Category Archives: Space

“Houston, we’ve had a problem…”

Forty years after the Apollo 13 mission, Universe Today takes a look at the missions, the accident and how the astronauts got back to earth safely: 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (Link via MetaFilter: Surviving a Space Scrape 40 years Ago.)
So far, nine of the 13 parts have been posted. (I’m going to add the other links as the pages become available.)

Gene Kranz was the flight director for NASA‘s Gemini and Apollo Missions. Here’s a Discovery Channel Video of Kranz talking about his experiences with the Apollo 13 mission. I’m reading Kranz’s book Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond right now and enjoy it immensely.

Forty years ago…

… men first landed on the moon.

Hal has some postings with links up.

I wasn’t born yet back then, but I’m sure I would have been glued to the TV. Today, you can recreate the experience by going to Kottke’s Apollo 11 page.

Wer noch mehr über das Mondprogramm der NASA erfahren möchte, dem empfehle ich das Buch, welches ich gerade lese: Der Mond (weitere Rezension) von Ralf Jaumann (Herausgeber).

Moon Images and Panoramas

NASA offers a lot of photos taken on the moon via their site NASA Images.

Virtual reality images of the moon is a collection of panoramas made from high-resolution photos the twelve astronauts who walked on the moon took. (The rest of Panoramas.dk is worth checking out as well, by the way. Quicktime is required to view the panoramas, though.)

From Panoramas.dk:

“Experience the moon just as the astronauts did – almost as you were there. View interactive QuickTime VR Panoramas in full-screen from the 6 Apollo Missions who landed on moon.
The links to the panoramas opens in a new fullscreen window which resizes to your screen.
All panoramas include original audio clips. Most of these are from the minutes around the time for the pans. On the Apollo 11 you hear the famous moment when Armstrong stepped down on the moon.”

If you want still more images of the moon, check out Google Moon!

About Google Moon:

After over three decades, we’re finally getting ready to go back to the Moon.
To help you prepare, and to whet your appetite for exploration, we teamed up with scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center to bring you this collection of lunar maps and charts. This tool is an exciting new way to explore the story of the Apollo missions, still the only time mankind has set foot on another world.

Moon Machines

There are some great documentaries about spacesuits, the Lunar Rover, navigation computers, the Lunar Module and Saturn V on Youtube, each in five parts. They were aired on the Discovery Channel during Space Week. I’ve only watched the first two documentaries (not enough time for all of them today) and found them very interesting. Enjoy!

Links via MetaFilter.