Happy Moon Landing Day

[melannen]

I have been spending a lot of time the last few days with Apollo In Real Time on in the background - the website where all the audio, video, and photos of the Apollo 11 mission are available synced in real time (+50 years) so you can follow the mission as it happens. (It makes good company for #booksort).

They just reported "The Eagle Has Wings"! Landing is in about three hours. Which I will miss because work, *sigh*. But you can rewind and catch up on stuff you missed; I hope the website stays up a good long time, it's a really great way of experience space travel.

Anyway here are five things I have learned from it so far:

1. It really is amazing how low-tech it was. Like, I knew nearly all the calculations were done by hand, that the computer power on the capsule was very small, etc. But it puts in it in a much different light when I'm hearing Buzz Aldrin taking sighting with an actual sextant to compare to his paper star charts in order to recalculate rocket burns when they're already halfway to the moon. The old 1950s SF with slide rules in space seem a lot less silly when you hear them debating whether they'll need a slide rule on the lander.

They lose signal a couple times day because the moon and/or Earth are in the way. Why would you not just throw up a couple comms satellites to take care of that first, I ask, of people who succeeded at a manned landing before INTELSAT was even up and running.

2. There is a lot of "wastewater" in orbit around the moon. I knew there was a lot of waste left on the surface of the moon, and a lot in orbit around the earth, but somehow I'd not made the connection that they were dumping wastewater in lunar orbit. (They were dumping it a couple times a day the whole way, in fact, so presumably there is also a lot of "wastewater" wandering around the Sun in and near Earth's orbit.)

3. They never know where their towels are.

4. I asked my sister (graduate degree in space science) and my mom (in college when it happened) whether they got out and walked as soon as they could after landing, or it they spent a lot of time in the lander on the surface first. Neither of them had any idea. I guess I will have to wait and find out from the live coverage today.

(They told me I could just look it up but what fun would that be? That's another thing this website is making me think about - just how little information was available to people following it at the time. I can hear all the audio and see all the photos and videos; but a lot of that wasn't even available to Mission Control until after the landing - this website is probably the first time it's all been put together chronologically, ever. In '69 the average person on the ground - unless they had a receiver that could pick up the actual radio from the capsule - was limited to maybe a couple of minutes on the nightly news, and whatever was in the paper. We take so much info for granted?

Also the '60s were weird. The Apollo astronauts didn't have wifi like the ISS does, but they did get a daily radio news digest, and it contained things like "There is an expedition going out in search of the Loch Ness Monster"

5. Pilot picks the music, shotgun gets out of the damn hallway so I can shut my hatch and we can all--

(did you know they brought mixtapes and a tape player? I didn't know they brought mixtapes! The PR person has to keep explaining "That music you are hearing over the radio seems to be music they are playing in the capsule.")

(p.s.: Michael Collins is the coolest. No this is not up for debate.)

Comments

[pauraque]

Walking on the moon is cool, don't get me wrong, but I always got an even greater sense of awe thinking about Michael Collins in absolute solitude, completely isolated from all other human beings when he was out of radio contact on the dark side.

[melannen]

Yes!

Although the more I observe of Collins' sense of humor, the more I am wondering just what he got up to alone on Columbia. :D

[primeideal]

Is #3 a Hitchhiker's Guide reference or just facts?

[melannen]

I mean, both? Obviously the Hitchhiker's guide is why I noticed, but yeah, twice now I've just randomly tuned in when they're trying to figure out where their towels are. Once they needed one for something to with cameras - possibly blocking light from the windows to get a good Moon pic? And once there were just some floating around and they didn't know whose they were. Unclear from transcripts as to whether they were disposable or they brought actual cloth towels up. :D

[rosefox]

Wow, thank you for that link!

[melannen]

It's so cool! I think there's a lot more option I haven't even looked at yet, too, I'm too busy trying not to miss anything in the transcript.

