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

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/

Also just saw that Margaret Dean Lazarus is co-writing the memoirs of an Apollo astronaut: short interview with her here https://medium.com/the-ribbon/author-interview-margaret-lazarus-dean-a027b36fa2c9#.8avlganc8

Wonder which of the Apollo astronauts hasn't already written a memoir. Let's see.

Um, Scott Kelly, born in 1964, was not part of the Apollo program. Would be interested to read her novel.

Argh, i wondered if i had misremembered, and the link was down and i could not check, so i thought it would be fine, and here i am. Ashamed.

The novel is very good, btw

Argh, i wondered if i had misremembered, and the link was down and i could not check, so i thought it would be fine, and here i am. Ashamed.

Wonder which of the Apollo astronauts hasn't already written a memoir. Let's see.

John Young needs to write one.

I find it hard to believe he didn't.

It seems to be named after a song by a recent Nobel-prize recipient.

blowing in the wind -- an inexplicable late-life turn to conspiracy

Eh, not quite.

Mentioned third post in

Hello, space-nerd checking in finally

I got "We Seven" for Christmas, haven't started it but timing turned out bittersweet with Glenn's passing.

that's the one that reprints the life magazine articles from the time of the mercury missions right? always meant tog et around to reading that one but i haven't yet, so looking forward to seeing what you think about it

gene cernan's passing has reminded me that i don't think we've talked about the last man on the moon anywhere else on ilx have we? i watched it when it came to netflix and thought it was a decent overview of the man and his career but it could have done with being longer - there was lots of stuff i'd have liked to have seen more on, and i wish there was more input from jack schmitt. i'm fascinated by the amount of important work he and cernan did on the moon during apollo 17, and their justified frustration that their discoveries were never followed up by other missions.

in other space-dork news i'm going to see chris hadfield lecture on friday. saw him (and met him!) last year and it was fantastic - he's such a charismatic ambassador for space

exciting! i enjoy him in the interviews & other stuff i've seen - full report plz

I'm ashamed that I haven't posted more in this thread - (long story, all IRL nonsense) but James Redd nagged me over here after Gene Cernan's passing was noted on the obit. thread.

It worked like this - my mom was a mid-level apparatchik in the O.C. political establishment - somewhere in the early 70s she met Skylab astronaut (and O.C. resident) Jerry Carr at a function and got us (mom, dad, & me) VIP passes to see the launch of Apollo 17. I was seven years old and liked NASA more than ice cream - nevermind that we also flew on a Pan Am 747, my dad and I hung out at the plane upstairs bar. We also went to Disney World, but fuck that shit compared with a Saturn V launch.

After the mission was over the A17 crew took a meet-and-greet around the states and somehow my mom got us into the California stop. I can't really remember what I asked Cernan - I was way too self-conscious. Nevertheless everyone signed my stuff. I just unpacked everything at my new place and have to get it framed.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2U1aSWUoAAkm5r.jpg

I watched The Last Man on the Moon - it's not necessarily a memorable documentary, but it is worth watching. It's entirely possible that the only answer to "what was it like to walk on the Moon and how did it change you?" will be whatever we can piece together from what these guys say and I'd watch it for that reason alone.

wow.

Yeah, wow, thanks.

holy shit elvis, that's amazing. that's gonna look fantastic in a frame.

We also went to Disney World, but fuck that shit compared with a Saturn V launch

seeing the saturn v on its side at kennedy space centre last summer was one of the more stunning things i've ever set eyes on in real life - i can't even imagine how incredible it must have been to see one of those things take off.

http://www.earthtothemoon.com/apollo_10.html
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR4U0J4RDIVNqhCva25E8vmuJCk0q05EQ9rUkOyyCQuHIekYHEA
Houston, this is Snoopy! We is GO and we is down among 'em Charlie!

thanks elvis! what an incredible experience.

in other news: 50th anniversary of Apollo 1 tragedy today :/

thanks elvis! what an incredible experience.

in other news: 50th anniversary of Apollo 1 tragedy today :/

Very envious and impressed

http://hackaday.com/2017/05/29/re-creating-the-apollo-dskys-display/#more-258907

weirdly tempted to chip in some cash for that

Greatly enjoyed the first four stories I read this weekend in The Dream Life of Astronauts, which are set on Merritt Island and read like a mix of New Yorker stories written by a Southerner like, say, Padgett Powell, with Ballard's Memories of the Space Age. Which may not be quite accurate and will probably put you off reading it but perhaps I can describe better upon reading the rest of the stories.

Did not know of that book, but now i want

RIP John Young

;_;

i guessed "manned" isn't strictly correct: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/02/19/death-lonely-death/

anyway, an evocative post from a site i only very rarely check these days, abt the tin can we threw furthest

Poor voyager

y'all have seen The Farthest right?
https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/

This one is good too. I drive past the office building featured in this a couple times a week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI

Love The Farthest.

What video is that, Elvis? Stupid YT is geoblocking it.

it's the trailer for It's Quieter In The Twilight - a 2022 doc about Voyager's flight team. It's streaming in a couple of different places, but you can find it on the torrents

Cheers!

I think I posted this one before? The Homemade Documentaries YT channel has been making space documentaries that are routinely superior to any of the NASA ones - especially his Voyager one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62kajY-ln0