DSKY-DSKY Him Sad: Official ILB Thread For The Heroic Age of Manned Spaceflight

Please report back on your visit.

will do!

I so want to get into the vehicle assembly building!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiLaNEFyCiM

You know, I first became vaguely aware of Mercurio when I saw his JFK book on the new arrival shelf in the library. Was not in the mood to read that one at the time and wasn't sure he would be able to make it work, but dimly recall thinking I would want to read the one about the cosmonaut.

Yeah, the jfk one didnt appeal, but his first book, Bodies, is very good

I just picked up a copy of Ascent from my local public library. Looking forward to being gripped.

Have no idea whether it will be your cup of tea, but definitely interested to hear your opinion, as always.

Started reading it last night. The Korean War has ended and our hero has just been banished to the Arctic.

It is hardboiled in a way that I find only moderately engaging, as opposed to, say Hammett or Chandler, but I just finished 400pp of late-stage Henry James, so this is a welcome change regardless. It's short enough I am sure I'll stick to the end.

You might prefer The Hunters. Salter writes of manly doings with little trace of macho posturing, having a warmer side that is pretty deftly managed, never feeling fake or forced.

He is such good writer that it is kind of intimidating to try to say anything about him without feeling that one is not measuring up to his standard and damning him with faint praise.

I enjoyed Ascent, but it was pretty obvious to me that the book was conceived as an ending in search of a beginning. Mercurio succeeded well enough in finding the beginning he needed that the book hops past some questionable transitions and gets you to the payoff ending. It's not the kind of book that requires pondering, so I won't inflict any on ILB. Suffice it to say I was adequately entertained.

Glad you liked it even that much.

read the first three of ian sale's apollo quartet and half of the fourth on another long flight, again thanks to this thread.

i enjoyed the first two a fair bit, thought the third fizzled out a bit (and i wasn't entirely convinced by the characterisation of jerrie cobb, especially her christianity) and i'm struggling a bit with the self-conscious authorial interjections in the fourth. it's true he's definitely good on the tactile, sensory parts of spacefaring, but i wish he'd been a bit less obvious with flashing the fruits of his research via namechecking bits of equipment and endless acronyms.

From Subterranean Press:

https://d3pdrxb6g9axe3.cloudfront.net/uploads/The_Top_of_the_Volcano_by_Harlan_Ellison_500_719.jpg

We've just received a number of copies of Harlan Ellison's The Top of the Volcano back from one of our wholesale account. Some are perfect, some are slightly worn. We'll put new dust jackets on copies to bring them up to snuff, and are happy to offer them at only $25 per copy, a wholly great price for an oversize hardcover that clocks in north of 500 pages.

Have at them! Think I'll keep an eye peeled for *even* cheaper

Sorry, wrong thread!

Lol. Just don't let HE find out or he just might try to shut us down.

Agree that the first two AQ books were the best and that there was a dip afterwards. Third one veered close to being the most obvious alternate history 101 inversion and therefore seemed the slightest. Fourth one though I thought was a satisfying wrap up of the whole thing and brought together a bunch of interesting stuff- golden age sf, women in sf, astronauts and their wives and nurses and Vehicle Assembly Buildings.

The more I read/think about the US manned space program the more depressing it is that such a vast, science-driven, hugely expensive state-funded enterprise was possible back then, mere decades ago, but not now when it's needed vs climate change

if only putin would threaten to solve climate change

yeah, what better way to reverse global warming than a cold war?

just picked up mike collins' carrying the fire, andrew chaikin's a man on the moon: the voyages of the apollo astronauts, and deborah cadbury's space race: the battle to rule the heavens. hoping to get them all finished before i make it to the kennedy space centre in a couple of weeks. which reminds me, i need to see if i can get tickets to have lunch with an astronaut while i'm there...

the cold war was prosecuted because the political and military leaders of the USA felt that the USSR was an existential threat to the nation, whereas climate change is merely an existential threat to the entire world.

finished a man on the moon: the voyages of the apollo astronauts a couple of days ago and i'm about halfway through carrying the fire at the moment. a man on the moon is a really good run-through of the apollo programme, based on late-80s interviews with most of the main players. chaikin sketches the characters of the astronauts really well and it gave me a much better appreciation of the achievements of the later missions. chaikin is also excellent at conveying the sensations of space travel: what it's like to wear a pressure suit on an eva, what moon dust smells like, etc

carrying the fire is fantastic so far - collins is a good writer with a dry wit, and he does a great job of delving into the roles each astronaut played in the development of apollo as well as explaining some of the technical aspects of spaceflight in an understandable way.

