Apollo 50+: The Next Giant Leap.

It's hard to believe that it's been 50 years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Lunar Excursion Module in the Sea of Tranquility, 50 years since Neil Armstrong announced that it was "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind"* - 50 years since Apollo 11 opened the door to the universe.

We’ve been slow to go through that door, but as I've commented before, the Apollo moon missions weren't really part of a strategy for sustained exploration, they were markers in a game of political one-upmanship. After the United States had placed their flag on the lunar surface in advance of the USSR, there was actually no need to continue to proceed any further, as evidenced by the fact that the Soviet Union never bothered to make a manned Moon landing - that particular marker had been scored, and both sides moved on to another part of the board.

However, as time moved on, tensions eased, and the USSR fell apart, a more thoughtful and scientific approach was taken to the now-defunct space race. The development of orbiting space stations such as Skylab and Mir marked a shift from exploration to experimentation, eventually resulting in the cooperative initiative of the International Space Station. The ISS is essentially a huge experimental platform, but it's also an ongoing investigation into the long term effects of life in zero gravity on the human body, information which will now be invaluable as we once again begin to explore further into the solar system.

The key to NASA's strategy for that exploration is made clear in the Apollo 50th anniversary logo, which features both the Moon and Mars. NASA plans to create a sustainable human presence on the Moon through its Artemis program, followed by manned missions to Mars.

 

The Artemis program is currently composed of seven missions, starting with unmanned tests of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft next year, followed by a manned lunar flyby and the start of the assembly process for the Gateway lunar space station** in 2022. Once Gateway is complete in 2023, the Human Landing System will be transferred to it in stages by civilian rockets, with a manned lunar landing by Artemis III scheduled for 2024.

 

The next four Artemis missions will follow the same pattern of using Gateway as a transfer point from Orion to the HLS, and will presumably do the necessary groundwork (literally) to create a permanent sustainable human presence on the Moon by 2028. This exploration model will then be repeated for Mars, with a manned landing planned for sometime in the 2030s.

 

This all sounds very impressive, but it's important to remember that, regardless of international participation, NASA is the primary driving force behind Artemis, and as such, it is at the mercy of government funding and changes in political priorities.  As if to drive this point home, much of Artemis is made up of the remnants of cancelled NASA programs - the Orion capsule comes from the Constellation program, which was shut down in 2010 by President Obama, and the Power and Propulsion unit for Gateway is adapted from the Asteroid Redirect mission that was cancelled in 2017.

Hopefully Artemis will not suffer a similar fate, and we actually will see a permanent installation on the Moon, and subsequent missions to Mars.  After all, it's been 50 years - isn't it time for another giant leap?

- Sid

* I know, "one small step for man" is how this is normally written, but I honestly think that Armstrong's Ohio accent elides the missing "a" into the end of "for". Try repeating the statement in his voice and you'll see what I mean.

** The Gateway station has drawn some criticism as to whether or not an orbiting lunar platform is necessary, but intermodal stations like this allow for the use of dedicated space craft designed specifically for the role of launch from Earth, zero-g travel from the ISS to Gateway, and touchdown and return from the Moon.  I'd like to see a Mars space station for all the same reasons, but NASA hasn't mentioned that in their planning.

Apollo 50 Countdown: 5...4...3...2...1...

The Dark Side of the Moon.

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey

Was anyone ever as alone as Michael Collins?

Not only was Collins left alone in the Command Module for 27 hours while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the Moon, he was cut off from contact with Mission Control and his fellow astronauts for 47 minutes every time that his orbit took him to the dark side of the Moon, alone, alone, alone.

Landing on the Moon almost seems easy by comparison.

- Sid

Apollo 50 Countdown: 5...4...3...2...

"IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER."

Across the stratosphere
A final message, "Give my wife my love"
Then nothing more...

Peter Schilling, Major Tom

The most astonishing thing about the Apollo 11 mission is that they didn't all die.

Think about it: your task is to put a man - two men, as it turned out - on the Moon. The president has just publicly announced that the United States is going to do this by the end of the decade, and now you have to deliver on that promise.

You basically have to create the required technology from scratch. You've put men in orbit, so you know you can get that far, but now you have to build a system that transports a crew of some sort across the void between the Earth and its satellite, successfully lands on the lunar surface, lets an astronaut -  or astronauts - explore the surface on foot, then get back up into space and return to Earth.

