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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 27, 2012 23:14:19 GMT 12
I'd like to know why is it that when Apollo 8 went around the moon they beamed back coloured footage from inside their ship, and of the moon and the earth-rise. So if that technology was available then, why did Apollo 11 not have a coloured video camera to beam the images back of the landing? I know subsequent landings did it in colour. It seems a bit odd. The footage that was beamed back is poor quality black and white. Was there a malfunction with the coloured camera gear?
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Post by lumpy on Aug 28, 2012 7:15:40 GMT 12
I'd like to know why is it that when Apollo 8 went around the moon they beamed back coloured footage from inside their ship, and of the moon and the earth-rise. So if that technology was available then, why did Apollo 11 not have a coloured video camera to beam the images back of the landing? I know subsequent landings did it in colour. It seems a bit odd. The footage that was beamed back is poor quality black and white. Was there a malfunction with the coloured camera gear? Poor quality black and white footage could more easily hide the defincies of where the footage was really shot - area 51. ;D ( no , I dont really believe that , but it is a favourite theory of many )
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Post by Andy Wright on Aug 28, 2012 10:42:21 GMT 12
Oh, I do like that.
Edit - sorry, the 21st century man cartoon.
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Post by flyjoe180 on Aug 28, 2012 11:20:29 GMT 12
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Post by kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 28, 2012 11:24:35 GMT 12
Somewhere in a box in my shed, I've got a copy of Michael Collins' book, “Carrying The Fire”. He was the man who would have had to leave his two mates behind on the surface of the moon if everything had turned to custard, and return to earth alone. He had actually prepared himself for that possibility, just in case. It was part of his training for the mission.
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Post by vs on Aug 28, 2012 11:44:40 GMT 12
Carrying the Fire i a brilliant book, I just read the updated version....a must read!!!
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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 28, 2012 13:22:22 GMT 12
Apollo 8 carried a black and white RCA slow scan TV camera. You must be thinking of Apollo 10 Dave, because they carried a Westinghouse Lunar Color Camera. Well the BBC prigramme I watched on Saturday showed coloured footage of Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders in their capsule, and of the earth-rise they took, so I don't know where that footage came from? Because they were the crew of Apollo 8 and the first people to see an earth-rise.
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Post by kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 28, 2012 13:39:48 GMT 12
It could have been “coloured”, Dave.
I've got every episode of Hogans Heros on DVD, and they are all in colour, apart from the very first episode. Yet, apart from the final season, they were all shot in black & white, but have since been coloured.
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Post by Bruce on Aug 28, 2012 15:20:50 GMT 12
The Earthrise photo was not televised video - it was a still image on 70mm colour slide film en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EarthriseIt wasnt beamed back from the moon, therefore didnt have to be downgraded for transmission.
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Post by kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 28, 2012 17:53:36 GMT 12
I cannot remember Sputnik, but I can remember the first manned space flight.
I can also remember the entire Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs.
It was an exciting time growing up and going to school during the 1960s.
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Post by kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 28, 2012 17:55:03 GMT 12
from The Telegraph....Neil Armstrong: one giant leap into the darkPutting a man on the Moon in 1969 was a formidable achievement, but did Neil Armstrong make his small step on to the surface 50 years too early, asks Michael Hanlon.By MICHAEL HANLON | 7:43AM BST - Monday, 27 August 2012EARTHRISE: The Earth seen from the Moon. — Photo: NASA.I WAS one of the 600 million people who watched Neil Armstrong’s Small Step on to the Sea of Tranquility live on tiny black and white televisions. Dragged out of bed in the early hours on July 21 1969, I only vaguely understood what was happening. I was four and a half.
But I knew that a man on the Moon was a big deal. Back then, everyone assumed this was indeed a giant leap into the future, the beginning of a space age not for the chosen few but for us all. By the time I was at school, we all took it for granted that we would be following in Armstrong’s footsteps when we grew up.
We collected the Apollo badges and, later, glued together Airfix models of the magnificent spacecraft, towering machines that looked more like cathedrals than vehicles.
