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Freaky Friday: The Lunar Landings |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Arts & Science
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Friday, 17 July 2009 |
“Is that a lunar landing module in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” A girl tried using this joke to pick me up last night at the big NASA party in Pasadena. Not a bad opening line, and turns out she had the science to back it up. Turns out the computers used in the Apollo 11 moon landing had the approximate computing power of a modern cell phone. So bear this in mind. Many of the items available right here at Dyscern are powerful enough to navigate a manned spacecraft to the moon.
 This little tidbit is one of Ten Things You Didn’t Know About the
Apollo 11 Moon Landing, brought to you by the humbly endeavoring
scribes at Popular Science. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of
the Apollo mission, which is why you’ve been seeing it all over the
place. One more bit of trivia: The famous Apollo flag was made by
Sears. Click over to popsci.com for more nutritional infonuggets.
If you’d like to really dig into the matter, may I suggest the recent
Blu-ray release of For All Mankind, the excellent 1989 documentary on
the Apollo missions. The film provides some truly breathtaking footage,
all digitally remastered, as well as a terrific ambient soundtrack by
Brian Eno.
It seems in recent years we’ve lost the sense of wonder about the space
program, and the notion of sending people off the planet entirely.
Objectively speaking, it’s a pretty insane thing to do. What a
recommendation for the human race that we choose to do it anyway.
And what a recommendation for the young woman that she chose to flirt with me at the NASA partry. I still have the access codes from when I used to work at JPL, so we took a little tour of the NASA flight simulators. We're now both members of the 1,000 mile high club. Virtually.
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