why was the usa the only one to go to the moon?

[Jason Thompson]

If NASA wanted Kubrick to direct, the Apollo footage would have been filmed where Kubrick was.

And as much as I love the notion that the entire Apollo footage was faked just up the road from where I live right now.... 

[smartcooky]

"They were off another 5 miles from anything that we had."

That can't be right

It could be, if he's talking about the the rendezvous radar check.

[JayUtah]

We have it.  It's on the Spacecraft Films Apollo 1 DVD. It's an optional track, but it's all there.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that.  But then again I haven't tried since the early 2000s to get hold of it.

[Andromeda]

Oh God, and that isa real prayer, I am never, ever listening to that.
I watched Challenger explosion a couple years ago on youtube. It was horrible. My brain did a Blue Screen of Death after for quite some time. It still glitches out thinking about it.
As I have said before, now I know what a time traveller feels.

I had that feeling, that stunning shock, when I found out that these are Christa McAuliffe's parents a couple of years ago:



Cameras were on them at the moment of the explosion.

[dwight]

I was actually one of the people who advised Mark to keep the As-204 audio complete for historical accuracy. When I hear it I get goopsebumps, though I'm more freaked by the comments about a minute prior to the fire. The irony is heartbreaking. What ticks me off to no end is HBs like Jarrah placing these guys on a hero's pedastle for all the WRONG reasons.

But to backup Jay, until the Apollo 1 DVD came out, there was only ever one other instance on US television where that audio was played (a doco in the 70's on ABC IIRC).

[Andromeda]

Second, Buzz would have punched him at some point.  Seriously.  The way Kubrick directed would have driven him crazy.  Kubrick was known for doing sometimes literally hundreds of takes, trying to drive all emotion out of his actors.  He got takes the way he wanted, and he felt the only way to do that was to be a slave driver.  He emotionally abused poor, miscast Shelley Duvall to make her act the way he felt her character should in The Shining.  Frankly, I've always been surprised that Jack Nicholson didn't punch him.

There was no snake in the A Clockwork Orange book - Kubrick put in a pet snake for Alex when he found out Malcolm McDowell was terrified of reptiles.

[Andromeda]

Indeed the audio is on the DVD. From the sleeve notes written by Mark Gray on the DVD:

...I discovered the complete spacecraft communications audio was not resitricted.

...

My initial thought was that we would not include it in this set.

As I listened to the material myself, the Apollo 1 fire was transformed from a historical event into a human tragedy with definable features.

...

We included the audio because it is part of the story of Apollo 1, and space flight is a dangerous business. The conquest of space has already cost several human lives, and will doubtless cost more. This cost in precious treasure should be faced directly, and as the mission of Spacecraft Films has been to present the history of space exploration in as real a manner as possible, I felt this record should be included. Since one cannot "look away from a sound" we have also provided an edited version of this material should you wish to refrain from hearing the very short but disturbing last transmission.

I've listened to it. It's a very... strange experience. The result is that, as Mark says in his DVD sleeve notes, Apollo 1 has become much more than an account of some deaths in the space program to me.

I haven't.  I probably won't, but if I do I will listen when I am alone.

It looks like it has been uploaded to the web several times.

[twik]

My mother watched the first shuttle explosion on live tv. It took her many years to be able to watch Apollo 13, even though she knew they survived, because it gave her flashbacks to that.

[raven]

There was some crackly audio at the start of the film Apollo 13 along with a voice over by Cronkite, though I am guessing that wasn't the real deal?

[Mag40]

"They were off another 5 miles from anything that we had."

That can't be right

It could be, if he's talking about the the rendezvous radar check.

Please can you expand on that? Is he not talking about the actual lunar location of the LM?

[JayUtah]

I was actually one of the people who advised Mark to keep the As-204 audio complete for historical accuracy.

Thanks, I'm glad you did.  I actually own way too few of the Spacecraft Films series.  I keep hoping people will gift them to me, but it seems they never do.  However on the plus side, we have a public monitor in our office pod here, and we run through what we have on a regular basis.

[JayUtah]

Please can you expand on that? Is he not talking about the actual lunar location of the LM?

The estimate of LM location came back about 4-5 miles aware from where most of the other estimates were clustered.  Keep in mind that the radar-based method was not a "magic bullet."  In fact it was an untested ad hoc method.  Someone invented it on the fly.  But Patrick Tekeli believed it was a magic bullet simply because it was the outlier.

[Laurel]

I believe the documentary Failure Is Not An Option has some Apollo 1 audio in it also.

[gillianren]

There was no snake in the A Clockwork Orange book - Kubrick put in a pet snake for Alex when he found out Malcolm McDowell was terrified of reptiles.

Yup, that's Kubrick.

[Noldi400]

For all his foolishness, alexsanchez got me thinking about a question I'm hoping Jay or some of the other aerospace expert types here can answer.

Assume that Eagle had some kind of catastrophic computer/electronic failure.  Would it be possible for a human being with Neil Armstrong's level of skill and training, assuming that the absolutely essential systems were still somewhat functional, to manually lift off and get into an orbit from which Collins could maneuver to a rendezvous?

On the face of it, it seems that you should. Eagle was sitting right on the equator (well, almost); it seems that if they could get the ascent engine to fire, if Armstrong could keep the spacecraft stable, all you really need to do is get enough altitude to make sure you clear the terrain, then - keeping your "back to the sun" - pitch over and gain about, what, 1500 m/s or so of tangential velocity to get into some kind of orbit.

Collins had spent endless hours working on "alternate rendezvous" scenarios, trying to work out all the possible ways to go after the LM if they were unable to rendezvous as planned. If they could get into almost any kind of orbit high enough for him to reach them he probably could have. Even if they couldn't get the ascent stage into a stable enough attitude for him to dock with it, they still had the "space walk" option to get back into the CM.

Maybe it would have been impossible - I don't know, that's why I'm asking. But despite the stranded-on-the-moon scenario, I just can't picture Aldrin or Armstrong sitting down and waiting to die while there was anything at all they could reroute, hot-wire, or bang on with a hammer.