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Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott conducted the famous “hammer and feather” experiment, demonstrating Galileo’s theory that in the absence of air resistance, objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass.
At about 1:15 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday, the Apollo astronauts woke from a 10-hour rest period and were 12 hours into their 60-hour ride back from the Moon.
- Charles Fishman
Jul 17, 2019 · One perennial anomaly pointed to by moon landing deniers is that the Apollo astronauts could never have survived their passage of two belts of intense radiation partly surrounding the Earth at...
- Jim Wild
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The trainers were there to help, of course. By putting astronauts and flight controllers through hundreds of hours of joint drills—with as many surprises thrown in as the trainers could dream up—the simulations gave teams the confidence and sharpness to handle real emergencies in flight. In practice, though, the drills became battles between the fl...
We think of Apollo as John F. Kennedy’s legacy, but it was Lyndon Johnsonwho saw it through, almost to the end. (He left the White House six months before Apollo 11, the only launch he ever saw in person.) As Senate Majority Leader in 1957, Johnson had been instrumental in the creation of NASA, and his deep knowledge of space issues and legendary p...
The first person to see the Apollo 11 astronauts after their Pacific splashdown—the first to welcome visitors back from another world—was 20-year-old Navy “frogman”John Wolframof Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. He and his fellow members of SEAL Underwater Demolition Team 11—Wes Chesser and Michael Mallory—had trained for months for the ocean rescue, in w...
Jamye Flowers(later Coplin) was just 18 in June 1966, when she reported to work as a secretary in the astronaut office in Houston. “I graduated from high school one week, and I was standing in Alan Shepard’s office about seven days later,” she told an interviewer in 2008. Apollo was an information-intensive business, and in the pre-computer age, se...
John Houbolt’sgreatest asset may have been his obstinacy. When it came to deciding the best way to reach the moon, he refused to take no for an answer. The prevailing view in 1961 was to use a gigantic rocket, even larger than the still-to-be-invented Saturn V, to send a single vehicle directly from Earth to the lunar surface. There was another opt...
Norman Mailer described Kurt Debus as “a pleasant Junker gentleman with dueling scars on his mouth and bags under his eyes—the sort of aristocratic face...which belongs to an unhappy German prince from a small principality.” Born in Frankfurt in 1908, Debus was the colleague that Wernher von Braun, the visionary behind the Saturn V rocket, put in c...
Gene Shoemakerwas the first—and is still the only—person to be buried on the moon. Some of the legendary geologist’s cremated remains were on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft deliberately crashed into the moon after its orbital scientific mission ended in 1999. According to Carolyn Porco, the scientist who arranged the tribute, Shoemaker said a year...
Behind every white-shirted, skinny-tied flight controller staring intently at a screen during the Apollo missions was a team of technical experts who knew the systems—guidance, propulsion, communications, and the like—as well or better than the controllers themselves. This supporting cast might run several people deep, even more in emergencies. Nev...
In the mid-1950s, before NASA even existed, the Langley Research Center in Virginia produced the engineers and scientists who invented American spaceflight. Chief among them was Minnesota-born Robert R. Gilruth, who became a kind of father figure to NASA’s Apollo work force (he was 55 at the time of the first moon landing). Known for his calm leade...
Lynn Radcliffe started at Grumman fresh out of college, just six months after Pearl Harbor. Early in his career he worked on the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, and later on the first jets Grumman built for the Navy. In 1962, Joe Gavin, Grumman’s manager for the Lunar Module that would transport astronauts on the last leg of their journey to the moon’s...
- Tony Reichhardt
Oct 3, 2019 · Space. Learning from what Apollo astronauts left on the moon. Fifty years ago, astronauts left more than footprints on Earth’s lunar neighbor. This photo, taken in 1969 by Astronaut Neil Armstrong, shows Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.
Aug 2, 2021 · “Without it, the major scientific discoveries of Apollo 15, 16, and 17 would not have been possible, and our current understanding of lunar evolution would not have been possible.” The total distance traversed for Apollo astronauts grew from a little over half a mile during Apollo 11, to nearly 22.5 miles during Apollo 17.
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On Jan. 27, 1967, veteran astronaut Gus Grissom, first American spacewalker Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee (left-to-right) were preparing for what was to be the first manned Apollo flight. Image Credit: NASA. Before any Apollo mission flew, NASA dealt with a major tragedy on Jan. 27, 1967.
