Every day this week I plan to watch another movie or documentary about the missions to the moon. Today, after a grueling set of errands (grueling due to the HEAT) I settled down with a snack and watched MISSION CONTROL, which was fascinating.
It was a blow by blow documentary of the experiences of the engineers in the control room during the Apollo missions. It really brought home to me what an almost impossible task was accomplished by the people of that time and place. To make from almost nothing, a building, a team, and the machinery to send men into space, to the moon, and get them back alive!
Joel Morgenstern (The Wall Street Journal)
Best Moon Movies for the 50th Anniversary
First Man
Apollo 11
Apolo13
For All Mankind
Moon (2009) I was not familiar with this one
and although it isn't about the moon, it is about flight training for astronauts - The Right Stuff (my choice to add)
All along the week, I have had questions and looked them up and found out some facts. I wondered exactly how many men did go to the moon. The answer is 12. There were 4 successful moon landings the last of which was Apollo 17.
The first women in space were Russian. There were two of them. We didn't send one until 1983, Sally Ride. All in all, there were 64 women astronauts.
Side note: It was a "man's world" for sure in the 1960's, and that was reflected in the fact that almost all the engineer were men. I remember well how some colleges were closed to women entirely, and colleges that did let women in, sequestered them in 'female appropriate' courses of study, such as education. Engineering was closed to us, as was law, physics, and many of the sciences.
Nonetheless, it was a marvel that we could engineer, create, and successfully operate a rocket-ship to space. I am celebrating that marvel every day this week!
Many of the engineers said we couldn't do that now. We would have to start from scratch and begin all over since technology has changed so much since then. Interesting. Well, we are doing other things, Mars, Hubble, and so on. Thank heavens for one thing we did NOT do, and that is to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon which was something that was discussed and then prohibited by international space treaty (another interesting topic).
I am not sure which of the top ten movies about the moon I am going to watch next. The Right Stuff was a possible choice!
Happy trails, even contrails
Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com
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