by slracer » Mon Jul 20, 2009 11:56 pm
I was lucky enough to have worked at NASA Houston as a Co-operative Education (aka Co-Op) student starting in the summer of 1963 and continuing through the spring of 1966, then finished my senior year at Kansas State Univ without further interruption. During that time I saw an awful lot of dedicated people who were working toward that goal of putting someone on the moon "and returning them safely to Earth" before the end of the decade! And Houston was just the tip of the iceberg. There is no way that all those people were fooled or involved. Hanging on my shop wall right now is the outer window from a Mercury capsule labelled "Use on capsule 10" (if you remember, the 7th astronaut did not fly in Mercury due to a heart murmur) and below it is a somewhat tattered paperback of "We 7, a story by the astronauts themselves". I'll get a pic of that "shrine" and post it tomorrow! The book contains the autographs of Scott Carpenter and John Glenn. (Why I did not get the others, to this day I cannot tell you!) I used to have a small screw from the door of Ed White's Gemini capsule when the local tech guy at Ellington AFB, Tx took the door apart to try to figure out why it didn't latch completely after the first walk in space, causing all of NASA to hold their collective breath during re-entry waiting for capsule communication to begin again. Unfortunately, I lost that piece somewhere in my numerous travels / moves. No, it happened! The people who say it didn't don't believe in Mulder either :p and they don't live 60 miles from Roswell (and even closer to THAT crash site)!
The real question today is "Should we go back to the moon (and establish a base), or go to Mars?"
JMO - Doug
I choose NOT to be an ordinary man because it is my right to be uncommon if I can! - unknown