talkmagic.co.uk

dat8962 wrote:On the moon landings only, I'm not convinced and that's true.

Not convinced of what?

That it happened in 69

you would of thought it would of been worth re-visiting several times though eh...the ideal spying-base...

I'm not convinced of the landings myself, or rather, i like the idea of it all being a scam more than the space-travel part...

was there a bit where someone said "oh, hang on a minute, can we do the landing again? i've got a hair in the gate..."

im even more surprised that there's not a McMoon-Donalds up there...perhaps thats on the dark side....

There's a really rather excellent book called "Apollo: The Race to the Moon" by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox in which the authors go to the US National Archive to get the audio tapes of the missions. Then they track down the people on the tapes and get their recollections of events. It's fascinating and a bit terrifying. Most Saturn V's limped into orbit with serious malfunctions, some idiot had added another mode to Eagle's ascent radar that kept overloading the onboard computer on the descent when it lost sight of Columbia, no one was sure if they'd actualy get off the surface alive and manage to get the physics of docking right, and when Armstrong grabbed the controls to stop them crashing, it was literally brown trousers time becasue a LEM is inherently unstable to make it manoeuverable in just that situation. Incredible stuff. NASA even had an alternative press statement to release in case the astronauts died. Wikipedia has a copy. There are some lovely snippets of info too. The guy telling them to override the bus errors as Eagle descended (a bloke called Bales) went to a press conference after his shift finished and passed some protestors on the way, and suddenly realised that he'd spent the past near-decade burried so deeply in the Apollo programme that he had no idea what had happened in society during the 60s or what they were protesting about (the enormous cost of putting men on the Moon when people were starving).