You can test parts of it, but tests are just as expensive and time-consuming as the real thing, and the clock is ticking - who knows what the Soviets are up to.  But not testing could result in a historic failure, so tests have to happen.  Apollo 4 introduces the Saturn V launch system and does a successful unmanned test of the Command Service Module, and Apollo 5 tests the Landing Module - not by landing it, unfortunately, just getting it into space.  Apollo 6 suffers from launch problems but makes it into orbit:  that's the last unmanned test, now the stakes go up.

You can only imagine - literally - what the conditions on the Moon will be. There's no way to practice the landing: the only way you will find out if you've done everything right is by doing it, so you make your best guess based on what the scientists tell you, and hope that they know what they're talking about.

And if you're wrong about anything, the astronauts will die, as you, their families, their friends, and the world listen helplessly from 238,900 miles away.

Think about all the places that it could have gone wrong!  If the Saturn V rocket had failed again during the launch, if one of the thousands and thousands of components had failed at any point in the mission, if there had been a leak in the capsule, if they had crash-landed, if the lunar suits had failed, or some completely unexpected aspect of the lunar surface had meant that they couldn't get back to Columbia, the command module.

The last one is the nightmare scenario, the one you really don't want to think about.  If something had gone wrong with the Ascent Stage of the Eagle, there would have been nothing Michael Collins could have done from his post on the orbiting Command Module - he would have had to abandon Armstrong and Collins to a slow death as their oxygen ran out, or to the more immediate conclusion of "deliberately closed down communications" - a euphimistic term for suicide.

In an acknowledgement of the grim necessities that would have followed, a speech was prepared for President Richard Nixon* by William Safire, the presidential speech writer:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.

In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

- Sid

* I always forget that it's Richard Nixon who is president when they land on the Moon, it should be John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy had been dead for six years when Armstrong took his one small step.

Apollo 50 Countdown: 5...4...3...

"Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare."

After the launch from Cape Kennedy, the three members of the Apollo 11 crew spent the next four days crammed together in the Command Module, the only part of the rocket which would complete the round trip and return to Earth.

The command module had a full volume of 218 cubic feet, although I suspect that some of the space wasn't really accessible to the crew*.  Sources describe this as "the same interior volume as two midsize American cars", but obviously with less opportunity to roll down the window, get out to stretch your legs, or to visit a gas station men's room - which would have been a useful thing, given that the systems used for urination and excretion were messy and unavoidably public.**

In her excellent 2010 book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, one of the topics addressed by author Mary Roach is the manner in which potential astronauts are observed and tested in regards to their psychological stability.  Looking at the Apollo moon missions reveals the critical nature of these tests. Imagine that you have to spend a week seated on a small couch with two of your co-workers - I'll even let you pick which two - and you all have to keep some part of your body in contact with the couch while you perform every possible physical function for those seven days. And at least one of you probably snores.

- Sid

* If you'd like a better idea of what this was like, the Smithsonian has created a fascinatingly detailed virtual model of the module's interior:

https://3d.si.edu/object/3d/command-module-apollo-11:d8c63e8a-4ebc-11ea-b77f-2e728ce88125

It doesn't look like two midsize cars to me, whether they're American or not.

** The Lunar Excursion Module made no provision at all for the astronauts' basic needs, relying instead on oversized diapers for Armstrong and Aldrin during their 21 hour excursion.  Wearing a set of Depends™ must have diminished their sense of history just a little bit.

Apollo 50 Countdown: 5...4...

"We have liftoff."

The Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo 11 mission into orbit is defined as a "super-heavy launch vehicle" - 363 feet tall, and weighing in at 6,540,000 pounds.

It took about five hours to move the rocket over the four miles from the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy to Launch Pad 39A on the back of a crawler-transporter, one of two, the largest self-propelled land vehicles in existence.

 

The first stage is equipped with five F-1 rocket engines, which utilized 203,400 gallons of kerosene and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen to create 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

 

The Saturn V took about two years to build, and cost $110 million dollars - that's about $696 million in current cash*.

It was used once for about 20 minutes, and then thrown away.

- Sid

* To add some perspective, that's actually a little bit less than the box office for an MCU Spider-Man film.

Apollo 50 Countdown: 5....

"We are still Go with Apollo 11."

 

Counting down - just five days left until the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin in 1969.

It surprises me that there isn't more public attention being paid to the anniversary - the Apollo 11 landing is arguably the most significant accomplishment of the 20th Century.  Neil Armstrong's step onto the surface of the Moon is a clear demarcation point in the history of our planet, the moment when we truly became a spacefaring species.

