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Apollo 13 Mission Manual Pages To Be Auctioned
astroengine writes "On April 13 — the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 accident — Bonhams in New York City will auction off pages from the Apollo 13 mission manual, with handwritten notes by flight commander Jim Lovell. I'm thinking the chances of actually outbidding a rich space enthusiast are slim to none, but having a chance at owning a piece of spaceflight history should be popular nonetheless." Here is an item listing page at Bonhams for one of those pages, which, as Gizmodo notes, saved three astronauts' lives.
... just use ducktape!
Whoever it is selling this deserves a lot of pity. Whether it be NASA who needs the money or an old NASA employee (maybe astronaut?) who needs the money or an old collector who needs the money or the estate of an old collector or NASA employee that needs to liquidate it, there really must be a sad story behind the selling of an item that belongs in a museum.
Come on dude this is slashdot. If it can't be read on an iPad or Kindle, it's not worth bidding on;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why are they selling the wrong one?
Every Level 9 visitor of Johnson Space Center can hold in his hands the (original) Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Operation Plan, probably used and touched by Gene Krantz and others, while visiting the historical Apollo mission control room. It's on the left side of the room, stockpiled with other various files.
Gee if only we had a government body charged with the preservation of important historical documents. Oh wait! We do! I don't understand why these items aren't going to the National Archives. Its not like they are gonna raise enough money for a rocket or anything. The Smithsonian Institution would be a better home than some private collection.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Since the moon landing was a hoax, would these be authentic fake moon landing manual pages, or fake moon landing authentic manual pages?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
They are auctioning a booklet that probably has some information but the public cant access it because the rich people will win it.
Unless, the winner sells it on ebay...
Their so-called "auction site" is broken - I can't even see the current highest bid.
Congrats, want a medal?
Is it wrong that I'm a little dismayed at this? IMHO these belong in the National Archives, or at the Smithsonian's Air & Space museum, not in the hands of the highest bidder. They're a part of our space program's history, and deserve to be preserved.
In the worst case, someone buys it and keeps it in their "private" collection. In effect, no one will ever see it again. Why can't NASA give it to a museum?
Posting as AC, just in case....
In 1969, NASA put the command module and some other stuff on a trailer and toured the state capitals. The capsule was not behind glass or anything. The walkway led past it, and only a railing separated the audience from the capsule. I reached over to touch the heat shield. It was surprisingly brittle, and I scratched it experimentally to see how hard it was. It wasn't, and a bunch came off under a couple of my nails. I looked around, but nobody noticed, so I went to my family's car and put the black stuff into a Jolly Rancher wrapper and tucked it safely away. Later, I put it into a cheap picture frame with a typewritten note. I have it today, sitting on the mantle, my misbegotten piece of the space program.
It is my little reward, I guess, for all those predawns, getting up early on the West Coast to watch TV coverage of launches of the Mercury and then the Gemini missions and building endless models of the space crafts.
Missing front cover (used to repair air filters).
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Nowhere do you see any "do you really want to..." switches. I mean really, who would build such a space craft and only have a switch or button which doesn't have a secondary switch or button labeled "do you really want to?"(DYRWT) to be sure the operator wants to throw that switch? Or _really_ sure for that matter. It must be fake.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Why are all you people so sure that there is a museum that even wants it?
And I don't say that from opposition to preserving interesting history. Is NASA's disposition process really so broken that the Smithsonian isn't getting stuff they want?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A friend and I went to the auction for a piece of ENIAC! I was pretty skeptical it would hold any interest and doubtful it would be in my price range, but it was exciting to see up close and exciting to watch the process. It turns out the only part I really regret was having to wait through all the Titanic junk to get to the good part. When it finally came up we fought for attention to try to get an early bid in just to say we did, but the bids quickly went into the stratosphere. It was also satisfying seeing the final price put to shame all that Titanic junk the auction house was so proud of.
Very exciting. If you're in that area, even if you're not a fan of auctions, I strongly recommend the experience. Go. Get a close up look at a piece of history.
