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And IIRC, the Liberty 7 capsule is on display at the Space Museum in Hutchison, Kansas (yes, you read that right). And if you are a space buff, and haven't been, put it on your bucket list. It's well worth it.

oohrah wrote:

ELB wrote:I wonder who the other four guys are, the three swimmers and the guy holding the tether to the capsule?

If it was the same as Navy water survival training, those other swimmers are trained divers to react in the case of real emergencies.

I was glad to see Gus Grissom was exonerated when his capsule was recovered from the deep a few years back. "The Right Stuff" was not kind to him.

I remember reading somewhere that it was Navy SEALS who went into the water to effect the crew retrieval each time a crew had to be picked up after splashdown at mission's end.

Here's an example: http://wtkr.com/2012/07/21/retired-navy ... y-mission/

oohrah wrote:And IIRC, the Liberty 7 capsule is on display at the Space Museum in Hutchison, Kansas (yes, you read that right). And if you are a space buff, and haven't been, put it on your bucket list. It's well worth it.

If you ever make it to the Kennedy Space Center, it is WELL worth the the "old Cape Canaveral" tour which visits most of the launch sites for Freedom through Apollo - including the pad where Apollo 1 burned. The tour ends in a display where the entire length of the last Apollo rocket - Apollo 18 - lies in state, perfectly preserved. You can walk the entire length of the monster, from stage 1 booster nozzles to the tip of the command module's escape tower. It is really quite remarkable...... a lifetime memory. It is hard to imagine that men once flew something THAT big and powerful.

This helps to put the mammoth size of the thing in perspective:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

oohrah wrote:And IIRC, the Liberty 7 capsule is on display at the Space Museum in Hutchison, Kansas (yes, you read that right). And if you are a space buff, and haven't been, put it on your bucket list. It's well worth it.

If you ever make it to the Kennedy Space Center, it is WELL worth the the "old Cape Canaveral" tour which visits most of the launch sites for Freedom through Apollo - including the pad where Apollo 1 burned. The tour ends in a display where the entire length of the last Apollo rocket - Apollo 18 - lies in state, perfectly preserved. You can walk the entire length of the monster, from stage 1 booster nozzles to the tip of the command module's escape tower. It is really quite remarkable...... a lifetime memory. It is hard to imagine that men once flew something THAT big and powerful.

You're right, it's a heck of a tour and the Saturn V is incredibly large. We had a reception in that building for the launch of STS-125.

The Annoyed Man wrote: If you ever make it to the Kennedy Space Center, it is WELL worth the the "old Cape Canaveral" tour which visits most of the launch sites for Freedom through Apollo - including the pad where Apollo 1 burned. The tour ends in a display where the entire length of the last Apollo rocket - Apollo 18 - lies in state, perfectly preserved. You can walk the entire length of the monster, from stage 1 booster nozzles to the tip of the command module's escape tower. It is really quite remarkable...... a lifetime memory. It is hard to imagine that men once flew something THAT big and powerful.

This helps to put the mammoth size of the thing in perspective:

I read that the escape rocket motor for the Apollo module was more powerful than the Redstone that launched the Mercury capsules into space.

One of my old company's customers was in spacesuit design at JSC, which in the Shuttle days was in the old repurposed WETF, the Weightless Environmental Training Facility. The WETF was a swimming pool for weightless training, and was in Building 29, the old Mercury era astronaut training centrifuge. High-gee to zero-gee in that building.

I remember seeing a navigational aid from Glenn's spacecraft on display in the Smithsonian. It looked like a two-part sheetmetal toy globe in a clockwork mechanism, wound by hand, that let Glenn correct for his actual observed position and keep visual track of where he was. Like Star Trek's Spock, who once endeavored to escape a time paradox by constructing a mnemonic memory circuit from "stone knives and bearskins", we took primitive technology and willpower and guts and three digits of precision on slide rules and extended our reach to the moon.

And then we didn't go back. As voiced by that episode of Star Trek, time resumed its shape. After those remarkable, daring achievements, all is as it was. Too many of us go about our affairs here with downcast eyes while the moon and beyond still entices from above.

Hopefully we'll resume manned space travel beyond low Earth orbit. The first small steps beyond our gravity field were man-wrought miracles, and as was also said on that old TV show, many such journeys are possible.

If only we would.

And as for mnemonic memory circuits from stone knives and bearskins, we actually did some of that. If you are familiar with ferrite core memory from the dark ages, you'll know it was limited to one bit per iron bead - except when Apollo flew, NASA stored four bits per bead in something called rope core.

The trick is it was read-only memory, not read-write, and used permanently magnetized beads, not soft iron. There were four sense wires, not just one, and the data was encoded by the weave. Which wire skipped which beads determined the data content, and put four kilobytes of read-only core in an array about the size of a postage stamp.

For those of you who live near Houston or plan to visit, Space Center Houston has a Saturn V rocket on display.
It is amazing to see in person. Not only the size, but looking at all of the tubing, cables, valves going into the rocket engine and nozzle boggles the mind.

WildBill wrote:

OldCurlyWolf wrote:

oohrah wrote:

ELB wrote:I wonder who the other four guys are, the three swimmers and the guy holding the tether to the capsule?

If it was the same as Navy water survival training, those other swimmers are trained divers to react in the case of real emergencies.

I was glad to see Gus Grissom was exonerated when his capsule was recovered from the deep a few years back. "The Right Stuff" was not kind to him.

I didn't notice anything about the capsule being recovered and Grissom being exhonerated. When did that happen?

The Liberty Bell 7 was recovered July 20, 1999.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9907/20/g ... apsule.01/

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/dec/12/news/mn-43115

Ok, I am not surprised I didn't notice it then. At that point in time I wasn't paying much attention to the news in any form. Thanks.

TVGuy wrote:If you remember Car Talk, this was a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8

My niece graduated from that small technical institute that John was talking about. When she got her Masters, Click and Clack were the guest speakers at commencement. They were AWESOME!