In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the importance of the missions that preceded Apollo 11, but somehow it seems a game of incremental steps that eventually lead to the Moon - increasingly higher flights until Yuri Gagarin crosses the line and orbits the earth in 1961, followed by multiple orbits, unmanned test flights, longer duration manned missions, the first lunar orbits by Apollo 8, more orbital tests, and the final "small step" onto the surface of the Moon on July 20th.

However, in some ways that culminating footstep was as pointless as it was historic.

The competitive origin of the initial landing contained the seeds of the Apollo program's termination.  The sole purpose of the Apollo missions was political: for the United States to land on the Moon before the Soviet Union.  Once that goal was accomplished, the Apollo program was more than a little like a dog chasing a car - what do you do after you catch one?  And so, after five more landings*, distinguished only by Alan Shepard's Apollo 14 golf stunt** and a few lunar rover photo ops, the program sputtered out in 1972 after Apollo 17.

The fiftieth anniversary of that final landing will arrive in 2022, and it might well be just as important to acknowledge that landmark as it was to recognize the anniversary of the first landing.  Hopefully by then we will have permanently returned to the Moon, or perhaps bypassed it on the way to Mars, but if not, a reminder of that last point in time when impossible was made possible might revive the desire to do so again.

- Sid

* The ill-fated Apollo 13 mission would have made it six.

** Insert "Moon shot" joke here.

"War. War never changes."

 

If you looked at the picture of my Fallout 4 plasma pistol and thought to yourself, "I want that," Chronicle Collectibles may have what you REALLY want.  For a mere ten thousand US dollars (okay, $9,999.99, but what's an extra penny between friends) Chronicle will be happy to take your pre-order for 2020 delivery of a lifesized set of T-51b power armour based on the design in the game - seven feet tall, complete with plasma rifle, and only 50 to be manufactured.

Chronicle says that the suit is "not meant for wearability", and, really, if you can afford to spend ten grand USD on something like this, you can afford to get someone to make you a wearable suit of power armour if you really want one - this version would just be for show.

- Sid

! C A U T I O N !

 

When WIRED™ announced that ThinkGeek.com was closing its virtual doors as of July 2nd and that everything on their site was for sale at 50% off, my first thought was "Plasma rifle!".*

Sadly, that particular sample of  Fallout 4 replica weaponry was no longer in stock.  However, the  plasma pistol was, and at 50% off, it seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down, even at the current USD exchange rate.

I placed my order, and waited. I had to pay some additional import fees**, and as usual UPS failed to impress me with their skills as a shipping choice, but in the fullness of time, my purchase made its way to my workplace, and I toted it home for the unboxing.

The plasma pistol, created by Texas-based Chronicle Collectibles, has been lovingly distressed in order to match the post-apocalyptic style of the game, and at 15 inches in length and 11 inches tall, it's an impressively large replica (which makes me feel that the 45 inch long rifle version would have been almost ridiculous).

It's quite well made and doesn't feel at all flimsy, but I'm not sure that I'd want to give it to a small child to play with, it's obviously a game prop reproduction, not a toy.  That being said, I was amused to see that it's equipped with the standard orange muzzle that distinguishes toy pistols from the real thing - it's hard to imagine that the police would mistake this for an actual weapon and draw their own firearms in response.

 

AND IT LIGHTS UP. (Which, for some obscure reason, was disconcerting to Jaq the Cat the first time I tried it.)

Overall, I'm completely pleased with my purchase - I'd love to have it make a noise when the trigger is pulled, and I'd like the trigger spring to be a bit stiffer, but that's just nit-picking.  But why does a device that would shoot at 20,000° C need to be stored at "a moderate temperature"?

- Sid

* What, was that not your first thought?

 ** I bear the Canadian government no ill will for this. In the current political climate, I would put some kind of tariff on imported American plasma beam weaponry as well, lord knows what Trump is charging on softwood going the other way.

Imagine.

Jack Malik: John, Paul, George and Ringo, The Beatles. Yesterday, it’s one of the greatest songs ever written.

Carol: Well, it’s not Coldplay, it’s not Fix You.

 - Yesterday

Note:  the following posting contains a minor spoiler for the movie Yesterday - okay, perhaps a major spoiler, it's a matter of opinion.  A spoiler, anyway.

My interest in science fiction and fantasy is well established, but most people are unaware that I'm a complete fool for romance as well (just ask my wife).

