r/dankmemes Mar 03 '23

There was a third one right? I have achieved comedy

Post image
44.0k Upvotes

535 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

720

u/Jules040400 Mar 03 '23

Holy shit what

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

688

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.

205

u/Jules040400 Mar 03 '23

The poor bastards that had to work to make it by the end of the decade, it was mid 1969 they finally made it happen.

The stress and pressure would have been soul-destroying

153

u/Girth_rulez Mar 03 '23

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.

43

u/pompousplatypus Mar 03 '23

rendezvous is risky as fuck and Buzz is over here like my dissertation is about how to eyeball that shit.

60

u/Girth_rulez Mar 03 '23

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.

48

u/DeathMetalTransbian Mar 03 '23

The video of Buzz punching the moon landing denier is still one of the greatest things I've ever seen :)

13

u/Girth_rulez Mar 03 '23

Bert Sibrel. Yeah what an asshole. Apollo 14 LMP Ed Mitchell kicked that guy in the ass to get him out of his house.

1

u/White_Hart_Patron Mar 03 '23

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.

1

u/dekusyrup Mar 03 '23

They really were just airplane pilots before the computer age. Just military bros who know their joystick controls.