Posted on 12/20/2017 11:47:13 PM PST by SES1066
Christmas Eve, 1968. As one of the most turbulent, tragic years in American history drew to a close, millions around the world were watching and listening as the Apollo 8 astronauts - Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders - became the first humans to orbit another world.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasa.gov ...
First humans to leave Earth’s gravity well and orbit the Moon! Will I live to see another Moon Landing? Will it be our include Americans?
Ah yes! I remember it well!
... but, that's a still. IIRC, the live broadcast was of the lunar surface ... IIRC !
That was not until a few missions later.
#11 was first to land on the surface.
Wow. This was way before my time. Genesis was read?!
This is all the more poignant in light of my studies of Russian history and the Soviet Union. *Atheism* and the triumph of man, the triumph of science were the values and auspices under which all their space travel was pursued. (Not to mention the triumph communism and the supremacy of the State.)
Its footage like this which reminds me why we won the Cold War. 1968 was such a profound time in our history, and yet we still managed as a people to cling to our understanding of being one humanity under our Creator, GOD.
There is a video at the NASA web site.
Heh. I was more or less right, but finding the actual video, it is not what I remembered! I thought the view was more or less downward, with the lunar landscape passing by.
Not it! They are looking towards the rim, and mention the sunrise there, but they are heading towards the darkside from their POV, and make substantial progress towards it during the reading, so that we are looking past the terminator at the dark side beyond by the end.
Very crude video!
... and Merry Christmas to all!
Check.
For the younger FReepers, the NASA comment; “one of the most turbulent, tragic years in American history” is really understated. Vietnam War ramping up, assassinations of Robert Kennedy & Martin Luther King Jr., multiple city riots and destruction.... it really was a BAD YEAR but for this Great Christmas Present.
We just knew we would have colonies on the moon by now, with regular transports to the stars. Grew up on Tom Swift and Mike Mars as well as Johnny Quest. Good guys were good, bad guys were bad, and crime Did Not Pay!
As Americans we believed ( still believe) that the possibilities are endless when we strive for truth, justice, and the American Way! MAGA!
Well, a lot was happening, but youth is plastic, i.e. adaptable, flexible. I remember those tragic events, but they were ultimately transient. Maybe just because they were positive, Apollo 8 and 11, in particular, abide. I guess I'll have to accommodate myself to the idea that anything beyond that will remain a vision for me.
I know that by Apollo 17, the public was getting bored with the whole thing. Maybe that's the end.
And while I'm on the subject, I just can't see a manned Mars Mission. Too difficult, too expensive, and no point to it. Isn't everybody already talking about AI taking over the earth? What the heck!
Here’s an excerpt of an article about 1968. I was only 8, but remember watching the moon landings, and knowing a bit about the war and the protests. That greater interest didn’t happen until later though. The war and protests that is - of course I wanted to be an astronaut! The closest I ever got was a few dates in college with a gal that ended up working on the Mars rover!
https://whyy.org/articles/take-a-breath-folks-2016-is-not-1968/
In the time between the King and Kennedy assassinations, huge swaths of our nation’s capital went up in flames. The U.S. attorney general watched it from the air, as recounted by author Hampton Sides:
“Smoke engulfed all of downtown and the Mall. Only the great illuminated dome of the Capitol and the sharp white obelisk of the Washington Monument punctured the seething blankets …. the pilot thought it looked like Dresden. All told, more than 500 fires had been set throughout the city. At President Johnson’s behest, much of the District was now occupied by federal troops, spearheaded by the Third Infantry Regiment …. The White House was reinforced with sandbags and ringed with troops …. Machine gun nests were erected all around the Mall and the Capitol building, where soldiers, some fresh from Vietnam, stood in nervous vigil, their rifles fixed with bayonets.”
Twelve people died in the D.C. riots, and 1,600 were injured. And the death toll was higher in the two most serious riots that raged a year earlier — in Detroit (43 dead, more than 1,000 injured) and in Newark (27 dead, roughly 1,000 injured). Chuck Todd also mentioned Watts, the L.A. neighborhood that burned in 1965, but the toll there — 34 dead, another 1,000 injured — was far more dire than any of the disturbances today. The U.S. Army was sent to Detroit as well. Imagine the hysteria today, fanned by social media and the 24/7 cable cycle, if the U.S. Army was fighting in our streets.
Very crude video!
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As I recall, the actual video was high quality for the time, but was converted to a lower res version for TV broadcast (the version on NASA’s site). Later, the original was lost or deliberately destroyed along with many Apollo-era lunar original Hasselblad negatives and videos to make room for ‘other things’ and to ‘save money’.
Uh, that’s exactly what they want today if you hadn’t noticed. A whole passle of those bastards have embedded themselves like ticks in the .gov, obviously. I can think of a dozen people right off the top of my head that objectively should just be getting out of jail about now, but instead had a long career in government “service”. While July 1969 was the actual landing of course it could be argued that the high point for America was in fact this Apollo 8 mission, and it’s been downhill in many, many ways ever since. Very sad.
No still photographs were destroyed, that’s just silly. I hope you’re not one of those Moon hoaxer nutjobs.
I recall the sense of optomism that still permeated our culture, that our technology and sense of the future, even evident in advertising and education. All that has been flipped, by design, to inculcating all manner of bizarre neurosis in the kids, they don’t even know what bathroom to use or whether they may want to chop their private parts off. Neat trick, huh?
President Kennedy: “Man on the Moon!”
President Obama : “Men In Women’s Bathrooms!”
And as I recall, Santa still delivered and it was an awesome Christmas. I got a Barbie, an Easy Bake Oven, a Thing Maker and a really big Spirograph set.
Very well played in my opinion and I make a point to watch this episode again every Christmas. The series died after the single season due, IMHO, to getting too complex and adding ambiguous morality too quickly for audiences to take hold.
“No still photographs were destroyed, that’s just silly. I hope you’re not one of those Moon hoaxer nutjobs.”
No. Sorry. It is well documented that NASA cleaned out a huge amount of stills and videos. You’ll just have to go looking for the documentation yourself - I long ago lost or forgot the links to the various places. Much of it took place in the early 80s and 90s, and I’ve been through several computers and many hard drives over the years and some data was lost or destroyed in the transitions.
NASA is very infamous for ‘disappearing’ many things (including lunar rock samples) over the years during the various changes in management. This has nothing to do with hoaxes - its often put down to various things, but usually just plain government bureaucracy at work. Things that should have been kept have turned up in private collections or at auctions. Many of the remaining stills are copes of copies of copies and so on for generations - much of the clarity of the lost/destroyed original is no longer on the images; they are very badly degraded - especially those available as highly compressed .jpegs.
Just recently someone found the original images of Armstrong as he set food on the moon and has been restored somewhat. Remember the formats in use then for video images are nothing like today’s and conversion often does not go well - you actually have to see the original played on the intended tech, not your PC or digital TV.
During recent times, all of the US Navy’s Clementine hi-res images of the moon remain classified. Many of the Mars and other lunar missions images and data are no longer publicly available. Perhaps that material still exists at the various NASA sites and JPL. To access it, you’d have to put in a request (but you need to know the catalogue numbers and so on - which again are not publicly available), or else visit and look through their respective catalogues personally - a task which could take days or weeks.
I think I read somewhere that there exist a project to digitize the remaining material from Apollo, but it will take many years to complete - if it does not run out of money and interest before it is finished.
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