i also rewatched my blu-ray of for all mankind, which never ceases to make me emotional.

i'm off to the kennedy space center tomorrow. kinda think i might keel over at the sight of a saturn v or a shuttle.

saw the shuttle atlantis, cried

awesome

Do tell

sure!

atlantis has its own building at the space centre, and nasa has carefully stage-managed your experience before you see it for real for the first time. you watch a short dramatisation of the shuttle development process, then a really gorgeous montage of shuttle mission footage on a massive screen. then the screen lifts and behind it is the atlantis, lit dramatically and tilted on its side with the cargo bay doors open.

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/t31.0-8/11864981_10153461127620638_7060066314462098229_o.jpg

it's smaller than i'd have guessed but it's absolutely gorgeous, all flowing, elegant lines contrasting with a surface which is pockmarked and rough-edged from 33 visits to space. the sight of it hit me like a ton of bricks and i was instantly teary. i spent a lot of time as a kid reading and thinking about the orbiters - i was six when the challenger disaster happened and i vividly remember crying while watching it on the tv - but i was still surprised by how moving it was to see a shuttle for real.

there's also an amazing full-scale model of the hubble telescope in there, along with some replica space suits:

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/t31.0-8/11816230_10153461126845638_808564544352120920_o.jpg

we also took a trip in the space shuttle simulator, which is cool as hell and does what feels like a reasonable job of recreating the experience of blasting off into orbit, including the lying-on-your-back wait for takeoff. then we took a guided bus tour around various locations including the mindbogglingly huge vehicle assembly building, which is every bit as massive as i expected and more, and launch complex 39, from which apollo and space shuttle missions took off and which is now leased to spacex:

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/t31.0-8/11865348_10153461124950638_7321524299771301802_o.jpg

then we stopped off at the saturn v / apollo building to take a look at the actual control room from apollo 8:

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/t31.0-8/11823022_10153461124495638_4658601945709688007_o.jpg

and the saturn v stack, which is as intimidatingly huge as the shuttle is compact and friendly. it takes up a whole building and it is fucking massive:

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xft1/t31.0-8/11856340_10153461124100638_2890088577621426801_o.jpg

even with a super-wide lens i couldn't fit the whole thing into the frame. it's insane and inspiring and terrifying to think that there's two million working parts in it, any one of which could malfunction and stop a launch (explosively or otherwise):

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/t31.0-8/11807191_10153461123510638_216552785613825137_o.jpg

also on display: the apollo 14 command module and al shepard's moon-dust-crusted space suit:

https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/t31.0-8/p960x960/11807352_10153461121975638_748753903730101738_o.jpg
https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/t31.0-8/11802685_10153461122435638_1461597965149089638_o.jpg

i have a million other pictures and things to say but this is too long already. it was an incredible experience and i loved every second of it.

I am so envious. Lovely write-up!

thanks! one more thing: I was convinced at first the mercury and gemini capsules we saw must have been scale models, but nope, they actually are incredibly small and claustrophobic. mike collins called the gemini 'a flying men's room' - doing 14 days in orbit in a space only very slightly larger than the seat you're in while having to go to the bathroom right next to your copilot seems like a special kind of hell.

i meant to say how much i love the photos, too. is the spacesuit behind glass? I assume there's no way of touching it, getting a little bit of moon on your fingertips...

yeah, it's behind glass unfortunately. there is a little chunk of moon rock you can touch, though!

if you've got the time, this massive five-part waitbutwhy.com piece on spacex's history and insane future ambitions is definitely worth a read: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

i finished mike collins' autobio recently - it's really fantastic. goes in to a massive amount of detail about his flights but it's never dull or difficult to follow, and his occasional slightly catty asides about the other apollo astronauts are amusing (he really seemed to have it in for donn eisele for some reason)

i'm about halfway through deborah cadbury's space race: the battle to rule the heavens, which focuses on the work of wernher von braun and sergei korolev. there's a fantastic action-adventure movie waiting to be made about the race of the allied powers to track down and win over german rocket scientists after wwii ended, which cadbury goes over in detail in the opening chapters. she very effectively communicates the utter horror of the slave camps which produced the v-2 rockets, which i didn't know much about - 60,000 slaves worked on the programme, subsisting on 1,000 calories a day which the nazis calculated would keep them alive for six months. 20,000 of them died.

the thought that the heroic age of manned spaceflight was built on the horror of slave labour is something i knew about but reading about it in some detail is still pretty horrible.

