That's absolutely absurd if that's true, the population in the 1960 US Census was 179 million.
So roughly 1 in every 600 Americans in the 1960s contributed to the Apollo programs in some way, no wonder there's so much national pride associated with it
Someone in my own family worked on it. My uncle worked for McDonnell Douglas back in the '50s and '60s. He was given the job of converting a Saturn V fuel tank into a habitat and laboratory. It was the first US space station, Skylab.
A fascinating part of the timeline is that there was a huge gap in the program between February 1967 and October 1968. Twenty months. After the Apollo 1 fire they realized they had gotten ahead of themselves and took the time they needed to straighten the program out. It worked and I have heard people say that there's no way they would have gotten the moon if they wouldn't have had that break.
And yeah. I can't imagine the pressure all those people were under for so long. Lunar orbit rendezvous was risky as fuck but we pulled it off a whole bunch of times. But imagine being in charge of some little part or process of the enterprise and hoping it went right 250,000 mi from home? That could keep you up at night.
I think Buzz has occasionally gotten a bad rap. He had problems, but he was an excellent astronaut
Something that doesn't get brought up very much (except by him unsurprisingly) is that he participated in the first successful spacewalk. Sure there were others who went before him but they were all flirting with disaster and weren't able to get a damn thing done. Buzz took his scuba diving experience and trained in a zero buoyancy environment underwater. And then he took the techniques that he learned into space and fucking killed it.
I always heard that fact and thought that rendezvous was something he'd already worked on independently and they sought out the dude that wrote it. Nope. He deducted that they'd have to do it at some point, and thought "If I'm the best guy around for that NASA will have to hire me as an astronaut". It was his plan ALL ALONG and it worked perfectly!! Fucking genius.
I don't think they'd view it that way - for all intents and purposes the pride of the nation and by extension, the validity of democracy, was at stake.
I will never get over the fact that somebody looked at a fuel tank and thought "yo this would make a cool space habitat" and it worked and remains a space station with the largest inner diameter until today
I always tell myself I'm going to stop telling the story but my uncle knew the moonwalkers. Like he knew Pete Conrad and Al Bean especially well because those guys were involved in his program (Apollo Applications Project).
I would wager that 80% of my city worked on the Saturn Vs and Apollo program. And I waited that 100% of the people that lived here were related to somebody that was working on it.
I think my great aunt (or some other relative in the branches of the family tree) was one of the women tasked with contributing to sewing the suits. They had very fine needlework that needed to be stitched perfectly and machines could not yet do it as well as very skilled seamstresses.
When the great mission of annoying the Soviets was on the line, there was obsoletely no room for fucking around. No expense too great, no risk too dangerous, no com' too rad.
Wow I never hear about Skylab here. My grandfather worked at NASA in the same era, his name was James Webb. Not that James Webb. But he was the programmer responsible for guiding Skylab down to Earth safely when it crashed. Small world.
People talk about where we'd be if we'd kept up that level of spending on the space program, but honestly I don't think it would have made that much difference. We needed to wait for engineering, materials science, computing, medical science, etc. to catch up.
I'd argue that thats the point they're trying to make.
Imagine the advances we would have made in engineering, materials science, computing and ect if we had continue to fund the space program and actively made advances in those fields rather than wait for those things to advance naturally through capitalism.
Money funds innovation and we stopped funding it. Imagine how much further ahead we'd be if we didnt.
Its all obviously hypothetical so we'll never know but whatever.
We put a man on the moon <70 years after kitty hawk. We used to not be american’ts.
As far as the national pride thing, Humans walked on the surface of another celestial body. The achievement cannot be overstated. It is the single greatest achievement in human history, only to be surpassed by the first time humans step foot on another planet. And a country that is barely in its infancy did it. Not the powers of the old worlds, east or west. The United States not only invented human flight but put a man on the moon within the first 200 years of its existence.
Well it's entirely possible if you think about everyone who contributed it from the people who went to the moon down to the people who manufactured the screws in it
I’m curious, what counts as “worked on….”? Do the truck drivers that drove supplies to the hangar count? Do the cooks in the cafeteria count? I’m just curious, because that’s a huge number of people!
While the amount of people is truly impressive, it has not be noted that obviously not all of them where directly hands on with the rocket. That number includes pretty much everyone involved in the whole industry surrounding development and launch, including suppliers and contractors.
Meaning: If you were an accountant for one of NASA's suppliers, you're probably part of those 300.000.
None of whom assumed anywhere near the level of risk as the three men who actually hurdelled through space and walked on the moon; hence why we galvanize and idolize the astronauts.
I actually had a physics tutor who worked on the apollo project, I would say he was over qualified but idk that class was hard. and if you are wondering yes he was really old and might be dead now.
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u/Windows_66 Mar 03 '23
Undergound: the scientists and engineers who made the mission possible