As such, I'm pleasantly surprised by how many romantic-comedy fantasy films there are. On the face of it, it seems like an odd sub-genre. I can't think of a lot of war movie or western rom-coms, but there's a substantial list of fantasy-themed takes on boy-meets-girl:  Kate and Leopold, Splash, Groundhog Day, Isn't It Romantic?, About Time, Shallow Hal, and so on - I'm not sure that Princess Bride is romantic enough to qualify, but you get the idea.

Yesterday, the latest addition to the list, is perhaps more comedy than romance, although romance is certainly part of the story. The film's concept is quite simple - Jack Malik, a failing English musician on his way home from what he has decided is his last performance, is knocked off his bike by a bus during a 12-second global blackout.

After he painfully regains consciousness in the hospital, he slowly comes to the realization that, in this new post-blackout reality, the Beatles never existed.* Jack is now the only person in the world who remembers the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

 

He  decides to capitalize on his unique knowledge, and uses his memory of the Beatles' catalogue** to springboard himself into a position of international fame and fortune, while struggling with the morality of whether or not he should claim credit for the music which is making him famous.  At the same time, he's slowly losing touch with his long-time friend, supporter and part-time manager Ellie, who finally admits to her love for him when she feels that she's lost him to his newfound role as " the world’s greatest singer-songwriter".

Jack is brilliantly played by British actor Himesh Patel, who also does all of his own singing in Yesterday.  The movie cleverly relies upon solo performances backed only by guitar for most of the songs, which helps to level the playing field in terms of where they originate in the history of the band:  there's a big jump from Help! to Magical Mystery Tour.  It also recognizes the uncertain knowledge that most of us have regarding song lyrics - it's easy to put yourself in Jack's shoes as he struggles to recreate the words to Eleanor Rigby.

In selecting the Beatles over the Rolling Stones or the Who, the writers acknowledge the incredible cultural impact of their music.  I've always thought that five hundred years from now, the Beatles will be one of the lasting legacies of the the 20th century, much as Shakespeare is the only playwright that anyone recognizes from the Elizabethan era.

The what-if alternate timeline concept is a common one, whether caused by a time traveller's errant foot killing a butterfly or a quantum shift into another version of reality, common enough that both The Simpsons and Family Guy have done episodes based on the idea.   Science fiction often attempts to describe the future based on the present - alternate reality stories describe the present based on a different past.

Not surprisingly, there are a couple of other versions of the no-Beatles reality available, both of which revolve around time travel rather than alternate realities: a French graphic novel, also called Yesterday, and 1963: Fanfare for the Common Men, a Peter Davison Doctor Who audio play in which the Beatles have been replaced by Mark, James and Korky - The Common Men.***

The real question is whether or not the Beatles would succeed in 2019 or more accurately, whether their music would.  Yesterday takes it almost as a given that the answer is yes. Jack is quickly hailed as a musical genius, and his first album is anticipated to be the greatest record of all time.

 

However, there are larger implications to a world without the Beatles (although, honestly, I feel that a world without cigarettes would be a much more intriguing one - think of all the people who didn't die from related cancers, it would have to add up). Changing history is like dropping a stone into a pool - the splash is obvious, but the ripples will travel a lot further.  Yesterday concentrates on splash, but it spends a little time looking at the ripples as well, most notably Jack's meeting with a 78-year-old John Lennon.

It's a meeting made possible by the fact that, in a world where Lennon never publicly announced that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus, Mark David Chapman would never even know his name, let alone wait for him outside a New York apartment building with a .38 calibre revolver.  The Lennon scene has proven to be somewhat controversial, but for me, it made perfect sense as one of the most powerful consequences of the Beatles never coming together, and I found it to be an unexpectedly touching element in the framework of the story.

I quite enjoyed Yesterday - it's not perfect, but it's an entertaining little fantasy concept movie that doesn't attempt to change the world - no pun intended.   Would the music of the Beatles succeed in a different era?  Impossible to say, but I'd hope that it would.

Ultimately, I'd like to think that, as per John Lennon's animated alter ego in Yellow Submarine, nothing is Beatle proof.

- Sid

* Along with cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and Oasis - which, as Jack comments, does make sense, although it leads to a bit of a hole in the plot regarding a key performance from his school days.  Oh well, wibbly wobbly, timey wimey...

** Not surprisingly, close to half the film's budget was dedicated to the rights for the Beatle's music.

***  I've only explored a few of the Doctor Who radio plays/audio books, but I'm tempted to look this one up - as I've explained to Karli, the key to Doctor Who is that it's ALWAYS aliens, and as such I'm curious to see if Korky turns out to be from Arcateen V.