Apollo 14 Moon landing

It always amazes me that there are still people(or as I call them ,nutcases) who say that the moon landing was a hoax. Funny enough these people always refer to the Apollo 11 mission . The mission that brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon.

However they were not the only ones to set foot on Earth’s only proper natural satellite Luna aka the Moon. In total there were 12 astronauts who left their mark on Luna’s surface.

On February 5,1971 it was the turn off Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Edgar D. Mitchell, the 5th and 6th ‘moon walkers’.

Apollo 14 was the eighth manned Apollo mission and the third to land on the Moon. On January 31, 1971, Apollo 14 launched from Kennedy Space Center with a crew of commander Alan B. Shepard, command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa, and lunar module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell.

The crew experienced challenges in docking with the lunar module Antares and six attempts were required before a “hard dock” was achieved.

On February 5, 1971, Antares made the most precise landing to date in the hilly uplands of the Fra Mauro crater.

So next time when someone tells you ‘the moon landing was a hoax’ ask them which one of the 6th landings they are referring to.

Although 12 seems to be a very small amount of people yo have walked on the moon. The deepest exploration on earth was done by even fewer people.

In the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Guam and the Philippines, lies the Marianas Trench, also known as the Mariana Trench. At 35,814 feet below sea level, its bottom is called the Challenger Deep — the deepest point known on Earth. The three people who have explored it were ,Navy Lt. Don Walsh, a submariner, and explorer Jacques Piccard. They reached the Challenger Deep on January 23, 1960.

The last perdon yo get there was James Cameron, director of movies like the Titanic and Avatar., He reached the deep on January 26,2012.

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Sources

https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/story/Article/1737193/hitting-bottom-submariner-explored-deepest-part-of-ocean/#:~:text=Only%20three%20people%20have%20ever,deepest%20point%20known%20on%20Earth.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/890/who-has-walked-on-the-moon/

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/apollo-14-arrives-in-lunar-orbit-on-feb-4-1971

The last man on the Moon

 

Mention Neil Armstrong and every one will know who he is and even what he said when he set foot as the first man on the Moon.

However the name Eugene Cernan will mean very little to most people. Although he was just as important to the Apollo missions. Eugene Ceman was the last man on the Moon, but he was also part of the Apollo 10 mission.

Apollo 10 was  the second manned mission(Apollo 8,had been the first) to orbit the Moon. Launched on May 18, 1969, it was the F mission: (the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the first Moon landing) testing all of the components and procedures, without actually landing on the surface.

It was also the mission which set the  highest speed attained by a manned vehicle.24,791 mph on its return to earth on May 26 1969.

Eugene Cernan Cernan flew two other space missions: Gemini 9A, where he struggled during NASA’s second spacewalk ever. Cernan was originally selected with Thomas Stafford as backup pilot for Gemini 9. When the prime crew was killed in the crash of NASA T-38A “901” (USAF serial 63-8181) at Lambert Field on February 28, 1966, the backup crew became the prime crew—the first time this happened.

Cernan was surprised, as were others, that he was selected as the commander for the Apollo 17 mission. Shortly before the selection of the crew, Cernan had crashed his helicopter. After the crash he said  “if he couldn’t fly a helicopter without incident, how could he command a journey to the moon?”  Richard F. Gordon Jr. would have been a more likely candidate as commander for the mission, partially because he had been a member as the back up crew of the cancelled Apollo 15 mission together with Harrison H. Schmitt.

Schmitt was a geologist, making him the first scientist-astronaut to land on moon.He was assigned as Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 17 mission.

Scientific objectives of the Apollo 17 mission included, geological surveying and sampling of materials and surface features in a pre-selected area of the Taurus-Littrow region; deploying and activating surface experiments.

Cernan’s role as commander of Apollo 17 closed out the Apollo program’s lunar exploration mission with a number of record-setting achievements. During the three days of Apollo 17’s surface activity (Dec. 11-14, 1972), Cernan and Schmitt performed three EVAs (Extravehicular Activities)or Spacewalk and moonwalk in this case, of  a total of about 22 hours of exploration of the Taurus–Littrow valley. Their first EVA alone was more than three times the length astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent outside the Lunar Module.

As Cernan was getting ready  to climb the ladder for the final time, he spoke these words; which are the last spoken by a human standing on the Moon’s surface to date:

“Bob, this is Gene, and I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record: that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”

Sadly Eugene Cernan died on January 16, 2017 but what a legacy he left behind, they just don’t make them like that anymore. A true hero.

