Monday, July 20, 2009

Hey, Mike--you stay here and keep the engine running.

This is dedicated to one of history's greatest wingmen: Apollo XI astronaut Michael Collins, who stayed in the Command Module Columbia, orbiting about 50 miles above the lunar surface, while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong descended to the Sea of Tranquility in the Lunar Module Eagle.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I watched a number of reviews of Apollo XI so don't remember the source for this. It seems that when the LEM returned to space it did so constantly wobbling as the fuel was being used unequally from the tanks. Armstrong and Alden tried to compensate the best they could. When they got back in orbit, it was Collins who had to go and get them in the command module. They couldn't come to him. Collins docked with the LEM not the LEM with the command module. I don't think I'd ever heard that story before and shows that Collins was more to the mission than the guy who just went round-n-round.

fbear said...

It's amazing to think that we were able to send people to the moon with the technology available at the time.

I'm pretty sure that the computing power I have on the machine I'm using at this very second not only has more computing power than was on board Apollo 11, but more computing power than Mission Control.

Now we need a President willing to give a challenge, similar to the one Kennedy gave about going to the moon, to get us off of fossil fuels in a decade.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.