40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

Men of the Moon Photo by RALPH MORSE / Time Life Pictures / Getty

From Denny: Time magazine has pulled out all the stops to remind us of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. It's like Kennedy's assassination, people remember where they were that day when they saw the footage. For me, I wasn't in America but in Taiwan, impatient to hear the audio in English translation instead of in Chinese. It still was a thrill for a schoolgirl and watched with other kids whose parents were on government assignment abroad.

Apollo 13 Insignia Image via Wikipedia

Time: "Profiles of the Apollo crews, photos, video and an interactive graphic which shows the successful missions that have landed on moon's surface." For all their goodies, especially the interesting profiles, go here.

These are all their featured videos, enjoy!



Video: How Apollo 11 Got to the Moon - When the Apollo 11 mission reached the moon, it was the successful culmination of several missions over nine years



Video: Why America Hasn't Gone Back to the Moon - To accomplish the feat of putting human footprints on the moon, it took lots of money, people, political will -- and a cold war. Can we do it again?

Video: Apollo 11: Final Approach - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin avoid near catastrophe on their final approach to Tranquility Base



Video: Apollo 8: First Broadcast From the Moon - The Apollo 8 mission was a bright spot at the end of an otherwise bleak 1968. America watched in awe as astronauts broadcast live pictures from the moon



Video: Apollo Astronaut Jim Lovell - Astronaut Jim Lovell famously said "Houston, we have a problem." He talks with TIME's Jeffrey Kluger, who co-authored his book about Apollo 13. He also piloted Apollo 8, flew on Gemini 7 and Gemini 12.




Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, 40th anniversary of moon landing, Jeffrey Kluger, Apollo 13, Neil Armstrong, Apollo program, Apollo 11, Space

Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

From Denny: My husband was just telling me about a documentary covering this same subject today! So, of course, I went to check it out if Popular Science had anything on it and here it is!

Now that we are more technologically advanced than all those years ago for the moon landing it's a bit chilling to see how fragile and vulnerable we were just jumping out there in space like that.

Here's an excerpt from the PopSci article:

"This month marks the 40th anniversary of humankind's first steps on the moon. Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men--one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.

1. The Apollo’s Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn’t rule out the possibility that they might explode on takeoff. NASA seated its VIP spectators three and a half miles from the launchpad.

2. The Apollo computers had less processing power than a cellphone.

3. Drinking water was a fuel-cell by-product, but Apollo 11’s hydrogen-gas filters didn’t work, making every drink bubbly. Urinating and defecating in zero gravity, meanwhile, had not been figured out; the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it.

4. When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s landing four miles off-target.

5. Pilot Neil Armstrong nearly ran out of fuel landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash. Apollo engineer Milton Silveira, however, was relieved: His tests had shown that there was a small chance the exhaust could shoot back into the rocket as it landed and ignite the remaining propellant.

6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface."

For the rest of this article just click on the title link! Thanks for visiting as always!