If you want to see it, go to the item listing page at Bonhams. You can see a high-resolution photo of both sides of the sheet. For the purposes of research or curiosity that's a much closer look than you would get if it were behind glass in a museum. Besides, even though the Air & Space museum is huge (they've got a Concorde, 727, SR-71, Space Shuttle, etc), they don't have room to preserve and display every piece of paper that an astronaut ever wrote on. This is ONE PAGE out a binder with hundreds of pages, which is one of thousands of binders NASA used in the space program. It's autographed on one side by Lovell, so I suspect this is from his personal binder and a some point he was using pages out of it for autographs instead of using photos. Just because something is collectible, doesn't mean it's historically significant.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
yet another crash landing guide. not many pages, it's more like a contract. mynuts won; we'd rather chew nails than remember those daze.
It's not this stuff ever made it to the moon.
They actually lugged paper documents to the moon? I wonder how much weight NASA has shaved off missions over the years by reducing paper and upgrading electronics.
Why pay such high prices for a few pages of original manual when you can just buy one of these for your maintenance needs?
Is it wrong that I'm a little dismayed at this?
Yes, it is wrong. Where are these museums going to put this stuff? Who is going to pay for storage and maintenance? As I understand it, NASA has warehouses of this stuff. The Smithsonian (and other museums) could pick most of it up, if they wanted to. They don't because that would require spending a lot of money they don't have.
No, you belong in a museum, Dr. Jones.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
For those with less money, and in Chicago, the Adler Planetarium has a raft of events for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13. http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/index.shtml#apollo And for those with a fair bit of money there is an expensive dinner with a bunch of astronauts, including the two still-living Apollo 13 astronauts. www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/doc/Apollo13invite (Yes, I know, seriously off-topic, but please don't punish!)
I mean, how much can that manual be worth with the cover torn off of it? ;^)
--
Toro
I'm sorry but that sounds like a racist comment. Like you really wanted to say "How about sending a Kenyan out into space".
Or "Let's put a Kenyan in charge of our Space Program and see what happens."
You, sir, indulge in way too much unfounded conspiracy and idle fantasy!
Next thing you're going to tell me we've never been to the moon (which is really going to hamper bidding on the auction for the Apollo 13 note books). I mean just because we haven't been back, let alone even left sub-orbital altitudes for like 30+ years when it seemed like child's play back in the 1960's - oh, wait, that's more like 40+ years ago - anyway, these highly technical endeavors, like building computers and such, they're more difficult to do now, cost a lot more, and with that war on poverty, er drugs, er terror, er, climate change, er, what are we warring on right now? Even if my iPhone has 10X the memory capacity and computing power* of all of the 1969 Houston Space Center and Cape Canaveral combined, have you seen how tall those Saturn Rockets were? I think you forget the challenges we faced back in the 1960s, the Cold War, which took 20 years to win it too, not to mention the costs of an imaginary "Star Wars" program in the 1980s, that was supposed to shoot down ICBMs from space using Ion Cannons.
And so what if we STILL can't reliably shoot down inbound missiles and what the hell is an ion cannon, anyway? Sorry, I'm losing it, I'm just getting nostalgic for those days of Gene Rodenberry and the "Final Frontier". Glad I didn't pursue a career as an Astronaut... or as a climatologist, turns out first, the ice age scheduled for the year 2000 didn't show up, and now everyone gets all testy when you fudge a few numbers to get the graph to line up according to modeled projections. I was going to pursue a career in Medicine, but "evil doctors" are either getting sued into bankruptcy, or if they survive all the malpractice tort, a zealous congress will cap their salaries soon enough. Okay, I actually didn't have the brains for Med School, so I did my undergraduate work in pre-law.
Attended Occidental, though it wasn't until long after tossing my graduation cap (not much of a cap, just a piece of cardboard sewn to a yarmulke) in the air that I realized the spelling with an "O" wasn't just a typo when the school was chartered. I thought it was "Accidental College", else how did a schlub like me get in. Actually, I never showed up for class (sat in my friend's dorm room smoking fags - that's English for "cigarettes" and other leafy and incendiary tubular oral pacifiers, if I may be so dubious), so now I'm wondering how I ever got OUT of Accidental, er, Occidental.