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Sources

NASA

Space.com

Would you believe they put a man on the moon? Well buried him actually.

Eugene Merle Shoemaker (April 28, 1928 – July 18, 1997), also known as Gene Shoemaker, was an American geologist and one of the founders of the field of planetary science. He is best known for co-discovering the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy. This comet hit Jupiter in July 1994: the impact was televised around the world

Dr. Gene Shoemaker died Friday, July 18, 1997 (Australian Time) in Alice Springs, Australia in a car accident. He was in the field, pursuing his lifelong passion of geologic studies to help understand impact craters with his wife and science partner, Carolyn Shoemaker. Carolyn survived the accident sustaining various injuries.

Shoemaker’s friends and family knew that he would want to forever rest among the cosmos. And as luck would have it, a company called Celestis has been conducting “memorial spaceflights” for 23 years now.

Celestis finds extra room on space launches and sends up the ashes along with the crafts. The equipment that the ashes are stored on ends up in Earth’s orbit, and upon re-entry, the equipment and the ashes burn up. For Shoemaker, however, Celestis agreed to do something different. A colleague of Shoemaker believed that the man who had dedicated his life to science, who wanted nothing more in life than to journey to the cosmos as an astronaut, would be ecstatic to make it to the moon in death. The folks at Celestis took on the special request and made it happen.

On January 6, 1998, NASA’s Lunar Prospector took off for the south pole of the moon on a mission to look for ice. Also aboard the craft was an ounce of Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes. The man’s remains were wrapped in a piece of brass foil. His name was laser-etched into the brass, along with an image of the Hale-Bopp Comet, an image of Arizona’s Meteor Crater where Shoemaker trained astronauts, and a quote from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“And, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

The mission lasted about a year and a half and ended on July 31, 1999, when NASA deliberately crashed the craft onto the surface of the moon. Shoemaker’s remains crashed into the moon along with the craft, making him the only human being to be buried there.

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The Great Moon Hoax

On this day in 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.

Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day.

Herschel had in fact traveled to Capetown, South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. The articles also offered vivid description of the moon’s geography, complete with massive craters, enormous amethyst crystals, rushing rivers and lush vegetation.

The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was one of the new “penny press” papers that appealed to a wider audience with a cheaper price and a more narrative style of journalism. From the day the first moon hoax article was released, sales of the paper shot up considerably. It was exciting stuff, and readers lapped it up. The only problem was that none of it was true. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publication years earlier, and Grant was a fictional character. The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University. Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.

Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. The craze over Herschel’s supposed discoveries even fooled a committee of Yale University scientists, who traveled to New York in search of the Edinburgh Journal articles. After Sun employees sent them back and forth between the printing and editorial offices, hoping to discourage them, the scientists returned to New Haven without realizing they had been tricked.

 

On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the articles had been a hoax. People were generally amused by the whole thing, and sales of the paper didn’t suffer. The Sun continued operation until 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram. The merger folded in 1967.

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Urban Myths you just wished were true.

Sometime you hear these stories or tall tales that turn out to be completely untrue or just have a small element of truth, and often the stories are repeated for years. Urban Myths is what they turn out to be, but sometimes you wish these Urban Myths or Legends were just true because they really spark your imagination.

Good luck, Mr. Gorsky

The story being that while a child, Neil Armstrong , playing baseball, through an open window he heard his Neighbor Mrs. Gorsky yell at her husband: “Oral sex, you want oral sex? When the kid next door walks on the Moon!”

During November 1995, a clever (and slightly risqué) story was widely circulated on the Internet concerning a statement Neil is supposed to have made during the Apollo 11 EVA. At the suggestion of several readers, let me state that Neil never said “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky” at any time during the mission. Indeed, on November 28, 1995, Neil wrote for the ALSJ, “I understand that the joke is a year old. I first heard it in California delivered by (comedian) Buddy Hacket.

Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen

This one may sound farfetched to some but this legend has been going around for decades. It is often said that legendary cartoonist, Walt Disney had himself frozen while waiting for a lung cancer cure, in hopes of returning to life once the cure was found. Taking it a step further, it is also said his body was cryo-preserved somewhere in the theme park, many believing under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. This one unfortunately isn’t true. He was cremated after death – however, the first-ever cryogenic freezings did take place soon after his death.

The kidney heist

In this tale, a young man is either seduced by a beautiful woman or pays for an escort. The following morning, he awakens in a bathtub full of ice to find one of his kidneys has been removed for sale on the black market.

