[ExI] rocket!

[William Flynn Wallace]

 The moon launch was never primarily about science.
There was only one scientist who ever went to the moon  spike

so the astronauts were the pretty boys?  Great on camera?  But the
pretty boys did do some scientific experiments, did they not?  Besides
picking up rocks, that is.  bill

On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 9:26 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
> MB
> via extropy-chat
> Subject: [ExI] rocket!
>
> Hey spike, were you there for this one?
>
> https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191109.html
>
> Those were good days, spike.  Seems like there was a lot more enthusiasm,
> excitment, and hope then.
>
> I have a friend living down that way and she can see, from her front porch,
> various rockets going up.  She's never tired of it.  :)
>
>
> Regards,
> MB
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
>
> Hi MB, I sure as heck was there for that one.  That was the first full
> Saturn 5 launch, and it was at dawn and the moon was full.  These are some
> of my earliest memories, for I had just turned 7.  My father worked at the
> cape so he had a pass to get in and knew a place.  After the fact I
> realized
> it must have been due south of the launch site because the glow of dawn was
> on my right and the moon was setting on my left as we faced the rocket.
>
> There were some things I didn't understand.  It was hard to get scale on
> something like that.  I heard the rocket stood as high as a tall building.
> But the tallest building I had ever seen was 5 floors, the tallest building
> Titusville had in those days.  What is that, about 50 ft?  The Saturn 5 was
> 360 ft.  Seeing it from about 4 miles away one couldn't really scale it.
>
> That launch started an industry in Titusville.  Yankees would come down in
> their Winnebagos and camp along the Indian River.  There weren't many
> stores; we didn't even have a shopping mall in town.  So a kid could sell
> souvenir trinkets and newspapers, young women could sell souvenir... eh...
> could sell... ummm... a kid could sell trinkets and newspapers, make a pile
> of money.  That's how I bought all my first camping gear, profit from a
> single day of selling special edition newspapers.
>
> If I could find one of those vintage editions of the Star Advocate Special,
> I would be tempted to offer a deal for it.  From what I recall, the
> editions
> that sold like hotcakes were the ones that were mostly about the astronauts
> and their wives (?) and had little to do with rocketry.
>
> This Nov 1967 launch had no astronauts aboard, but they didn't tell me
> that.
> I was told an ape was flying it.  My 7 yr old self didn't know any better.
> When the politicians commented "No Buck Rogers, no bucks" we understood
> exactly what they meant.  The moon launch was never primarily about
> science.
> There was only one scientist who ever went to the moon.
>
> spike
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20191109/4be5b082/attachment.htm>