Over the last week, demolition crews have torn down the old Saturn IB rocket that stood at the Alabama Welcome Center on I-65. After nearly four decades, the rocket deteriorated to the point it was deemed unsafe and efforts by local officials to renovate the rocket failed.
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It’s a hot and humid summer morning. On July 16th, 1969 the silence was broken by the sound of five F-1 engines roaring to life. Apollo 11 lifted off at 9:32 AM EDT on a mission of a lifetime. On July 20th, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are about to land on the Moon.
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Human spaceflight has a relatively short history over the past ~60 years, but the Saturn rocket has a major position towards the start of it. Now, a major piece of that history has been destroyed because nobody wanted to pay the $250,000 to move the booster and NASA didn’t bother to keep it preserved.
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The launch control center at Kennedy Space Center that first sent mankind to the Moon has now been named after Rocco Petrone, a man instrumental in America’s journey to reach Earth’s celestial neighbor during the Apollo program.
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The US reached the Moon with the Apollo program, and we haven’t been back since. But the planned first crewed mission of the program, Apollo 1, ended tragically before the rocket ever left the launch pad. The mission is deemed by NASA one of the worst incidents in spaceflight history.
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Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step foot on the Moon, received his first COVID-19 vaccine dose on Tuesday and urges others to do the same when it’s available to them.
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Humans first orbited the Moon on this day in 1968, and while on their first pass around the backside of the Moon, they first saw with their own eyes Earthrise over the horizon.
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On this day 48 years ago, Gene Cernan took the final steps on the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission. Stating that “we believe not too long into the future” we will return to the Moon, Cernan would have never thought it would have taken this long.
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The Planetary Society has a new podcast called “A Political History of Apollo” that explores why we decided to go to the Moon and how this turned into a full fledge space race to land a human on the surface.
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The city of Biloxi is honoring retired NASA astronaut Fred Haise with a new monument on Saturday, April 11. Astronaut Haise is a Biloxi native and one of three astronauts sent to space for NASA’s Apollo 13 mission — a mission intended for the Moon that almost took the lives of NASA astronauts Fred Haise, James Lovell, and John Swigert. Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the historic mission.
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From NASA Goddard:
Expand Expanding CloseThis video uses data gathered from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to recreate some of the stunning views of the Moon that the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their perilous journey around the farside in 1970.
These visualizations, in 4K resolution, depict many different views of the lunar surface, starting with earthset and sunrise and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control.
Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes — they are not shown in “real-time.”