[untonuggan]

this whole post is gold but

They never know where their towels are.

is gold.

[melannen]

At least they remembered to bring some along! :D

...I kind of want to scan a bunch more NASA transcripts now to figure out how often they know where their towels are.

[trobadora]

What a cool link!

The old 1950s SF with slide rules in space seem a lot less silly when you hear them debating whether they'll need a slide rule on the lander.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that recently. It's so different now, it's easy to forget.

[melannen]

And I think a lot of the difference isn't even that we take the technology for granted, it's that we have a whole different concept of what's a reasonable amount of safeguards. I mean, I know a lot of people who won't even go highway driving with just paper charts and a compass anymore!

[kore]

I remember slide rules from Samuel R. Delany!

Clea held up a slide rule and notebook. "I'm traveling light."

Thanks for the reminder.

[jesse_the_k]

Why would you not just throw up a couple comms satellites to take care of that first, I ask, of people who succeeded at a manned landing before INTELSAT was even up and running.

As a radio listener, I remember how excited I was when the public radio satellite system launched ten years later.

Don't know if you're on twitter. Just in case, a wonderful thread about peeing in space from Mary Robinette Kowal, author of The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky.

A hint:

Fun fact: Gravity creates most of the sense of urgency for peeing, so in microgravity, astronauts can't always tell when they need to go.
[... snip ...]
What about periods in space? - According to women who have been there, "It's just like a period on Earth."

It turns out menstrual blood moves via a wicking action. Gravity can speed that up, but is unnecessary.

Also, tampons exist.

Re: Thanks for the reminder.

[melannen]

There was a lot about that in Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, which I also recommend (I bet it was one of Kowal's sources, actually!) I had just... not made the connection to Lunar orbit until I got it in real-time.

I've wondered about the menstruation thing, though - obviously it doesn't depend on gravity to exit the uterus or "overnight" tampons would not exist, and tampons themselves depend on wicking. But I suspect every woman in space has used tampons if needed - I use a cup, and I sometimes wonder how it would transfer (It might work? It's vacuum-sealed when worn, and if you were really careful removing it...) I guess a pad would work the same as a pee diaper, though. Just don't wear loose underpants and a skirt with it!

[oracne]

I just saw a Smithsonian movie about it that answers some of your questions.

[melannen]

Did it say where their towels were? :D

The Eagle just landed on the live coverage; as soon as I'm free of work I am 100% going to sit down and the couple hours post-landing right through, and I suspect I will learn most of the answers there.

[duskpeterson]

Lovely website! Thanks for linking!

"In '69 the average person on the ground - unless they had a receiver that could pick up the actual radio from the capsule - was limited to maybe a couple of minutes on the nightly news, and whatever was in the paper. We take so much info for granted?"

I was just blogging about that sort of thing in a totally different context - how being a queer teen in the 1970s meant hunting down all the infinitely small mentions of homosexuality in the mass media, and not being able to make much sense of what I read/saw (I thought that all gay people lived in big cities and that there were no other gay people at any of the schools I'd attended), because there was so little information to go on.

But in terms of Apollo 11, the media coverage was pretty intense. CBS gave the launch and landing nearly five hours of news coverage, the coverage in other countries was also intense (my parents saw the landing on British TV in real time, and then I saw the rerun the next day), and the newspapers and newsmagazines were covering Apollo like crazy. I still have a lot of the printed news coverage from then, because my mother saved it. Most of it wasn't instant news, like we'd get today, but you could pull plenty of information from radio, television, and printed news.

So it was really a question of how much access you had to media. I remember that, during the 1976 landing on Mars (when I was thirteen), my access consisted of articles from The Washington Post, the occasional item on the nightly news, and - oh, glory! - the newly arrived Air and Space Museum in nearby DC. I think I had to wait till the day after the landing to see the first photos of the Mars landscape (via The Washington Post), and I had to wait till Time magazine came out to see them in color (except for a fleeting glimpse on TV), but I gave those news photos a lot more attention, I think, than I would give to a billion tweets today.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Awhile back, Australia figured out that we Americans had never gotten the good footage (Australia was who had 'sightlines') and then their people had to see if they could find the masters. They did and they managed to get machines working to read it for transfer.

