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

fuck that’s a real gut-punch

the OPEN DSKY thing i mentioned above launched on kickstarter last week (and is already at 250% of goal)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/438986934/open-dsky-apollo-50th-anniversary-make-100

why do i want that

Why wouldn’t you?

tru

RIP Al Bean :(

RIP

O bum

He was top of my list of Apollo astronauts I would have loved to meet. Such a quirky, enthusiastic, genuine-seeming person.

There’s a lovely quote in the obituary about how he & Walt Cunningham were bffs & ate cheeseburgers together once a month <3

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/astronaut-footprint-moon-warming-180969362/

That is mental.

wow

There's some great stuff in NASA's historical archives, my fave is the oral history project - long interviews with everyone before they pass away A recent fave of mine are the 2004 interviews with Joe Engle - the X-15 pilot who got bumped from Apollo 17 by geologist (and later Senator and climate-change denier) Harrison Schmitt. More to the point, Engle talks about the life of being a badass-casual Air Force fighter/ test pilot - dogfighting & partying with Yeager, hand-wringing over stick-and-rudder vs. spam-in-a-can space travel, flight-testing every goddamn thing at Edwards, rolling the X-15, having to pee while you're in the middle of an abort, getting the phone call from Slayton, training for not going to the Moon and then finding a place in NASA and picking the Space Shuttle because it had wings and a stick-n-rudder.

ooo cool, thx elvis!

kinda heartbroken to hear harrison schmitt is a climate change denier, he and gene cernan are maybe my favourite apollo duo

:/

Hadn't noticed that this came out: https://iansales.com/2016/11/18/apollo-quartet-5-a-visit-to-the-national-air-and-space-museum/

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-hidden-figure-space-program-20190101-story.html

Oceanside resident Shelby Jacobs, 83, is responsible for one of the most iconic video images of NASA’s race to put a man on the moon in the 1960s.

It’s the oft-seen, slow-motion color footage of a ringlike section of the Saturn V rocket separating from the Apollo 6 spacecraft and spinning slowly away toward Earth, 200,000 feet below.

Yet for all of his 40 years working his way up to the executive level on the Apollo and space shuttle programs, Jacobs, who is black, faced near-constant discrimination from his white colleagues and was never paid as well as other engineers doing the same work.

To avoid rocking the boat, Jacobs kept a low profile in his working life. But in recent years, he has stepped into the spotlight to serve as a role model for minorities and women who face workplace discrimination.

Shel-by! Shel-by! Shel-by!

"Taschen teams up with NASA for an archival look into the great beyond"

https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/taschen-nasa-archives-publication-060219

ooooh

hell yes

preordered a copy

speaking of which, have we talked about this astonishing-looking apollo 11 doc anywhere else on ilx? cuz i am fucking psyched

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Co8Z8BQgWc

me & mr veg are going to see it in IMAX

:D

jealous tbh

we have tickets for this Saturday at 1:45pm

I'm going to space, basically

the Apollo 11 doc is insane

some of the footage is of things you’ve seen a hundred times on tv but seeing it HUGE in imax and so pristine with the audio matching, it’s like watching it in real time, it was wild.

even the liftoff becomes new again...it’s like watching an A-bomb explode in your face, it put me back in my seat in a way i wasn’t expecting

and good lord all that 70mm found footage is glorious.

there’s a good rundown of the cool behind the scenes work that went into it here https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/12/apollo-11-50th-year-anniversary

ooh and easter egg breakdown here if you need more convincing

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-030119a-apollo11-documentary-film-details.html

Wow

god I wanna see this so much

in the meantime my copy of the nasa archives arrived and i clearly hadn’t read the description too clearly or thought too much about what it being a taschen production would mean because i was shocked at just how massive and heavy it is - it comes in a box with a carrying handle ffs

it is absolutely incredible to look at though, just gorgeous

I had missed this a couple of years back - it's wonderful and features some of the Apollo 11 production team:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMDdaNLc8DU

We haven’t mentioned yet the thing about one of the space nerds involved in this being Feist’s brother.

YES! Very cool

I forgot to say that the Apollo 17 video above is also directed / edited by Todd Miller and features Ben Feist's work; it's like a short form of how I expect the Apollo 11 feature will be. Cool soundtrack too.

So there’s a new book out...

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5744977b22482e4393b418c2/t/58ac8feb03596e6e757048f6/1537304200387/ This one? I have it on the way, will report when I get it.

https://www.apollopresskits.com/

🖼 This one? I have it on the way, will report when I get it.

Has a blurb from Mike Collins about it being the best Apollo book,

holy fucking shit

?

ran the doc tonite

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

13 Minutes To The Moon

"How the first moon landing was saved. The full story of the people who made Apollo 11 happen and prevented it from going badly wrong."

specifically the 13 minutes before touchdown of Apollo 11, which were sketchy.

(that's from the bbc. iplayer radio stuff traditionally wasn't region-locked but i'm not sure whether that's true with the new sounds thing. oh, but it's World Service, so maybe it's ok.)

I can download it in Australia. Looks good. ANy idea how many parts it will be? It; doesn't seem to say anywhere.

I *think* he says it's 10 parts somewhere within it, but I can't see that info anywhere else.

(Episode 2 is up and 3 is listed for next week but no details beyond that)

episode 5 (briefly) talks about the DSKY system

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz4dn

Ep.05 The fourth astronaut
13 Minutes to the Moon

The computer that got us to the moon. The size of a briefcase, there had never been anything like it. Apollo 11 was “the first time software ran on the moon”. This is the story of the world’s first digital portable general purpose computer. The work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, helped give rise to the digital age.

I know this isn’t booksrelated but it’s super cool

https://m.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Restored-Mission-Control-comes-alive-50-years-14057766.php#photo-17770659

No worries, VG, thread has long since widened its scope to included non-book-related discussion.