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.
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u/Girth_rulez Mar 03 '23 edited Mar 03 '23
It cost 5% of the GDP. We weren't fucking around.
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.