Paris Olympics thread

Apollo 11 took off before the party on Chappaquiddick and the landing and the spacewalk was two days after the authorities fished Mary Jo Kopechne out.  

The Apollo 11 astronauts left the camera, the flag, a Laser Ranging Retroreflector, a Passive Seismic Experiment Package (which was put way too close to the Eagle and failed after 21 days), and the Landing Module, the bottom part of the Eagle.

The Laser Ranging Retroreflector still works and is still used, in part, to measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  It is this experiment that has shown that the Moon is outside of the Earth's gravity well and is actually moving away from the Earth.  This has led to a lot of our knowledge on Theia and the formation of both Earth and the Moon, as well  as what life may have been like for prehistoric animals and people.  Apollo 14 and 15 also carried LRRs, which help to get more accurate data out of the Apollo 11 LRR.  

The Passive Seismic Experiment Package was needed because of the failures of Rangers 3-5.  (Rangers 3 and 5 missed the Moon entirely, and Ranger 4 crashed into the Moon, although there has never been any evidence of any crater.  Ranger 3's rocket malfunctioned.  Ranger 4's computer never turned on, which caused it to crash into the Moon.  Ranger 5's solar panels failed and the backup battery failed before Ranger 5 could be correctly oriented.  Ranger 5 only missed the Moon by 450 miles, but, with inertia, ultimately missed by several hundred thousand miles.)  The PSEP only lasted for 21 days before failing, but it showed that the Moon was a lot less seismically-active than the Earth, which was very surprising to scientists at the time.  Aldrin and Armstrong did a bad job at siting the instrument, which may have led to its premature failure, at least in part.

The failure of the PSEP in Apollo 11, led to the Apollo 12 astronauts spending some of their time setting up a second PSE, which provided better and more reliable data.

It would be difficult to fake all of that.

You can add to that the Apollo 16 landing site (the closest of the other five) was too far away to plant Apollo 11's LRR.

And the Apollo 11 LRR is still functioning to this day.

Apollo 11 landing happened.  The idea that it did not happen was a Communist disinformation campaign, which has proven to be surprisingly effective, with many useful idiots out there.

To get back to the earlier discussion of the Cuyahoga River, though, part of the reason that it took so long to get anything done with the EPA was because of the successful Apollo 11 mission and subsequent actions taken by Congress and President Nixon as a result.

Lance was not even born until 1971 and would have his abusive father's surname, Gunderson, at least until 1974.

good question and answer. I looked at a calculator for figuring calories burned swimming, and it says 200 is a reasonable guess (I'd move it to 250 but I have zero expertise at this). I'm surprised because if Ledecky's running colleague ran a near world record pace for 16 minutes, she might run 3.5 miles. For those miles at that pace, I'm guessing 400 to 500 calories would be burnt. I would guess you would be equally tired after 15 minutes of that effort by either running or swimming. Any triathletes here want to respond?

Back to Apollo for a minute. The onboard computer system that was used to get to the moon and back was something like 12 kilobytes.

Try getting an astronaut into a capsule like that today, and he'd probably say, "Ehh, why don't you guys fake this one, while I hide in the cellar for 2 weeks?"

Sort of goes to show that more important than the technology is the human will and determination. Human beings are incredible when they want to be.

The onboard computer system had a little bit more than 4 kilobytes of RAM but had about 72 kilobytes of ROM.

A picture of Margaret Hamilton, NASA computer programmer, standing by the code she created to get Apollo 11 to the moon, July 1969:


The focus on the onboard computer system belies the fact that most systems on board the Apollo missions were primarily being controlled by computers back on Earth.

The computer was primarily there as an auto-pilot system and to assist the astronauts with difficult maneuvers, like landing on the Moon.  In Apollo 11, the computer almost crashed on decent, because one of the astronauts had set one of the radar switches to the wrong position, which was intermittently overloading the computer's processing ability.  Because it was only intermittent, though, the decision was made to land anyway.  The computer issue caused Apollo 11 to fly past the chosen landing spot.  The computer actually was directing the Eagle to the edge of a crater.  Neil Armstrong manually flew the Eagle past the computer-directed location and landed in a different location entirely.

The computer also was utilized to return the astronauts to Earth.  However, because of bad weather at the intended location, the Apollo 11 astronauts once again overrode the computer and programmed a different landing location.  The result was successful but, as was predicted, the Columbia landed in the ocean upside down.  It took 10 minutes to right the Columbia, but, otherwise, the mission was rather unremarkable.

Apollo 12 was struck by lightning on takeoff, which threw off the computer slightly, requiring an additional unplanned burn to return to Earth.

During Apollo 13, a portion of the Odyssey's information had to be transferred to the Aquarius' computer and then transferred back to the Odyssey's computer.  The transfer to the Aquarius' computer was done manually.  Part of the Mission Control code for a portion of the Apollo 13 mission was written, while the mission was ongoing.  This was done successfully.  The computer information from the Aquarius' computer back to the Odyssey's computer was done successfully automatically without incident.

During Apollo 14, a faulty switch was causing the computer to try to abort the moon landing and a workaround had to be implemented.  The radar went down later during landing.  The astronauts cleared the issue by turning the radar off and back on.  Despite the foregoing issues, Alan Shepard's landing was ultimately the cleanest of the six that landed on the Moon.

In Apollo 15, the computer placed the astronauts 3,000 feet off the landing site.  David Scott had to manually fly the Falcon to try and get them closer to the landing site.  Scott landed 1,800 feet from the landings site and the Falcon almost tipped over on landing.  It is thought that the Apollo 15 landing was the fastest of the six landings with Scott cutting the engines too early.

I have a 16 year old daughter who is coming off a year long rehab from a knee injury, so the current furor over biological males competing in women's Olympic Boxing has some relevance for me.


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I'm all for people being able to self-identify however they wish socially. In competition, I have a real, real problem with it.