Doug Mataconis remembers, or at least commemorates.
I would add, as I do in the book, that this was also when we really won the space race, not when we actually landed on the moon. It was our “first,” and the first time the Soviets realized they couldn’t beat us.
I think Korolev and his top people knew much earlier, when they couldn’t secure the backing and funding they needed, but of course they could always hope that the Americans would somehow botch it, hitting major technical snags, and they hoped to at least scoop us with an orbital flight if their Zond missions panned out. We didn’t goof, and their Zond’s had issues, so Apollo 8 was the nail in the coffin.
If Korolev had seen the long, drawn out SLS development schedule, 11 to 18 years from program start to the first manned flight, depending on what you count as the starting point, he’d have danced a jig, seeing that we make the first moon landing sometime in the 1980’s.
The link didn’t work for me, but I happened to watch this just a few minutes ago.
Oops. I had watched the video earlier and in hitting a link issue just edited around the bad link (which is just a TTM header prefixed to a valid URL). The main video is the same as what you linked. And yet, as iconic as the image is, we don’t have a picture of actual Earth rise from the surface of the moon because we never landed on the dark side of the terminator. Something productive could probably be made of that, because it would be like arguing that all moon rise shots from Earth are actually the same regardless of the location. Scientifically, perhaps, but in terms of selling beer or hotel rooms, not even close.
Since the moon is locked with the same side always facing the Earth, you can’t see an earth rise from the surface. You only get earth rise from lunar orbit.
Libration? ‘Course, it would be real slow.
Well, due to the moon’s libration (slight elliptical orbit) we get to see almost 60% of the surface from Earth, so if you set up a site near the edge (as we see it), you should get an Earthrise and set once a month. 🙂
Thanks to libration, there is a ring of territory where the earth does rise and set. An exercise for the student is to figure out how where and how high the earth can get and still disappear completely.
Combining an Earthrise with an eclipse (is there a term for an Earth eclipse seen from the moon?) would be an interesting sight.
is there a term for an Earth eclipse seen from the moon?
I would call it a “solar eclipse”.
Years ago I watched a lunar eclipse through a telescope and was surprised at how much color I could see on the eclipsed portion of the moon. I could see faint hints of blue, green, yellow, and orange.
So I think a lunar eclipse as seen from the moon (i.e., a solar eclipse) would show quite a lot of color in the thin ring of Earth’s atmosphere, especially through a telescope.
In thinking about the significance of Earthrise, the first observation of Earth from the moon, I’m struck by the feeling that a more significant even for human spaceflight occured on Gemini 12, where Buzz Aldrin used underwater training and his spacewalks to figure out that the spacewalk problems on Gemini 11, where it seemed that perhaps a man couldn’t perform useful work in zero-G without risking exhaustion and perhaps a heart attack, were bogus. Alexi Leonov had a scare even trying to get back into his Soyuz, and I imagine that there was a big unknown floating in the air that would’ve made a lunar landing rather pointless, because even if we accomplished it, nothing much would come of it because man couldn’t build things in space.
So I’m thinking that for the people actually working on manned spaceflight, Gemini 12 might really be more important.
Very interesting, given that Buzz Aldrin got the seat on Gemini XII only because Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (original commander and pilot of Gemini IX) died in a plane crash, largely the result of foul weather in St. Louis and woefully inadequate information for making an instrument landing, and their backups had to take over that flight, such that Slayton needed two new backups for the flight. Given that weather is very susceptible to butterfly effects, it’s very likely that we’re in a relatively small band of timelines in which the crash happens, surrounded by a much larger band of timelines in which See and Bassett found more clement weather in St. Louis that day, landed safely and went on to fly their mission, and Stafford and Cernan flew Gemini XII.
Of course in the absence of a reliable and verifiable quantum bridge (data or physical) across paratime, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics remains a hypothetical, and discussion of other timelines speculation or the province of parapsychological researchers. But it’s still interesting to wonder how long those worlds continued to struggle with the problems of being able to do useful work on an EVA.
If engineers had incorrectly assumed that man couldn’t usefully work in zero-G, except for simple tasks, one odd possibility is that after beating the Soviets to the moon, we’d have switched our emphasis to making spinning space stations with artificial gravity, and so Skylab might have been entirely different.
A follow on thought.
Humans are tree climbers who happily hang upside-down, scale cliffs, buildings, towers, and whatnot. We’re pretty happy in any orientation, unlike a lot of animals who are very dependent on a clear posture relative to up and down. Cats are even better than we are at righting themselves, but I’m not sure if they could do without an up. One of my rabbits with a minor back injury starts screaming if she can’t right herself. Humans are among the largest animals on the planet, and yet probably one of a few large animals that can adapt to no up.