The future beckoned, as shiny-white as those sundrenched rockets on their Florida launchpads. I was one of the millions back then who fell in love with space and it is partly thanks to Neil Armstrong and fellow crew member Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin that I write books about it and have tried to meet as many of the Moonwalkers as I can. But sadly, that dream that I and others would be able to follow in their footsteps one day was not to be.
They are all old men, now, the Moonwalkers, and with the death of Armstrong there are just eight humans left alive who have walked on the surface of another world. When they are gone, we will have lost the last living links with what British space historian Dr David Harland has called “a piece of the 21st century transported into the 1960s”.
As the Apollo programme recedes into history, the more unreal it seems. Back in 1961, just 57 years after Wilbur and Orville Wright first took to the air in their string-and-canvas contraptions, President John F Kennedy pledged to put an American on the Moon and bring him home again before 1970. Only one person, the Russian Yuri Gagarin, had flown in space. America’s manned space programme, Mercury, was embryonic and the US had to rely on the former-Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun to telescope what should have realistically taken 40 years into less than a decade.For Apollo to succeed, a whole technology had to be created from scratch. This meant not just firing space capsules into space and splashing them down again, but assembling large complex craft in orbit, keeping humans alive in the radiation-drenched vacuum of outer space for days at a time and somehow navigating across a quarter of a million miles of space with pinpoint accuracy.
It meant not just building a rocket capable of propelling 120 tons of material into orbit (the mighty Saturn V) but developing computers powerful enough and small enough to fit into a capsule. It is a myth that Apollo gave us Teflon, but without that programme we would have had to wait a lot longer for the computer revolution to arrive (the Apollo Guidance Computer was the direct ancestor of your laptop or iPhone).
But the technology alone would have been nothing without finding a new breed of heroes to ride in and operate these magnificent machines. America’s astronauts defied easy categorisation. Armstrong himself was two parts warrior and hyper-fit macho hero to one part pensive engineering and aeronautics-obsessed geek.
I have been privileged to meet four of the Moonwalkers. They are indeed men apart. All brilliant, some prickly. Armstrong was usually described as a “recluse”, but he was not; this being a word used by journalists to mean “does not give interviews”. One got the impression that it was all too much, the sheer weight of expectation upon the shoulders of the first Moonwalker more than any human could handle.
The second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, like most astronauts preferred then and now to talk about flying and the mathematics of celestial navigation than about the glory. Aldrin, an intense, extraordinarily intelligent man, told me that one of the mistakes made by NASA was “that we never sent anyone who could really communicate what was happening”. As well as engineers and pilots, the Moonwalkers should have included writers, a poet perhaps, or an artist among the pilot-jocks. Then, along with the seismographs and geological samples, the analysis of the lunar soil and measurements of craters and mountains, we would have heard how the Moon smells of gunpowder and tastes of burnt sulphur; of how, after taking their bulky suits off in the module, moon dust and grit would get into every crack and crevice on the body, of the cold and the terror, and exactly what it is like to gaze up at the Earth, a blue and green orb that from the Moon appears four times the size that the Moon does from our world.
And the Moon — the reality of it — has remained a missed opportunity for art and literature. Even as Armstrong, Aldrin and the Command Module pilot Mike Collins were on their way, the decision was being made to abort humanity’s giant leap into the cosmos.
Politics played a big part. Richard Nixon inherited Apollo from his hated rival JFK and, while he was happy to bathe in the reflected glory of Apollo 11, he saw no need to follow it up with the planned Moon bases and manned missions to Mars that von Braun insisted were possible by 1985. The last three Moon missions — Apollos 18, 19 and 20 — were quietly cancelled, a tragic decision as the rockets had been built and the money already spent. NASA’s grand vision shrank to a parochial horizon of space stations and shuttles, missions that were banal in their ambition and scope and in which the public soon lost interest.
Even during its pomp, when Apollo was hoovering up about 4 per cent of America’s GDP, polls showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for manned spaceflight. For the enthusiasts, of which there were millions, Apollo was the most important adventure in the history of mankind. But for the rest — many more millions, it was as relevant as Dorothy’s journey to Oz.
