I just watched Tom Hanks's movie Apollo 13, I thought it was a spectacular movie.
In this age and time of Star Trek, Star Trek TNG, Star Trek Voyager, and screen movies etc. ad nauseum, (don't get me wrong.. I watch and love them all as a SCI FI FAN) - BUT !
As a grade school kid, I watched black and white TV as Neil Armstrong acutally walked on the Moon, I was also glued to the set during the epic real live space drama of Apollo 13!
Does anyone else here remember and appreciate the real life adventures of our true space heros?

I remember getting up early one Saturday morning and watching a Gemini launch. There was also a couple of times I got up real early to watch a Gemini launch before going to school. I think mom even let me be late for school a little bit once because of a launch. If you knew my mom that was a miracle in it's self.

Yea, I watched the Apollo launches and the moon landing. I can still remember it like it was just last night. We had the neighbors over to watch it because we had a color TV and they had black & white. I had my telescope set up outside and tried to watch the landing from the front yard. [rolleyes] Hey!!! I was an imaginative 9 year old. [:D]

I also remember the Apollo 13 mission. My biggest gripe about the movie however, it the launch scenes. Ronnie Howard sped up the Saturn's launch speed as it cleared the tower to make it "more dramatic." What the hell was he thinking? Watching a Saturn launch at real speed is more than dramatic enough. All he did is make it look fake. [V]

I remember vividly watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin(?) walking on the moon on TV, then running outside in the front yard and looking up at the moon, then back in the house...

Every time I watch Apollo 13 I can't figure out why I get so wrapped up in the process because I know how it's going to end.  But the enormous challenge of what they went through is simply incredible.  The trajectories for the flight were [b]calculated by hand![/b]  They had a bunch of people in a room with the old mechanical "adding machines" doing the calculations.  According to Gene Krantz, they had some computers, but no programmers.  

Yep, such were the days of men and their machines.

I'm awestruck at the acheivements of the early pioneers in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. I just love reading the histories behind the achievements and innovations of the 1950s and 1960s air/space flight.

Today, I'm embarrassed when JPL forgets to convert feet to meters and ends up crashing the Mars probe into the backside of the planet.[%|]

So imagine Apollo 13 re-run in this age of affirmative action quota hiring at NASA.

One of my favorite movies.  Definately in my top 10.

I'd love to see a real live shuttle launch.  The closest I came was to see an Atlas take off from about 30 miles south while driving up 95.

Apollo 13: "Houston, we have a problem."

Mission Control: "Puede usted decir eso otra vez?"

Apollo 13: "WHAT?!?"

Mission Control: "Que?"

Apollo 13: "Uh... do you el speako el Ingles?"

Mission Control: "Ahhhh.... si, Inglés!  Lo siento mucho - ningún no."

Apollo 13: "Umm. We kinda got a "situation" here! Does ANYONE there speak English?"

Mission Control: "Ah - una situación! Un momento." [i]sound of chickens being kicked away in the background[/i]

Mission Control: "Hello dis is Aisha how can I help you today?"

Apollo 13: "Houston, we've had a major..."

Mission Control: "I said my name is AISHA! Not Houston! I was named after the favorite wife of Muhammad the Prophet - praise be to allah. You will NOT racially harrass me by calling me a name of a dead old WHITE MAN who committed genocide against..."

Apollo 13: "Okay, look Aisha... this is an emergency! We've had a major malfunction and possible explosion on board."

Apollo 13: "[i]sighing impatiently[/i]Hold on, let me transfer you."

FOURTEEN MINUTES LATER...

Mission Control: "Dude!"

Apollo 13: "Houston.. I mean... Aisha... umm... Hello Mr... "dude"? This is Apollo 13 and...

Mission Control: "Whoa!! For real?? Coooool. Like this is only my second day on the job cause my Mom's got lupus and so she gets a lot of time off and so they had to hire me cause some Disabilities Act or Bill or something says they can't take away our family's earnings so now whenever she can't work - I step in and our family still gets the bennies."

Apollo 13: "Fine. Hope your mom gets well soon. Now, we've had some kind of explosion on board and..."

Mission Control: "No WAY - Dude!! Awesome!"

Apollo 13: "No it's not awesome! It's serious! There's been an explosion, oxygen tanks're gone, two fuel cells're gone, command module's shut down. O2 tank 2 not reading at all, tank 1 is at 725 psi and falling. Fuel cells 1 and 3 are..."

Mission Control: "Dude - you gotta slow down! My brain is hurting!"