Which leads to the much bigger mystery, how did I ever get into Columbia!? (Chuckle, as a foreign student, of course! Chuckle, they had a quota for minorities and a passport from any third world nation, like, I don't know, um, say, Indonesia, could really help you get in back in the 1980s). So, how'd I get into Harvard, hell, I was too stoned to remember, but I graduated Magme Cum Laud (which is Latin for "Invoking Loud Ecstatic Vocalizations", but I totally skipped out on both my Latin and Constitutional Law classes, so I could be wrong on that... and a lot of things.) Now, where did Grandma Whitey hide my documents,I've got to make sure they are kept safe.
ANYWAY, don't be such a smug racist type, you know we're past that, right?
*The Apollo Guidance Computer consisted of 4100 integrated circuits (each with only one NOR gate) with wire-wrap interconnects, boasting 4K of RAM and 72K of programmed ROM running at a whopping 85kHz accessing 4 registers. Apple's cheapest current iPhone in comparison, has 16GB of Random Access Memory including a portion for the OS on a 600MHz ARM processor with 13.8 Million Transistors. Oh, and it has a built-in accelerometer. That's 3,365x transistors running 7000x cycles faster with access to 4 MILLION times as much storage. So, I'm thinking, as long as Steve let's me upload it to the App Store, putting a "Lunar Lander" on the iPhone!
A lot of monied families got where they are through scams, usually made possible through more family money or connections. One that we are still seeing the political aftershocks of is the Teapot Dome Scandal. It started out as bribery in the 1920's and leaves us today in the Middle East.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"Whoever it is selling this deserves a lot of pity"
or maybe the jig is up and he wants to unload the bundle while it's still worth something. Nyuk, nyuk (just making fun of the tin-foil crowd)
Here's a question for all the lunar landing conspiracists (you see, those that indulge in conspiracy are really racists - "conspiRACISTs")...
You know the original tape recording of the lunar landing, you know, the one they found in Australia? And I don't mean the 1967 "Simulation Footage", I mean the real footage that was recorded along with the telemetry data, I thought it was lost but found, and so I've been waiting around for it to show up on YouTube. Of course, I shouldn't get my expectations up too much, I remember watching the interlaced JPEG of the Lunar Landing Site from Hubble download on my browser window expecting to see vivid outlines of the flag and the base of the Eagle, but found myself straining at fuzzy shadows, but I digress...
Here's where we were in 2006, according to NPR:
"The original lunar footage did get recorded -- onto 14-inch spools of magnetic tape, along with telemetry data. And by 1970, the tapes had made their way to a giant government facility known as the National Records Center in Suitland, Md. Soon after that, records show that NASA brought the tapes to Goddard for "permanent retention."
A Race Against Time
Fast forward to April 2002. Someone who'd worked at one of the Australian tracking stations finds a tape in his garage. He thinks it's a copy he made of the original, high-quality footage. It goes to Building 25 at Goddard Space Flight Center, which houses the Data Evaluation Lab. This lab is full of giant blue cabinets that hold 40-year-old playback machines.
"This is equipment that would process any tapes we find of the original television," says Nafzger, who adds that this lab is the only place left that can play NASA tapes from the Apollo era.
It turned out, the Australian tape wasn't the moonwalk; it was a simulation from 1967. But it made Nafzger and others keen to find the originals."
Now, I know what the conspiracy nuts are thinking, WHY, Oh, Why would some simulation footage be found in Australia!? We expect to find the REAL footage in Australia from whence some of the telecast was received and relayed, but simulation footage? But don't put on your foil hats just yet, because even though you're thinking, "it was all simulation footage, so whether it was 1969 simulation footage or 1967 simulation footage, it was ALL simulated." Not so, you have to remember that Jim Lovell's brother-in-law's second cousin was a British ex-pat living in Jakarta at the time, and somehow the 1967 footage ended up in his luggage, which knowing 1960's lack of variety in the Samsonite line could easily have been swapped for his brother-in-law's cousin's cousin's luggage and then let's get together in Sydney, put some shrimps on the bar-b, yada, yada, yada, and it's obvious, this 1967 reel is going to end up in some garage Down Under.
Anyway, it's only the most frequently referenced achievement in human history, "we can put a man on the moon but we can't make a tea bag that's good for a second batch", so what do we need to keep the footage for, it's burned into our memory cells like the image of Jesus in that piece of toast that guy in Topeka has kept under glass since 1973.