I have a faint memory of that Clooney movie 'The Good German' looking as though it was going to be that film, and then going off into other, much more boring, directions

there's a fantastic action-adventure movie waiting to be made about the race of the allied powers to track down and win over german rocket scientists after wwii ended

it's gravity's rainbow

korolev had quite a story iirc. the revered father of soviet rocketry, called "the designer" like someone's called the godfather, died of complications following surgery that could not be successfully completed because of injuries sustained decades earlier in the gulag.

solzhenitsyn's the first circle a not-bad tolstovian novel about the relatively comfortable (as in, not actually designed to kill you) scientist-slave gulag camps. some truly nightmarish meetings about deadlines.

You just reminded me of this novel, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/26/konstantin-tom-bullough-review, about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the first great Russian rocket scientist: it was very good
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky)

i've read and enjoyed gravity's rainbow but i dunno if 'fantastic action-adventure movie' would be my main choice of descriptor for it

called "the designer" like someone's called the godfather

the CHIEF designer no less!

never read the first circle, i'll add it to the list

Apollo 18 is on Netflix but expiring on the 2nd, so watching now. Thanks for the extensive reporting, bg.

a kickstarter to reissure the 1975 nasa graphics standards manual (which introduced the iconic 'worm' logo) has smashed its funding goals right out of the gate. weirdly tempted to back it myself tbh

https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/004/396/546/23b3aeda89dc77759d288b970b7844bf_original.png?v=1440769823&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&lossless=true&s=3b904ba2935aa388fd45932015483658
https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/004/396/667/f3f8269bc7a1534ba10b1b6683c0bdd0_original.png?v=1440771142&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&lossless=true&s=a0be2a8209a1ae130878ef0072f6394b

Cool. If you like that, you might like a design-oriented book called Spacesuit.

ooo, that does look interesting. cheers!

"The Eve of the Last Apollo," by new ILB fave Carter Scholz.

Then there this, which mentions that story, and has a quote from it that I can't find: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/16/books/one-small-shelf-for-literature.html?pagewanted=all.
Haven't really read but I don't quite dig the tone. Also, can't find the quoted line from the story in question in the story itself. Perhaps it was edited out later.

It's not a good line! ''We took one step out of the cradle; we put our foot out - and drew it back. . . . I think what it is is that space is really fucking hard, and expensive, and we have too many other problems down here" would be more accurate.

Yup

You should read, ledge. Especially since he took your note and deleted that sentence.

"sputnik: the shock of the century" by paul dickson is a fun book that anyone who loves space age stuff would probably dig. lots of details about early rocket history that i never knew, plus inevitable entertaining anecdotes about how ppl reacted to sputnik (isaac asimov said it was what convinced him to stop writing science fiction and start writing popular science!).

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/01/from-astronaut-to-refugee-how-the-syrian-spaceman-fell-to-earth

Albums that never were and never will be:
Prince Major Nelson - Cosmic Rain
Cocoa Beach
Harem Pants
Little Red Sputnik/Little Red Mercury
Jeannie Talk 2 NASA
Gemini (Evil Twin)
Saturn V
VAB VI
RK Eye C Bust of Apollo
Anna Banana River
Star City
Gumdrop vs. Spider
Light Dis Candle
Tranquility Bass
Lovelace Clinique
Og
Flame Trench
I Would Fly 4 U
n Orbit
Kapton America
Drogue
Swimming Lee
I Wanna Be Your Rover
Reg o' Lith
Nurse D
spaminacan
Dr. Rendezvous
Steel Eel
Heat Shield
EVA
PLSS PLSS PLSS
Fit 2 Fly

( I didn't know where to post that so I posted it here)

http://apollo11.spacelog.org/page/04:05:22:37/

Will watch later

i mean, it's kind of heroic, like trusting an under-tested carbon fibre hull was heroic

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/19/science/spacex-polaris-dawn-jared-isaacman-spacewalk/index.html

(i hope these guys are OK, we will probably be hearing about it if not)

Just mentally misheard or morphed Jim McDivitt calling The Lunar Module a “tissue paper spacecraft” into a “carbon paper spacecraft.”