Apollo 13: "Sorry. Are there any adults there I can talk to?"

Mission Control: "Dude - I'm an adult! Just bought my first porn flick last night and I didn't even get carded!"

Apollo 13: "Okay, whatever. Look, I've got some numbers to crunch here: the roll calibration angle is minus 2. Lunar Module roll is 355.57. Pitch 1678. Correction, pitch 167.78. Yaw is 351.87."

Mission Control: "Hold on, let me get my algebra book - that's got all the answers in the back..."

Apollo 13: "Just forget it - can I talk to your boss?"

Mission Control: "FINE! But don't think you can get me fired - I'll sue you. It got me my high school diploma."

Mission Control: [i]Adult man's voice[/i]"Hello, this is Mission Control in Houston - Apollo 13 do you copy?"

- - - continued - - -

- - - continued - - -



Apollo 13: "THANK GOD!!"

Mission Control: "I'm sorry Apollo 13, you've just violated twenty-three federal laws not to mention the separation of Church and State in the 1st Amendment."

Apollo 13: "Okay, I'll try to control myself. But we're in a REAL emergency here. There's been an explosion and we've lost control of..."

Mission Control: "NASA is a Gov't entity and our transmissions are Public Property. Therefore and as such, we are legally prohibited from discussing Christian doctrines using Federally-funded institutions and equipment."

Apollo 13: "I said we've lost navigation and most of the power of the CM not to mention the oxygen..."

Mission Control: "I will have to begin filing incident reports and collecting pertinent depositions in advance of the automatically-instituted lawsuits as per Federal Guidelines found in Fed. Pub. 72/NLS/4900a.0042b2, 0065d7 and of course Fed. Pub. 232/BAS/9304c.0087s. Now, were any protected animals or sensitive waterways affected by this alleged "explosion"?

Apollo 13: [i]long pause[/i]"Houston... Never mind. Apollo 13 out."

The_Mac: My hat is off to you, sir. That's one of the funniest things I've read in YEARS.[beer]

AMEN! What makes it so dog-gone funny is that I can actually imagine this happening.

Or maybe it makes me sick...

BZ, Mac!

LMAO!!! That was great!

Saw a night shuttle launch about 8 years ago from the beach.  Freaking absolutely awesome.

If you want to appreciate the real space program go to the Cape Canavral Space Center in Florida. You can tour the cape, see movies, look at a number of the original rockets and capsules. Our family went there last summer and had a chance to talk to one of the Space Shuttle astronauts.It was awesome.

Mac,

YOU Sir have just delivered a masterpiece!  I just about fell over laughing...or was it crying?

Your pen [keyboard] is a tool of the gods.  You have just ascended to the exalted level of sarcastic wit where McUzi the Flamer lives and common folk like us fear to tread!

We're not worthy!

[beer]  [beer]  [beer]  [beer]

McUzi?!

I'm honored!!

You guys are fucked up.

Whats even worse is that you beleve your racist shit.

BTW. The Apollo program has to be considered a expensive failure.

Because look at the space program after Apollo.

The method used to get a man to a moon left no useable infrastructure for a continued presence in space. We had to start all over again with the Space Shuttle. Which was also a failure, they have never reached their designed sortie rate and one has blown up. By the way they are all grounded again, cracks are appearing in the main engine fuel lines- [i]again[/i]. Perhaps if they had a few women or non-whites on the design team they would have raised questions about these problems when the beast was designed 30 years ago, instead of falling in behind their good-ole boy buds and not rocking the boat?

Bingo.

Whitey is the root of all evil.

Nobody of color or female had ANYTHING to do with any of these problems they are pointing out.

Boy, for someone pointing out a ridiculous position, yours is even flimsier.

How many countries other than the US and USSR have space programs, and I don't mean hobby level stuff like they have in France and Japan?

I agree that space exploration is a huge drain on the budget, but blaming the shuttle or other problems on a lack of affirmative action just tells me you know nothing about the makeup of Rockwell (may it RIP) or NASA.

Hey Guys!  Is this a trolling mission...or is the Lib for real?  [:K]?

I know liberals have virtually NO sense of humor since it's been replaced by a severe sense of guilt for all wrongs...real and perceived...but I can't figure out why we're all fucked up.  Will somebody enlighten me?

What gives ArmdLbrl?  Are you REALLY that anal?

I don't want to waste keyboard time returning fire if the Lib is merely out to raise our BP.  What's up here?

