Apollo 8: Christmas at the Moon [Launched 49 Years Ago this day]

NASA ^ | Last update: Aug. 7, 2017 | NASA

[MarkL]

I remember that night!

I was only 6 years old, spending the night with my father and his girlfriend and her children. Though I’m Jewish, raised in a Jewish home by my mother, my father wasn’t observant, and dating a Christian, so it was my first experience with a Christmas tree too. (It was also my first example eating what I now realizes were pork chops, though at the time, I was told they were “lamb chops,” but that’s another story.)

It was a magical night for me as a 6 year old, my father asking me to recite the same passage in Hebrew for his girlfriend and children.

Mark

[canuck_conservative]

How and why it happened -

By mid-1968, the Apollo Program was in full gear, though not all parts were proceeding equally smoothly.

Grumman, in particular, was having problems developing the Lunar Module, but North American Aviation had had the Command Module and Service Module ready for some time (they were sent up on the earth-orbit Apollo 7 mission, and proved usable).

NASA had originally set out a series of early Apollo missions for 1968-69 that involved docking maneuvres with both the CM and LM, but with the LM still incomplete, von Braun suggested something different - a trip to the moon with the full Saturn V rocket (it had been successfully tested Nov. 1967), minus the LM. The fact that it would be a great PR move, at a time NASA needed all the support it could get, helped to sell NASA management on the idea.

[Campion]

The television camera system on the Apollo 11 lunar module was a non-standard, low-res, "slow scan TV" device, to conserve weight and bandwidth. The signal from that system had to be upconverted for broadcast TV. The mag tapes of the original slowscan TV signal were accidentally erased and recorded over. Only the (badly) upconverted version survives.

I believe that's what you're remembering. I'm unaware of any other large-scale loss of worthwhile Apollo artifacts.

Clementine was a joint effort by NASA and the DOD, specifically the SDI program. I'm not able to find corroboration that there are large numbers of Clementine images that remain classified, but if there are, it's because the government wants to keep their imaging capabilities a secret.

[bassmaner]

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!

During the 2012 primary season, Newt Gingrich laid out a vision of returning to the moon and establishing a permanent base by 2020. He was practically laughed out of the room by lamestream media types for having the temerity to even suggest such a thing!

So sad that we've declined from a country that reached for the stars to a country that reaches for a government handout in a mere 2 generations. Hopefully the Trump election may have (at least temporarily) put the brakes on it.

[kosciusko51]

That wasn't von Braun's idea; it was George Mueller's:

The biggest problem Mueller still faced was Apollo's slipping schedule and huge cost overruns. He had always thought the only way to resolve this, and achieve a lunar landing before 1970, was to reduce the number of test flights. Mueller wanted to use his "all-up testing" concept with each flight using the full number of live stages. This approach had been used successfully on the Titan II and Minuteman programs but violated von Braun's engineering concepts. The von Braun test plan called for the first live test to use the Saturn's first stage with dummy upper stages. If the first stage worked correctly then the first two stages would be live with a dummy third stage and so on, with at least ten test flights before a manned version was put into low earth orbit.

The Saturn V program manager Arthur Rudolph cornered Mueller with scale models of Saturn and Minuteman. The Saturn dwarfed the Minuteman but Mueller replied, "So what?"

Eventually von Braun and the others were won over. As von Braun stated: "It sounded reckless, but George Mueller's reasoning was impeccable. Water ballast in lieu of a second and third stage would require much less tank volume than liquid-hydrogen-fuelled stages, so that a rocket tested with only a live first stage would be much shorter than the final configuration. Its aerodynamic shape and its body dynamics would thus not be representative. Filling the ballast tanks with liquid hydrogen? Fine, but then why not burn it as a bonus experiment? And so the arguments went on until George in the end prevailed."[8]

Mueller's concept of all-up testing worked. The first two unmanned flights of the Saturn V were successful (the second less so), then the third Saturn V put Frank Borman's Apollo 8 crew in orbit round the Moon on Christmas 1968, and the sixth Saturn V carried Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 to the first lunar landing.

In an interview Mueller acknowledged what would have happened if all-up testing had failed, "The whole Apollo program and my reputation would have gone down the drain".[9]

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks SES1066. YouTube version:

Credit: NASA/JSC -- While in orbit around the Moon on Christmas 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts read a passage from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. -- JSC 790 - (1979) - 2 Minutes

[T-Bone Texan]

All this history makes my heart burst with pride, but also sadness at how far we’ve sunk as a culture.

I work with engineers. They have a saying:

Regarding units of measurement, there are two types of countries:

Those that use metric, and those that have been to the moon.

BOOM!

[PIF]

Clementine tech is 1994. There is nothing technical image-wise that has not been superseded many times over since then; therefore, on technical grounds there is no reason to keep it classified. It was the US Navy that funded the lunar mapping project from its budget; NASA and DOD were secondary users.

[ex91B10]

Apollo 8 Genesis reading

[Freedom4US]

"You'll just have to look it up yourself." Ah, no. That's not how it works. _You_ made the claim therefore it's up to _you_ to prove it. It's not up to me to prove you wrong. Makes sense, right? "It's well documented". Well OK, then it should be very easy for you to produce evidence right? Specifically, that Hasselblad negatives were destroyed. I'm aware that certain telemetry tapes were lost or recorded over. And, some film magazines were inadvertantly left on the lunar surface. Oops! But no way anybody threw out any negatives. They are all at Johnson Space Center in a vault, guaranteed. Also at the time of the Apollo 11 landings, the live video feed was received in Australia, and displayed on a television with a different scan rate than used in the US. The workaround was to simply point another video camera at the television screen running NTSC and broadcast that dim, grainy feed of a feed. That is what Americans watched live on their televisions in July 1969, if the original Kookubara (or wherever it was lol) tapes could be found it would be a huge improvement. There is a huge amount of digitized NASA footage - from the original16 mm films and they are outstanding, the clarity is astonishing. Back then we saw nothing like that, just an amorphous blob on our screen and barely identifiable features like craters or clouds. At the time live television broadcast via satellite was a pretty big deal, to have live TV coverage and briadcast from Space/Moon orbit must have really been something even if a bit crude.

[PIF]

You’ll just have to look it up yourself.” Ah, no. That’s not how it works. _You_ made the claim therefore it’s up to _you_ to prove it

—

Lazy. Its there. I refuse to comply with a demand.

[SunkenCiv]

/bingo

[GoldenState_Rose]

Thanks. GOD bless you!!!

[Freedom4US]

LOL!!!

Then you concede the argument.

The burden of proof is always on the one making the claim. It’s not a “demand”, it’s common sense. You call me “lazy”; but you want me to do your homework. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t let leftists get away with argumentation that way and you shouldn’t either.

Hell, you may even be correct - but I really, really doubt it - that’s all I’m saying.

[PIF]

No, I conceded nothing. Any concession is in your mind.

[Freedom4US]

So we just take your claims because you say so? LOL!

I expect that kind of “logic” from a 5 year old or a liberal c’mon man.

Put up or shut up. That’s how it works.

[PIF]

You just refuse to recognize my right not to cater to your whims and demands. That’s how it works. See ya.

[Freedom4US]

You lose, then.

Moon hoaxers never got much traction around here I expect, for good reason. Good try though!