the Apollo missions

After a long day’s work, I found myself accidentally reading about the various Apollo missions. Sometimes I wish I had been born ten years earlier just to be able to experience that period.

Although Apollo 11 (the first moon landing) gets all the glory for obvious reasons, I think my two favorite missions are…

Apollo 8: circling around the back of the moon

Apollo 15: hanging out on the moon for three days and driving the rover many, many miles across the lunar surface

But alas, I have no memories of any of this. Apollo 8 was over Christmas of ’68, my very first Christmas, and Apollo 15 was just a couple of years later. The only one I really remember at all was the Apollo-Soyuz hookup in 1975. That was exciting. I think I made paper mockups of the two spacecraft and gradually cut off segments with scissors to simulate the total mission cycle.

I suppose if you had asked people at the time of the first moon landing, in 1969, to predict the state of space travel in 2009, most respondents would have projected a far more advanced state of things than we currently witness.

There are those who view space exploration with an attitude approaching indifference, and I’ve never been able to understand why. Is there anything more magnificent than photos from Cassini or Huygens or from the Hubble telescope?

The most obviously amazing thing about the Apollo missions is to consider how primitive the computers would have been– no doubt far less powerful than the MacBook on which I am typing this post.