Just for the record, by no stretch of the imagination can the Apollo mission be considered a failure.  The space program went into hibernation after Apollo in order to spend more money on liberal domestic programs at home.  The Shuttle, while of an old design, has been emminently successful as a space truck, lifting some of the most sophisticated and capable satellites ever conceived by man into orbit.  Before we are room temp, Hubble may very well reveal the truth about our universe to us, answering the ultimate question:  Where DO we come from...and what lies in the future for our world?  Certain other birds dropped off have been absolutely invaluable to, "...the common defense."

Now I fully realize that for you...an apparent liberal, dollars spent on space is a waste of precious resources...but most of the rest of us don't think that way.  Remember, in spite of what the Party may teach...we still go by the vote of the majority here.  Sorry.  [;D]

Yes. It's racist to oppose affirmative action. Uh-huh.


Goal =
1) Come from behind the leading space pioneers at the time (the Soviets) and actually EXCEED their achievments in space.
2) Land men on moon and return safely.
3) Do this in less than ten years.

Result =
1) Done. Exceeded what Soviets had done and anyone else has yet to accomplish in forty more years.
2) Done. Landed SEVEN missions on moon and returned them safely
- one pre-launch disaster, one heroic rescue in space.
3) Done. Less than ten years left the Soviets in the dust.

Yep. Sounds like a failure to me. [rolleyes]


Like when fucking affirmative action, unskilled, uneducated liberals, minorities and womenz starting infiltrating the workforce??

Yeah... What's your point again??


Like after prop planes... we had to "start over" with jet propulsion. What a mistake that was!!


Name ONE aspect of Gov't, or Military or the private industry that has improved SIMPLY BECAUSE of forcing minorities or women into positions that they aren't the BEST qualified to fill.

NASA and the Johnson Administration were given the plans for a logical method to both put a man on the moon and to occupy it for sceientific study- and for whatever usful things that scientific study found- by Werner Von Braun.

Under this plan space stations, not big ones, not too different from the Skylab we would eventually orbit, just the largest they figured a Saturn rocket could lift in one piece, would be placed in orbit around Earth and another around the moon. A "space bus" a vheicle designed sole for going between  the two stations carrying people and perhaps as a tow vehicle for other cargo, would be built. Lastly a reuseable lunar lander would be sent to be kept perminently at the lunar station.

This would have established a space bridge where men could have been sent constantly to the moon as often as we could afford to fire them up there. Which would have been farely often as once all the major components were orbited only the manned reentry capsuls and unmanned fuel tank/cargo pods needed to be sent up- and these did not require the large, expensive Saturn series rockets to launch but could be lifted by the comparitively cheap "massed produced" Atlas ICBM booster. And the re-entry capsules themselves could be made resueable (unless they accidentally sank).

Had this method been used there would have been no near disaster. Had one of the space vheicles sprung a leak it would not have had to return all the way home, just to the nearest station, nor would the crew have had to worry about damage to their reentry vheicle, which would be waiting safely in earth orbit. There would have been less danger of stranding also as spare craft could be kept at the stations and sent out to pick up a stranded crew.

This method was actually less expensive than the version we ultimately did use, sending up each unit entirely self contained. With 90% of it being thrown away in the course of the mission, never to be used again. But they couldnt guarentee that they could meet the "deadline" LBJ beleved to be imposed upon him by Kennedy's speach calling for a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And there was also at the time the unfounded fear that the Russians would try to beat the US to the Moon. The Apollo program as we knew it was selected because it promised to be faster, even if it was grossly inefficient, and would leave very little that could be used for any other space mission beyond a Moon landing. Von Braun eventually adopted the pragmatic "half a program is better than none" attitude and went with it.

Von Braun and NASA started hitting Nixon up for changes in the space program as soon as the Administration changed hands. Nixon faced very different economic realities than LBJ did so those plans largely came to naught. The Space Shuttle-as a general concept- was pretty much all that came of it.  

Name one aspect that has been changed at all. NO unqualified minorities have been put in positions. That is a fiction put up by men who are jealous that they didn't get covetied positions. They cant admit that they were inadaquate so they cry racisim.

I remember waking up at all hours to watch every launch from 1963 through 1975. I still watch shuttle missions whenever our local college cable channel shows NASA select feeds. I've been to Cape Canaveral. My brother in law was stationed at Vandenberg AFB and I got to see more than one missile launch when I was a kid.