However, Reisman notes, the SpaceX suits do not include a Primary Life Support System, or PLSS, which is essentially a backpack that allows ISS astronauts to float more freely through space to carry out complex tasks, such as repairing and replacing hardware outside the space station. Instead, the Polaris Dawn crew will receive their life support from long hoses attached to their spacecraft.

innovation through "breaking things" i.e. going back to long hose tech

😑 😣 😩

WCGW?

Or even WCPGW

NASA have announced the astronauts will be returning on the space x dragon thingy in February and they will attempt to bring starliner down uncrewed

Space travel repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

i regret to inform you the boeing starliner is haunted

Sorry but why isn’t absolutely every single person talking about the fact that those two astronauts that are stuck in Space are now hearing mysterious heartbeat sounds and no one know what it is. THIS ENTIRE STORY IS INSANE pic.twitter.com/LCD8qxUXLo

— Summer Ray (@SummerRay) September 2, 2024

if twitter's taught me anything that's ppl trapped for days inside a submersible

these guys think they solved it (space ghosts):
https://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-12/02/content_27545348.htm

A mysterious banging noise on the surface of a spacecraft that baffled a Chinese astronaut turned out not to be aliens, but the result of air pressure changes.

sounds like something you’d say if the mysterious banging noise on the surface of spacecraft that baffled a chinese astronaut did turn out to be aliens tbh

the result of air pressures changes caused by aliens (space ghosts)

nobody died, the empty capsule returned without incident. Amazing, this thing actually works!

during re-entry when the strobe lights switched on it looked like a classic ufo

the touchdown was so slow and gentle, it was impressive tbh

Surprised/not-surprised to learn that the Starliner program is a relatively small part of Boeing's overall budget. If you really want to get pig-biting mad, check out the garbage fire that's the KC-46 tanker program

more news from the furthest-ever tin can:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/16/science/voyager-1-thruster-issue/index.html

it seems quite mad that the computer on V1 is basically a zx spectrum, but with less memory capacity than a zx 80. And this dog is still facing the earth 15 billion miles later.

I love these 2 little guys so much, long may they live.

https://hackaday.com/2025/01/14/repairing-a-real-and-broken-apollo-era-dsky/

(did we have a non-ilb thread for that? i searched dsky, didn't notice the board until it was too late)

No, there isn’t. It’s fine.

has this been posted before? NASA's own publications, many of which are public domain.

https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resources/nasa-history-series/

Shout out to the Peter Merlin books. Very specific but super-informative. His non-NASA book on Area 51 is about as definitive as you can get.

RIP, this guy. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/space/ed-smylie-dead.html

RIP thx for working the problem Ed

Just read Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, which for some reason made me think of this thread.

Come to that, the flight-line presence of ego-rich Mercury 7 jock Shepard was outrageous to begin with: shortly after his Mercury flight, he was diagnosed with Ménière’s syndrome, a malfunction of the inner ear which brought vertigo and dizziness and caused him to be grounded for the next six years. A risky operation made him available once more at the advanced age of forty-seven, but one respected authority on Apollo will spit to me that sending the science-and geology-phobic Shepard to the Moon “was a complete waste of time—we might as well have sent that jerk to Dallas.” Every morning, his secretary hung a sign on the wall to indicate what sort of mood the man they called the “icy commander” was in on that particular day, and this was to the Astronaut Office what the shipping news is to mariners.

lol! even reading his biography years ago he sure did not seem like a very likeable guy. very competitive w the other astronauts, resentful, kinda petty, often combative etc —- but also quite insecure beneath all that

squeaky wheel gets the grease (space mission)

Not to mention the Steel Eel.

I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't want to hang out with any of the Original 7, much less be in a crew with them.

Read Kluger's new Gemini book yesterday. If you've already read books about NASA in 1964-1966 you won't learn anything new unless you're looking for deep dives on technical issues such as ejection seats vs. escape towers or Rogallo Wings vs. traditional parachutes. Still, it's a fast enough read. There's barely anyone left alive from this era - Aldrin and Scott are the only two Gemini astronauts still around - and that seems to steer the direction of the book. What stories haven't yet been covered as opposed to a comprehensive document of everything.

Burgess and Doolan's Fallen Astronauts is the better book for Gemini-era personalities, even though it's told via the stories of those who died along the way (Ted Freeman, C.C. Williams, Charlie Bassett and Elliot See)

Not to be confused with The Fallen Astronauts, by Barry N. Malzberg.

Aargh Falling Astronauts

I have some books Colin Burgess co-wrote with Francis French but not the one you mention.

It's this one: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803285095/fallen-astronauts/
Worth the time