Today is the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was not quite Charlotte’s age in July of 1969, but I remember watching as much of this as my parents would let me, hunkered down in their bedroom in front of the little television they had in there.
Funny, I don’t remember it happening like this (YouTube, lots of profanity), but I was pretty little at the time.
Relatedly, this story talks about a recent meeting-of-minds among various engineering and science teams who are contributing to the early phases of designing a manned mission to Mars. It’s the first time anyone hs gotten them together to talk about the difficulties in designing the landing system that will be required. Mars presents some challenges that previous space programs haven’t had to deal with — primarily, landing a very heavy orbiter in a very thin atmosphere and getting everybody inside the craft safely on the surface. The fact that 60% of all unmanned missions to Mars have failed to land successfully isn’t terribly encouraging, but they’ve got some interesting ideas.
Comments:
Oh, come on, Brian! We all know that the moon landing is a hoax! ;)
Posted by Sarah [URL] on 07/20/07
Don’t go there with me, girlfriend! ;-p
I’ll go all Buzz Aldrin on the first person who tries to tell me the moon landing was a “hoax”.
Posted by Brian [URL] on 07/20/07
