@richardrazgaitis6055

2 years ago

I was part of the Launch Team at Cape Kennedy for all the Apollo's from #1 (sadly there for the fire on Pad 34) through #11, the first lunar landing. I've met a number of the lunar astronauts including Buzz Aldrin. So I knew bits and pieces of this story, and recall vividly the real-time experience of watching the landing and hearing reference to those alarms on descent of 11, but never knew the whole story until this wonderful presentation here. This was a great combination of technical details and overall mission operation. Really really well done. The speaker mentioned 400,000 people who had worked on Saturn / Apollo. The exact number is probably unknowable but the conclusion that cite leads to is right: it took the energy, invention, and genius of an incredible number of people of all walks of life that solved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of never-before-solved problems, all in a very very short time period. President Kennedy's speech was May 24, 1961 giving the challenge of the Landing by the end of the decade, and it was achieved twice (Apollo 11 and 12) before the end of 1969. And getting men-to-the-moon, circumnavigating it, was accomplished before the end of 1968 in Apollo 8 (Borman, Lovell, and Anders). All this, and the soon to follow Apollo fights and landings, was accomplished despite the massive setback of the deaths of three key astronauts (Grissom, White, and Chaffee) in January 1967 in the very first Apollo command module, when at that time no lunar module was even near flight ready, and Apollo 1 was atop the smaller / simpler Saturn 1B (earth orbit only rocket), while undergoing 'only' electrical testing weeks before even the first earth-orbit-only flight was to be attempted. Richard Nixon, who was President at the time of Apollo 11, called it "the greatest week in history since the Creation;" that's a little over the top...but Apollo 11 does rank somewhere pretty high in the historical list of achievements.

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