Hey, anyone want to read my NASA spoof?  I wrote it when I was about 15, and improved it over the years.  I studied the moon landings and things of that nature like crazy, so I knew quite a bit about it.

http://home.fuse.net/maclifto/APOLLO18_2.DOC

Okay, here's ONE:

After Bill Clinton was elected President, he swore that he would appoint the "first woman Attorney General of the United States".

Clinton's first attempt at FORCING a woman to become US AG was Zoe E. Baird. She had immigration problems.
Clinton's second attempt at FORCING a woman to become US AG was Kimba Wood. She had problems with tax laws.
Clinton's LAST attempt to FORCE a woman to become US AG was Janet Reno.

Because of trying to find a "woman" rather trying to find "the best qualified person", we had to endure eight years of JANET RENO!!



More:

The same could be said of Madeliene Albright, Jocelyn Elders, Ron Brown and a whole host of other barely-qualified, "mediocre" Gov't appointees. Those were all based, at least in part, on minority status - not merit alone.

And then there's Title IX and the destruction of almost a hundred popular and successful men's athletic programs throughout the country because of affirmative-action-based Title IX rules.
Failing and unpopular women's sports programs have to be funded to an equal amount as men's programs - even when there aren't any women who WANT to try out for the sports teams - and if not enough money is found to fund the women's teams, then the men's teams must be cancelled.

And don't even get me started on the "Black-Studies" Programs instituted at Universities around the country AT THE POINT OF A GUN HELD BY BLACK PANTHERS!!![pissed]


[b]Affirmative action = anti-white, anti-male, racist-sexist, liberal, hypocritical, G@dDamnMuthaF@cking BULLSHIT!![/b]

Don't be bashful, The_Macallan, tell us how you really feel! [;)]

BTW, I agree that most of Clinton's appointments were for political reasons, not primarily based on qualifications.

MCalla, not one of those people were the result of afirmitive action, those positions arent covered by affirmative action.

Do you even know what it is that you hate so much? Maybe you just hate all women and minorites?

And what does college sports have to do with what we were talking about.

You just are uncomfortable that you cant shove blacks and women around anymore just because you are a white man...

Oh wait a minute... are you?

ALL MEN were excluded from consideration for AG - Clinton made that very well known.

"White Men need not apply"

Janet Reno was appointed ONLY because she's a woman. THAT'S affirmative-action.

I thought I made myself pretty clear.

[b]Affirmative action = anti-white, anti-male, racist-sexist, liberal, hypocritical, G@dDamnMuthaF@cking BULLSHIT!![/b]

No.

Maybe you just hate whites?
Maybe you just hate men?
Maybe you think it's time to "get even" with us?
Maybe you think taking race and sex into consideration when hiring is actually GOOD?
Maybe you think Gov't-mandated racism against white men is FAIR?


Okay dillweed, I'll go REEEEAL slow here for you.

SOME people have a lot of talent in sports.
SOME people make their careers out of being Olympic-caliber swimmers, wrestlers, sprinters, tennis players.
SOME people make their career out of being atheletic coaches, assistants, physical therapists and trainers.

MANY people are cut or fired from men's College sports programs because not enough women want to try out for sports in College - so the men's programs CAN'T be funded any more than the women's programs.

One example:
UCLA, which produced a LOOONG line of Olympic-star athletes, just eliminated it's entire men's swimming program (and all the coaches, trainers, assistents, PTs etc were let go as well) because not enough women tried out for women's sports teams. To make the expenditures equal, men's teams were cut down to the level of the women's teams. Mark Spitz (as well as many other Olympic swimmers) came from the UCLA swim program. Now that door is shut because of you precious [b]FUCKING-LIBERAL AFFIRMATIVE ACTION[/B].

Highly talented College swimmers now have one less place to hone their skills and establish their careers.

The fired coaches, assistants, trainers and therapists are out of work.

And women still don't try out for their women's sports teams.

Does that make this nation any better?

Does it make ANYONE'S life any better?

That's just ONE example.


[:\]


Am I... running out of patience with a dried up patch of dogvomit like you? Yes.

While there are still racists, bigots, etc. (always has been, always will be... they're not all white males either), it has been my experience in the IT field, that the only reason people get hired is because of their education, training, and ability.  I have never seen such a multi-cultural collection as I have worked with in the last ten years.  I even took a class with 8 people which had one each Israeli and Palestinian in the same class!  

The bottom line is that most employers want the best trained/qualified person for their money; their race or gender doesn't matter.  

Hee-hee! So, Mac! What's you're point?  [;)]

Well, said, Maestro! [beer]