Splashdown!

26 Replies to “Splashdown!”

1. I was somewhat surprised at how it took to get the four crew out of the spacecraft.

   1. Makes waiting for the pilot to turn off the seatbelt light at the end of your flight pale in comparison.

2. Back in ’69 it was all new, exciting, even a bit scary – would they survive?

   Now, after so many years with people going into space, with space stations etc. it’s kind of a yawn. Just doesn’t have the wow factor.

   Or maybe that’s just me.

   1. Apollo 8, did ten orbits of the moon.
      Artimis 2 did a fly around and did not orbit the moon.

      Artimis 2 looks suspiciously like a DEI flight.

      1. Notice any difference in your reference to Apollo? EIGHT. Artimis? TWO

         1. Apollo 8 was the first crewed flight to the moon.

            Artemis 2 was the first crewed moon flight of Artemis.

            1. Well done…..now what is 8 minus 2?

            2. Artemis 1 orbited the moon.
               Artemis 2 did not. Was it too complicated?

   2. And yet … in ‘69 … we didn’t get the full-court FEAR-porn … talking constantly about how the angle and speed of the reentry was the MOST DANGEROUS part of the flight … and that the astronauts could surely be incinerated from damaged heat shielding … ohhhhhhhhhhh mommmmaaaaaaa … cried NASA … about Artemis.

      Sorry, I’m not being cynical … but NASA is. Anything to gin up some viewership … just hoping for a car crash at the end of the race. Gotta keep the Federal funding flowing! Pathetic.

      1. NASA, or the media?

      2. Odd. I remember it. It was overstated by Cronkite for drama but there was real risk.

         1. I remember it as well, especially with the aborted Apollo 13 mission.

            1. How has Elon Musk’s rocketry efforts escaped all the Fear-porn? I suspect nobody in the mass media wants to give him the publicity. No one wants eyes glued to TV screens watching his incomparable PRIVATE Space Travel company’s successes.

               But they HAVE retroactively mocked every one of his experimental failures.

      3. They discussed all those risks when Apollo 10 retuned. Too square of an angle they’ll burn up. Too low of an angle they’ll bounce off the atmosphere and die in space. It was the dominant conversation while watching the splashdown.

   3. That would also be my sentiment, Dirtman, except I have a professional interest in spaceflight, having worked on a couple of projects, so I follow it all closely. My ambition is to redirect all that techno development money from weapons to space. Dream on you say 🙂

      1. Wow! Great! You really should reveal your secret way to end war.

   4. I’m going to repost Bruce Sterling’s famous quote:

      I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes Gobi Desert Opera because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.

      This goes quadruple for the Moon, because there’s no atmosphere and humans can’t survive in the low gravity.

      The Apollo missions were gunboat diplomacy, not exploration or scientific. Absent some sea change in the strategic situation between the US and the rest of the world, there is no defensible reason to waste taxpayer money going beyond LEO.

      1. Agreed. The Mars thing is just plain stupid. Elon Musk is awesome and all for sure, but I don’t want any of my tax dollars going to fund a trip to Mars or any establishment of human colonies or whatever. Elon can spend as much of his money as he wants, I think it’s great that he wants to try, I can’t get enough of SpaceX launches and everything that they do, I wish him 1000% success, but I don’t want a single dollar of my tax money going towards this stupidity.

         Having said all that, I do support establishing a base on the moon, just so that we can say that it’s ours, and don’t even think about claiming it for yourselves, Russia or China. In fact, I think we should paint a gigantic American flag in the middle of the biggest crater so that it’s visible from earth.

         1. I want a large Crucifix on the moon just to anger the muslims and remind them how little they’ve accomplished in science and engineering.

      2. I agree to a very large degree. OTOH … people DO live in Barstow, CA … speaking of uninhabitable hell holes.

3. Imagine getting towed around for ten days in a little pop up camper with 3 other people. You can take turns looking out the tiny window but can’t open it. Then the shitter breaks on the first day.

   1. Oh Great! Thanks a lot Bunny,
      I thought I had finally got my 1973 summer vacation out of mind until NOW! !

4. Buzz Aldrin is still alive.

5. Glad this Gaslighting cheered you up. My nephew takes better photos of the moon than ANY of these “Images”.

   When a Stuntman does a stunt, we get 4K video from 18 angles.
   NASA shows 4frames/sec rocket separation, blurry video from 3000 metres away from the capsule.

   Real Astronauts like Katy Perry had to let Mission Specialist Jeff Bezos open the giant 1 lb shield door. Lol.

   So I am glad you all are smiling like 1969. Now back to reality

   1. Back to reality? Like Nixon talking to men on the moon from a “landline”. LOL

6. The fun starts the moment that China lands a module on the moon (if they ever achieve that fete). Because, they will, as usual, ignore international law (just like with their fishing fleets). They will claim all resources and then attempt to set up mining operations to acquire Helium-3 and titanium.