Utter crazy. Sounds like something out of Doctor Who fandom.

[melannen]

Yeah, I knew there was pretty intense coverage of the landing (And launch and splashdown) but on the days in between I didn't think there was a lot - did you get live coverage of things like when they entered Lunar orbit?

And I've heard that by Apollo 13 there was barely any coverage of even the big events.

And yeah, if you didn't have access to the live coverage when it was live, you just didn't get to see it! My mom missed it entirely because she had to work. So different from the way we think these days.

(Michael Collins got the funding for the Air and Space Museum! Told you he was the coolest.)

[cahn]

It is really amazing how low-tech it was. I work in a field where people (not usually me) have to occasionally compute orbits and things of that nature and, like. It is really really hard for me to imagine doing this without a computer.

After watching the Apollo 11 documentary (highly recommended):
Me: "I can't believe they WENT TO THE MOON with that level of technology, it's like, like..."
D: "Stone knives and bearskins?"
Me: "...yeah."

[melannen]

It's amazing!

Like, I'm just old enough that in theory I once learned to do trig with a slide rule, but. Just. Wow. Navigating by sextant in space!

It really makes the idea of having steampunk spaceships and stuff suddenly seem a lot more reasonable.

[kore]

(did you know they brought mixtapes and a tape player? I didn't know they brought mixtapes! The PR person has to keep explaining "That music you are hearing over the radio seems to be music they are playing in the capsule.")

OH MY GOD, I did not know this.

[melannen]

Apparently it was even cassettes even though those weren't really popular yet because they were smaller! And a portable player! Armstrong took it down in the lander and played "Fly Me To The Moon" on the moon!

I need to go see if anybody has a playlist of their tapes, and if not, make one.

[copperfyre]

Wow, this is an amazing link! Thank you so much, I have an hour to this now but it has been an excellent hour. It is so amazingly staggering the tech that people WENT TO THE MOON WITH. Just absolutely mindblowing.

I'm also so delighted by a) the towels, and b) the mixtapes.

[melannen]

I really really have to go back and catch up but my sister is forcing me to watch Good Omens instead.

[hannah]

I just want to comment with this icon and say I love this post.

[melannen]

It is such a great thing!

[dragoness_e]

Wow, thank you for posting this! I can't believe it's been 50 years... I was a little girl when my parents let me stay up to watch the moon landing. I followed the link in time to watch "A small step for [a] man, a giant leap for Mankind". And am staying up far too late just watching and listening.

I understand it better now--when I was little, I was confused by the poor video quality and that at first all we were seeing was the shadow of the LEM, and I couldn't tell WHAT was going on back then. (Also I was half-asleep, it was well past my bedtime).

It wasn't just the nightly news hour; the news coverage was pretty much round-the-clock live coverage of the landing and moon walk.

Geez, as bad in some ways as President Nixon was, he was light-years beyond the classless goon we are stuck with right now. Notice that Nixon DIDN'T use his message to Neil and Buzz to make it all about himself?

[melannen]

Yeah, I knew there was live coverage of the liftoff and landing (and splashdown, probably?) I was counting that as "on the nightly news". :D I have an LP with an hour of excerpts of the NBC live coverage and somewhere a 78 with I think some of the CBS.

But an equivalent event these days I can watch 24-hour coverage on NASA TV starting at least a day before launch, and going the entire length of the mission, and if I miss live coverage of the launch or other important events I can replays of to watch whenever I want really easily, and I can find as much analysis and history and NASA docs and tweets from the astronauts and...

And in the 60s you could watch the network live coverage, if you were free (my mom had to work and missed the whole landing) and maybe buy an LP later if you were really interested.