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47 Years Ago Today, Apollo 11 Landed On the Moon (foxnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At this point 47 years ago we had begun our orbit around the Moon," writes Buzz Aldrin in a tweet. Today, Wednesday, July 20th, 2016, marks the 47th anniversary of when NASA astronauts landed on the moon for the very first time. Fox News reports: "Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off from Earth on a massive Saturn V rocket on July 16, 1969. Four days later, the Eagle module landed on the surface with Aldrin and Armstrong inside; Collins stayed behind in the orbiting Columbia craft. Millions of people back on Earth watched, captivated, as Armstrong was the first down the ladder, then uttered his now-famous line: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' The astronauts eventually returned to Earth, splashing down four days later in the Pacific. On the moon, an American flag and a plaque that read, in part, 'We came in peace for all mankind,' remained." To this day, only 12 people have ever walked on the moon. Hopefully, that number will increase within the next decade. NASA is also celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Viking 1 lander's arrival on Mars. Viking 1 was the first American craft to land on the red planet on July 20, 1976.
I remember this like it was yesterday. Was four and a half years old, and I watched the landing with my father.
My dad was a pretty brilliant guy in the technology of the time. And he had tears welling up in his eyes when seeing Armstrong jump off the ladder to the lunar surface.
I remember his words to me: “We did it...”. Then he sobbed for a while but was ashamed of having his emotions that close to the surface.
Dad was a pretty smart guy in the high tech of those days. And he understood exactly how big this achievement was. He knew how hard the work was to do it. A lot of people in our family were involved in technology- it felt like the family had a part in it (and in fact my uncle educated NASA engineers in electronic engineering).
To this day, it is the most important moment in my life. It set the tone for everything I did in the future. And led to a career in technology.
That day- was perhaps my greatest lesson learned. It influenced countless other people I know in technology as well.
My proudest day as an American.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Nearly every advanced thing we all live with today derived from 3 big tech programs: [1] the ICBM program, which contrary to popular cenception was the actual driver of the miniturization of electronics [2] The Apollo Moon program, and [3] The space shuttle.
The ICBM program preceeded Apollo and needed to miniturized electronics for guidance and needed it small and light because the missiles back then barely had the performance required to get the warhead to its destination. That same ICBM program created the need to study shapes needed for high-speed atmospheric entries and guidance and thermal protection, which ended up proving manned spaceflight would be possible and that blunt-body capsule shapes were best. All the early manned spaceflight was done in tandem with the ICBMS an shared launch vehicles thereby sharing the benefits. Mercury flew on Redstone missiles and then Atlas Missiles. Gemini flew on Titan missiles and on that particular program the USAF/NASA interests on the electronics andother things were in full bloom. The first Saturns (The Saturn I) were designed before Kennedy was elected President and were done under the auspices of the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency under the names "Juno V" and "Super Jupiter" (Wikipedia has this a bit wrong, you need to read the actual Army and Eisehower Presidential Library docs. When Von Braun and his team transferred from the Army to the new NASA after President Eisehhower (Republican) teamed up with Senator Johnson (Democrat and future President) to create NASA from NACA and the BMA the project name changed to "Saturn". The Saturn moon missions then had greater computing needs for its far more complex guidance and drove further electronics developments.
The Apollo program not only required the creation of more new materials and electronics, but also the creation of new manufacturing techniques and new techniques for inspecting and testing things and qualifying things non-destructively and with very high reliability. All this activity required the Apollo program to employ over 300,000 people (making it nearly impossible to argue that there was a huge conspiracy to fake it, and keep it covered up) and track many thousands of exotic parts and assemblies which created requirements for even new management and documentation techniques that then propagated into the entire economy. You had ladies at Playtex who'd previously made girdles and brassiers suddenly making space suits where the slightest flaw would kill an astronaut, which made companies like even a ladies' undergarments company elevate quality control to never-imagined heights.
The space shuttle pushed all this stuff much further, with its extremely exotic thermal protection, engine, and fuel cell requirements as that program too the US from a 3-man capsule to a spacecraft the size of a 1960's airliner that could carry 7 people and a cargo the size of a schoolbus.
If you use a cell phone, a tablet, a personal computer, the internet, a post-1980 automobile, fly on a post-1970 airplane (fly-by-wire was pioneered by Neil Armstrong at Edwards AFB using a spare Apollo computer in his post-Apollo carreer) then the three programs I have noted are vital to you. If you get ANY medical treatments or tests, you are probably using tech derived from these programs. When you consider all the things that are only made possible by the things made possible by those programs, then the scope really widens.