So perhaps the greatest irony of Apollo was that its very success ended human expansion into space. Armstrong’s triumph was not the beginning of something new; it was, in fact, the beginning of the end. By meeting JFK’s absurd, vainglorious deadline, NASA won the space race, but the thing about races is that when they are won, they are over. It is a myth that America turned its back on space because of the cost; America’s wars consume far more cash than even Apollo did. There has always been the money — what has been lacking since JFK made his pledge has been vision and will.
A further irony is that while enthusiasm for real space exploration may have been limited, America’s — and the rest of the world’s — enthusiasm for fake space exploration has, since the Apollo years, boomed. The US spends far more money playing computer games and watching movies about pretend aliens and astronauts than it does on NASA. The most successful films ever made — Avatar, Star Wars, ET and the rest – have been about aliens and imagined futures in space. Here in Britain the BBC has proclaimed that Dr Who, a science fiction TV series that began in the Apollo era, may go on for ever.
My belief is that Apollo was simply a programme out of its time, a dead-end simply because it came 50, maybe even 100 years too early. We went to the Moon and simply didn’t know what to do next, just as the Vikings discovered America half a millennium before they should. In a recent, rare interview, Armstrong bemoaned the lack of direction at NASA, and he was right. Today, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many people believe he never actually went to the Moon or stepped on its surface, that the landing was brilliantly faked.
We are still exploring space, of course, but by proxy, using machines such as the brilliant Curiosity rover that landed on Mars last week. NASA’s hopes of getting a man on Mars and beyond are doomed and it is probably best for now to leave it to the robots, to search for life in the cosmos and leave the giant leaps to someone else. Because someone — most likely the Chinese or privateers — will one day take up the Apollo mantle from Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan and Schmitt. But for the surviving Moonmen, and maybe even for people of my generation, that day will probably come too late.• Michael Hanlon is the author of ‘The Real Mars’ and ‘The Worlds of Galileo’, which chronicle the robotic exploration of the Solar System.www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9501390/Neil-Armstrong-one-giant-leap-into-the-dark.html
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Post by kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 28, 2012 18:48:55 GMT 12
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Post by Dave Homewood on Sept 2, 2012 2:29:18 GMT 12
Kiwi pilot recalls day he flew Neil Armstrong By Russell Blackstock 4:13 PM Saturday Sep 1, 2012 Retired Kiwi pilot Doug Bruce will never forget flying Neil Armstrong around Milford Sound in a tiny, one-engined plane. A private service was being held for the pioneering astronaut today in Cincinnati. A blue moon coincided with the day of the service, which some interpreted as a wink from the cosmos for Armstrong. Queenstown-based aviator Doug Bruce also spent yesterday reflecting on his time with Armstong. He confesses he didn't recognise the superstar astronaut when he booked a front seat spot on the five-seat tourist plane, in the early 1970s. "I just knew I was picking up some passengers at Milford Sound for a 30-minute spin but I had no idea one of them was the most famous man in the world at the time," Bruce, now 74, said. "When he climbed in the cockpit and introduced himself, I nearly fell out of the plane. "I mean, what pilot wouldn't be a tad nervous at having the man who flew to the moon in Apollo 11 sitting next to him." Bruce believed Armstrong was on holiday with family and friends the day he bowled up unannounced at the natural tourist trap for the trip in a Cessna. "I know he was a very private man so I didn't want to trouble him for a picture or start pestering him for an autograph," the grandfather-of-three said. "I also knew that most people are blown away by the sight of Milford Sound, but how do you impress a guy who has been to the moon?" Bruce said Armstrong sat next to him for the duration of the flight and afterwards told him he loved it. "I thought a short trip like that would be a ho-hum experience for someone like him but a he said it was one of the best things he'd done in his life, so it so it just shows you how good the trip really is." Bruce retired from flying in 2009 after piloting about 60,000 people around Milford Sound during more than 30 years. He is sad that Armstrong is no longer with us, but said memories of the day he took the controls with the space hero in the next seat will stay with him forever. "He was an absolute gentleman," Bruce added. - Herald on Sunday www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10831039
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