"This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return. They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt."-George W. Bush (copied from the transcript available here).
This quote is an excerpt from the President's speech given at the Memorial Service for the STS-107 crew of Space Shuttle Columbia on February 4, 2003 in Houston, Texas. On the tram, leaving the Mission Control Center for the Saturn V Rocket hangar, you pass Astronaut Memorial Grove pictured above.
In 1996, George Abbey, JSC director at the time, saw to it that a memorial for the Challenger crew would finally be founded on the NASA grounds. Those we lost in both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies are represented by an oak tree. Other astronauts and mission operatives (and a supportive relative or two) from our Space age are also memorialized within the grove.
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| Photo Credit: JSC Features |
We depart toward the Saturn V after paying our respects.
Even once you're at the base of the Little Joe II and Mercury-Redstone, it's still hard to fathom the power these vehicles contained. I'll let the pictures and their plaques do the talking now.
First, a little modeling of little ol' me in my custom print knit from Huckleberries Fabric Consortium. The designer is actually running a reprint preorder of this fabric through tomorrow, message me for details on where to order! The pattern I used to create this top is the Create Kids Couture, Donna's Women's Knit Dolman Top.
I have a picture of the back coming up so look for it after we enter the building.
After taking your time appreciating and reading about these spacecrafts, the heat of summer in Texas coaxes you into the Saturn V hangar. I noticed a significant reprieve from heat as I entered the building, but the air conditioning units began to give out at the beginning of our guest speaker's introduction. By the end, my little troopers were drenched with sweat and really looking forward to my promise of "Space Dots" and ice cream from the food court.
I'm so glad they behaved given the circumstances and allowed me to video most of our celebrity (well, a celebrity in my mind) guest's retellings of the Apollo 11 history.
Lee Norbraten was there for it all and as Apollo Mission Planner, I had no idea how to approach him to ask any questions at the end, so I didn't take him up on the offer at the end (and my kiddos really needed some refreshments). I started filming as soon as I realized I wasn't going to remember specifics and he's a literal "primary source" of historical information and one day, my kids can use these recordings I took for future school papers and projects!
Look at just how massive these thrusters are. This is what it took to lift three people off the earth in 1969...
And now I attach the raw video footage of Lee Norbraten, guest speaking on the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing.
At 0:35 mark, my recording becomes less wonky. I was not expecting the Apollo Mission Planner himself to be present on this 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, so I wasn't prepared for a proper recording.
The audio may be a little unreliable for some devices, but I'm including this third clip anyway. I can't discard history no matter what the quality...
The guidance system was a little bit
off. And we didn't end up right over the landing site like we were
suppose to. We were about 4 miles down range from the landing site
and the astronauts looked down to survey the scene and the only thing
they even recognized was this thing called “West Crater” which
was out in the far west end of the pictures that they had been
looking at as they prepared for landing.
So we're going to have to uh, do a
little bit of uh adaptation here (mark 2:28), and we're going to have
to pick out another landing site other than the one we had planned so
we're going to have to do some -inaudible- and sipping on our
propellant and therefore we end up using a little more propellant
than we expected. We hope to land with about two to three minutes
of reserve propellant as we are uh moving around -inaudible- looking
at this spot, looking at that spot, translating over to find a new
spot we go through the one and a half minute alarm, the one minute
alarm, and even the 30 second alarm goes off and we probably actually
had a little more than 30 seconds to execute a landing because of the
slosh (mark 3:05) exposed the sensor that said it [the fuel gauge]
was dry, when it wasn't really dry, but nonetheless that was the
level in the tank that was there. And then to make matters worse, we
kept getting these -inaudible- alarms, which is irritating because
you're trying to fly your descent and all of a sudden:
“rrrrrreerrr!!!” Alarm goes off. It's the “twelve-o-two”
alarm meaning that the computer is overloaded. And that happens uh
(mark 3:29) really about five different alarms went off in the last
three or four minutes of the flight, really irritating, indicating
that the computers were overloaded, maybe the guidance wasn't going
to work, maybe the computer wasn't going to set you down, uh, at all,
but we had this guy on the ground that knew exactly the nature of the
alarm that said (mark 3:45) “Continue to go for landing. That's
not going to create an issue,” the computer is not going to lock
up, so we got the confidence to go ahead and proceed, uh, with the
landing. And this is the kind of things that makes Space Flight
interesting (mark 3:58). Right? So we finally set down on the
surface, uh, like three-seventeen in the afternoon today(mark 4:04),
he's looking at his watch), uh, about three and a half hours from
now, so there's a lot of check-out that has to happen inside the
cabin to be sure that everything is ready -inaudible- to jump out on
the surface of the moon. So that's going to be at about nine
o'clock, inaudible, when the hatch is first opened, Neil Armstrong
comes down the ladder. And makes that step onto the Moon and says, he
says, “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
But it wasn't really even a small step. They thought that the, uh,
that the pads were going to sink deeper into the soil and you'd only
have to step down a couple of feet. The pads didn't sink into the
soil very far, he had to actually jump three and a half feet down
-inaudible- to the surface first. So it was a big step for a guy
(mark 4:48), you know and a big leap for mankind, uh, as well. Uh,
about ten minutes later, Aldrin follows him outside. They, uh, do all
– collect their immediate samples just to be sure that if there's
an immediate emergency that they'd be some lunar material to return.
