bobbing in the ocean, with those big strange-looking flotation balloons on top. Cronkite is tied up in all of these memories, as well as in everything else I remember of world events of the early 1970s.
The really vivid July 20th space memory I have is (as I've said many times before) of the Viking 1 landing on Mars exactly seven years later, during CBS's East Coast airing of Captain Kangaroo. I was a huge space buff by then and it fired my imagination tremendously.
As James Nicoll says here, the history of American space exploration after Apollo (sometimes in collaboration with other countries) has been pretty remarkable—it just bears little resemblance to old science fiction or old futurism, and hasn't involved massive human movement into space. The main thing we've learned from human spaceflight efforts in the past 40-odd years is that working in space, while possible, is a lot harder than optimists thought it was in the Collier's days.
NASA's post-Shuttle plans involve a push to go back to the Moon (and, theoretically, on to Mars), in spacecraft that in some ways resemble an enlarged Apollo. Charlie Stross has said he doubts it'll come off. The program is probably technically feasible, but we don't have anything like Apollo's psychological-warfare motivation to keep it going. Apollo was unusual in that it was a human-spaceflight program that actually did have an enormous scientific haul, but it was so expensive that it never would have happened if it were motivated by the science alone, or by the manifest-destiny dreams of space fans.
I do remember bits and pieces of some of the later missions. I have really distinct memories of watching TV at our place in Ohio and seeing a Saturn V taking off, and my father explaining how the stages of the rocket would fall off as it got higher. I was concerned about what was going to happen to the people riding in the lower stages. Dad said there weren't any, but I insisted that some of the markings on the side of the rocket were windows. Then I made a crayon drawing of a rocket with USA written on it separating into pieces.
I also remember seeing some Walter Cronkite-narrated footage of an Apollo command module bobbing in the ocean, with those big strange-looking flotation balloons on top. Cronkite is tied up in all of these memories, as well as in everything else I remember of world events of the early 1970s.
The really vivid July 20th space memory I have is (as I've said many times before) of the Viking 1 landing on Mars exactly seven years later, during CBS's East Coast airing of Captain Kangaroo. I was a huge space buff by then and it fired my imagination tremendously.
As James Nicoll says here, the history of American space exploration after Apollo (sometimes in collaboration with other countries) has been pretty remarkable—it just bears little resemblance to old science fiction or old futurism, and hasn't involved massive human movement into space. The main thing we've learned from human spaceflight efforts in the past 40-odd years is that working in space, while possible, is a lot harder than optimists thought it was in the Collier's days.
NASA's post-Shuttle plans involve a push to go back to the Moon (and, theoretically, on to Mars), in spacecraft that in some ways resemble an enlarged Apollo. Charlie Stross has said he doubts it'll come off. The program is probably technically feasible, but we don't have anything like Apollo's psychological-warfare motivation to keep it going. Apollo was unusual in that it was a human-spaceflight program that actually did have an enormous scientific haul, but it was so expensive that it never would have happened if it were motivated by the science alone, or by the manifest-destiny dreams of space fans.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 03:37 pm (UTC)Like you, I do remember bits an pieces from that era. Mostly the "beeps" from the radios and the dudes saying "T-Minus" this and that.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-22 03:14 am (UTC)I sincerely hope some of these private space efforts pay off; short of a Mars race with China or maybe the ESA (yeah right), I don't see the government doing anything but sustaining a certain rate of humans in orbit.
What really disappoints is the failure of orbital research. I have no sense that any research done in microgravity is bearing fruit; no miracle drugs, and while they're certainly gathering data on humans with prolongued durations in microgravity, it's self-serving research. And hey, it'll pay off when the Mars mission comes, but so far the best thing to come out of the space station was my remarkable agar-based ant-farm. I'm glad to know we're at the forefront of ant-farm technology (not to say ant-farming, mind), but I'd like some miracle drugs, plz. If not for me, than for others, and I'll keep my ant farm.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-22 03:25 am (UTC)The microgravity-research hopes were, I think, mostly dreamed up because space was a solution in search of a problem.