qb says:

#21 BubbaRay

I’m still stunned at their piloting. No one will ever know how much fuel was left. The lower lunar gravity made the fuel slosh around a lot more so the low fuel sensors went off. That was on top of a bundle of other alarms going off while most of the world was watching.

Those guys were (and still are) amazing.

BubbbaRay says:

#22, QB, Roger on the fuel status. I’ve been down to 15 minutes of fuel in IFR conditiions due to screwed up ATC handling and I wasn’t as cool as Neil Armstrong. Bullet sweating time. Neil and Buzz were/are great pilots, and we didn’t have the computer power in ’69 to send robots to the Moon to do the geology Harrison Schmitt and others did. Probably still don’t. No substitute for a human being. I’ll salute NASA for one of the finest achievements of man.

qb says:

Here’s a pretty good article on LM Computer. Honestly I had never heard of rope memory until I read up on it today. These computers are pretty amazing, and yes, my iPhone or G1 are infinitely more powerful, but maybe not as robust.

The guys who wrote code for the Apollo program are real programmers – I’m just a wannabe compared to them.

chuck says:

And it’s all for nothing.
Next year, no more shuttle.
Ares and Orion will get delayed, and have cost overruns, and inevitably get canceled.
By 2016, no more space station (which means, why bother with Ares/Orion – it won’t have a mission any more).

On the bright side – with NASA out of the space business, maybe SpaceX or SpaceShipOne will get somewhere.

Olo Baggins of Bywater says:

Chuck, the upside is that if we take the humans out of the picture, it costs 10X less to go places and we can go to lots more of them a LOT sooner.

I think we had to do Apollo for a lot of reasons. But the shuttle is a terrible ROI, and there’s not a damn thing a human can do on Mars we can’t do with robots, at trillions fewer dollars.

chuck says:

#30 – actually I think if we take NASA out of the picture, it will cost 10X less. NASA was needed to get men to the moon during the cold war & space race.

But all government programs eventually evolve into money-pits, managed by politicians who direct the program into whatever will provide fat $$ contracts to their constituents.

Mr Curios says:

#1 Does he have the Missing tapes too?…

Jägermeister says:

#33 – ridin the short bus

Or a space suit or two…

Greg Allen says:

>> jbenson2 said, on July 20th, 2009 at 10:05 am
>> It happened 40 years ago today
>> Kennedy was formally charged with the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on July 20, 1969.

Holy smokes, you conservatives never forget a liberal scandal, do you.

Bush’s bogus war kills a few hundred thousand in Iraq and you guys let out a collective yawn.

But a tragic accident with Ted Kennedy? You carp with glee about it for four decades.

Oh, so you only care about the death of Americans in car mysterious accidents?

How about Nov 6, 1963 when Laura Bush on clear night on a unobstructed road inexplicably ran a read light and killed Michael Douglas?

There are several unexplained aspects to that story but I have never, EVER heard a conservative carp about it. Or even mention it. But not Ted Kennedy! You can’t shut up about that.

Probably both were just tragic accidents.

As for me, the hundreds of thousands needlessly dead Iraqis concern me more.

lens42 says:

Check out at 6:48. There’s a “Planet of the Apes” face on the right side of the frame.