Carrots Help You See in the Dark

Eating carrots and other vegetables rich in vitamin A helps you see better at night.

This is a myth created by British Ministry of Information,during WWII, as a way to boost morale and make war-weary citizens feel like they could help the war effort by growing carrots that could, in turn, be sent to fighter pilots fighting the Germans. They also wanted children to feel like eating vegetables was better than eating sweets, which were strictly rationed.

Somehow it became common knowledge that eating carrots helped your night vision, but there’s really no science behind the claim.

The CIA’s Whale Parade

During the Cold War, a rumor arose that the CIA had the unlikeliest agent on its roster: a dead fin whale named Goliath. Caught by Norwegian whalers in the 1950s, Goliath was mounted on a truck and toured all over Europe well in the 1960s. While already bizarre in itself (parading a dead whale is kind of weird), conspiracy theorists argued that the whole thing was a cover-up for more a more nefarious purpose, especially after the whale arrived in Hungary.

Allegedly, the CIA wanted to test if the roads of Hungary could handle the load of nuclear missiles loaded on trucks. To avoid arousing suspicion, they opted to substitute the dead whale for the missiles. The truck carrying the whale eerily resembled one used to carry nuclear missiles, according to conspiracy theorists.

No concrete proof was ever presented, and the Hungarian crowd loved Goliath. Tickets were sold out everywhere he went.

Philadelphia Experiment

The Philadelphia Experiment is an alleged military experiment supposed to have been carried out by the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sometime around October 28, 1943. The U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge (DE-173) was claimed to have been rendered invisible (or “cloaked”) to enemy devices.

The story first appeared in 1955, in letters of unknown origin sent to a writer and astronomer, Morris K. Jessup. It is widely understood to be a hoax;the U.S. Navy maintains that no such experiment was ever conducted, that the alleged details of the story contradict well-established facts about USS Eldridge, and that the claims do not conform to known physical laws.

The assassination of Glen Miller by the Gestapo.

The famous American big band leader Glenn Miller, who died in a plane crash, was either killed by German agents, or accidentally blown up by British bombers dumping their bombs.

Miller, a Major in the US Army Air Force, was flying from England to Paris in late 1944 to give a concert for troops there when his plane crashed and all on board were killed. Hampered by bad weather and poor visibility, the small plane they were on was lost at sea, and vanished. Conspiracy theories abound that he was knocked off by German agents, or was the victim of friendly fire from British bomber aircraft, but they aren’t supported by evidence, only individual accounts that can’t be confirmed.

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A small step for man

July 1969. It’s a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.

It is only seven months since NASA’s made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket

Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.

At 9:32 a.m. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit.

After one and a half orbits, Apollo 11 gets a “go” for what mission controllers call “Translunar Injection” – in other words, it’s time to head for the moon. Three days later the crew is in lunar orbit. A day after that, Armstrong and Aldrin climb into the lunar module Eagle and begin the descent, while Collins orbits in the command module Columbia.

Collins later writes that Eagle is “the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky,” but it will prove its worth.

When it comes time to set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong improvises, manually piloting the ship past an area littered with boulders. During the final seconds of descent, Eagle’s computer is sounding alarms.

It turns out to be a simple case of the computer trying to do too many things at once, but as Aldrin will later point out, “unfortunately it came up when we did not want to be trying to solve these particular problems.”

When the lunar module lands at 4:18 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remain. Armstrong radios “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Mission control erupts in celebration as the tension breaks, and a controller tells the crew “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we’re breathing again.”

Armstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern, saying “the unknowns were rampant,” and “there were just a thousand things to worry about.”

At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” (A quote he had already shown to his brother before he left on the Apollo 11 mission.)

Aldrin joins him shortly, and offers a simple but powerful description of the lunar surface: “magnificent desolation.” They explore the surface for two and a half hours, collecting samples and taking photographs.

They leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and a plaque on one of Eagle’s legs. It reads, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Armstrong and Aldrin blast off and dock with Collins in Columbia. Collins later says that “for the first time,” he “really felt that we were going to carry this thing off.”

The crew splashes down off Hawaii on July 24. Kennedy’s challenge has been met. Men from Earth have walked on the moon and returned safely home.

In an interview years later, Armstrong praises the “hundreds of thousands” of people behind the project. “Every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, ‘If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault.'”

In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong calls the flight “a beginning of a new age,” while Collins talks about future journeys to Mars.

Over the next three and a half years, 10 astronauts will follow in their footsteps. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission leaves the lunar surface with these words: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.”

 

 

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Source

NASA