Anniversaries

[mmcirvin]

30 years ago: First flight of Columbia. I remember it well, especially the anxiety over the heat-shield tiles that popped loose from the Orbital Maneuvering System pods. The Shuttle's reusable heat shield was one of the biggest technological risks involved with the project. They got back in one piece (though the Wikipedia article describes a lot of scary associated problems I never heard about at the time), but heat-shield damage would eventually doom Columbia over twenty years later, though it wasn't the tiles that failed.

It seems insane now, but NASA wanted to get up to 60+ flights a year and replace all existing satellite launchers with the Shuttle. It was going to be a new era of large-scale exploitation of space. For a kid interested in this stuff it was tremendously exciting.

50 years ago: "I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"

150 years ago: The US Civil War begins.

Comments

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Since I've been writing about an atomic-age horror setting for D&D-like games over on my gaming blog, I've been watching a lot of space stuff on the Science Channel. Saw the Mars Rising series, and now I've been watching Moon Machines. Seems there was a lot of errors and fears we didn't hear much about back then, when it was actually happening.