And we'd set up experiments. And then we collected about forty-seven
pounds of lunar material (mark 5:09), we brought them back onboard
and we waited for NASA -inaudible-. Now, as we're getting ready to
lift-off, uh, this is going to happen (mark 5:17), a little bit after
midnight tonight. Early on the 21st, Houston time, is
when we're gonna start back and the entire Lunar Module begins
liftoff from the Lunar surface, right most of the fuel from the
descent stages are on empty remember we almost used all the
propellant, uh, and only the ascent stage is going to return. It's
got uh, it's own propellant tanks its own engine. It lifts off and
-inaudible- it accelerates, fires in posograde. Catches up with the
command module about four hours later. The command module has been in
lunar orbit the entire time. And they round up to dock, rejoin back
with your crewmate from the command module, you exit the lunar module
and then we jettison the lunar module into the orbit so that it hits
the surface and now all we've got left is the command module and all
three astronauts are now safely back inside and their 47 pounds of
rocks. And the surface module -inaudible-...
And we're going to enter the
atmosphere, on the 24th of this month, so four days from
now, at a fantastic rate of speed. About almost 25,000 miles an hour,
re-entering the atmosphere. And that requires a bit of maneuvering
on our part to navigate that successfully. Because just like an
extraterrestrial particle comes into the atmosphere that fast it
just burns up (mark 7:03) you know it just becomes a meteor streaking
across the sky. We don't (mark 7:06) want that to happen (mark 7:07)
to our astronauts. We have to jettison the surface module about 20
minutes before we enter. -inaudible-
Our command module is the part that is
going to return safely. We got a heat shield on the bottom, we're
going to back into the atmosphere, front end first, the friction of
the heat shield against the atmosphere is going to create heat. Uh,
the heat shield is called the (mark 7:30 to 7:35 is inaudible) the
surface only will heat up, flake off, heat up, and flake off, and um,
this goes on for about five minutes. Where these super huge flakes
are flaking around you and heated up to around, oh, thirty-five
hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And then after another four or five
minutes things finally slow down to the point that we deploy
parachutes and splash down, in the water, a hundred and seventy
degrees West longitude about thirteen degrees North latitude. Pretty
much in the middle of no where because we don't want to land on land.
And now if you're on one of these later flights you'll be wonderful
because they'll pick you up and put you on the aircraft carrier and
sail you off to Hawaii for a couple of days of vacation (mark 8:19)
and then you'd come home, but not Apollo 11. Oh no, you might be
contaminated with all these extraterrestrial microbes. So you get
onto the ship and you go immediately into the isolation chamber
(8:30). And, uh, that's where you remain for the next, uh,
twenty-one days. And uh, there's this famous picture of President
Nixon actually coming out. Landing on the aircraft carrier to greet
the astronauts and he can't even shake their hand because they're
inside this isolation chamber, with a tiny little window, it's all so
sad, so you're going to have to endure this twenty-one initial days
of isolation before you can come out (mark 8:56). And then
immediately NASA will send you out on this wonderful good will tour,
where you're treated like royalty, for the rest of your lives, and
that's the Apollo 11 flight.
And that's the end of our NASA tour. We left enlightened, inspired and sweaty. I can't imagine leaving any other way.
Great blog. Loved seeing my old man in action. He's so passionate about space travel and the great things NASA has done.
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