Remembering Apollo 13 at 50 (apnews.com) 34
Marcia Dunn from The Associated Press remembers the Apollo 13 mission 50 years later: Apollo 13âs astronauts never gave a thought to their mission number as they blasted off for the moon 50 years ago. Even when their oxygen tank ruptured two days later â" on April 13. Jim Lovell and Fred Haise insist they're not superstitious. They even use 13 in their email addresses. As mission commander Lovell sees it, he's incredibly lucky. Not only did he survive NASA's most harrowing moonshot, he's around to mark its golden anniversary. "I'm still alive. As long as I can keep breathing, I'm good," Lovell, 92, said in an interview with The Associated Press from his Lake Forest, Illinois, home. A half-century later, Apollo 13 is still considered Mission Control's finest hour. Lovell calls it "a miraculous recovery." Haise, like so many others, regards it as NASA's most successful failure. "It was a great mission," Haise, 86, said. It showed "what can be done if people use their minds and a little ingenuity."
Navy pilots (Score:3)
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With enough help from Hollywood, anything can be made to fly.
NASA can make anything fly, even without wings. All you need is enough thrust.. And yes, Jim could fly it with or without wings.
As a little kid (Score:5, Interesting)
I still remember being amazed at Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. But Apollo 13 was what brought it home that these guys were sitting in a tiny pressurized vessel, in vacuum, many thousands of miles away from the safety of earth... and it was a very real possibility they could die out there.
(At the time I didn't know about the Apollo 1 disaster - that astronauts had already died, on earth)
We watched the evening news every night to hear what progress had been made (or what had failed). We talked about it at school. We talked about it while shooting hoops. Everyone was watching, and everyone smiled when they managed to bring them home.
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Is that why the Soviets called the Apollo moon missions a hoax? Oh wait, they didn't do that...
Revisit Apollo 13 as it happened (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some really cool projects out there recreating the history of the Apollo missions.
Apollo 13 in Real Time [apolloinrealtime.org] is probably the most extensive, with live playbacks of actual mission control audio channels, as well as video and stills.
On Twitter, @apollo_50th [twitter.com] is tweeting the mission as it happened 50 years ago.
Re:Revisit Apollo 13 as it happened (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm afraid your life has been outosurceed toa call center in Namibia.
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Yeah, fantasy is really cool.
Look at the Harry Potter films, they have similar level of realism and historicity.
Wow.. Holding fast to the fantasy that the moon landings were faked..
I'll never understand folks who think this in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The moon landings are a historical fact, better documented than many things we accept as fact from history.
Sometimes I wonder if some of you folks are just wanting to argue about something, you don't really believe, you just are trolling..
Which I guess has been marginally successful now.. :(
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Re:Revisit Apollo 13 as it happened (Score:4, Insightful)
Not possible now (Score:4, Insightful)
50 years ago... (Score:2)
... people also had less problems with simple stuff like quotes, apostrophes or dashes.
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Quality German theist engineering, to be more specific. [wikipedia.org]
When asked, "Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?", I like to have a specific answer.
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No war questions asked.
Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Funny)
less problems
Fewer.
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We had more problems when we didn't have less.
A child (Score:2)
I was a child when all this happened.
That was an exciting time in history - the space age was just happening, and I, along with just about just about everyone else in the world, was sitting on the edge of my seat hoping those three guys would make it home alive.
Most successful failure (Score:2)
It's more accurately a failure, with a successful recovery.
Movie Apollo 13 (Score:3, Interesting)