re: Apollo 8 assembly, NASA is incredible

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but the catastrophes are all that anyone will ever remember)

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I don't think thats true for anyone with half a brain.

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I am currently a NASA contractor. In my position, I have been fortunate enough to travel to every NASA center except for one, and in my capacity, have been able to go with my camera into places most folks cannot go and take pictures.

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I'm missing JPL, Glenn, Langley, and Wallops from my list.
Been inside the STS many times. Spent 12 hours in the USL.
Have close to 10K hours on console supporting STS and ISS missions.

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I don't think thats true for anyone with half a brain.

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What else happened during the shuttle program? Sure, I know, I'm a space junkie. McCandless' untethered spacewalk, Hubble, fixing Hubble, Glenn, and so forth.

But ask the average American about the shuttle program? Challenger and Columbia - those 2 stories probably combined for more media coverage than the entire rest of the shuttle program AND the Apollo program after 11.

So, I respectfully disagree with your assessment of me as "half-brained" on space topics.

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Shuttles external fuel tank falling towards earth:

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That's an unusual photo... since most external tanks end up in the Indian Ocean, I can only presume this is over South Africa somewhere. Even so, it is difficult to see any single area on the African continent this well developed from an agricultural standpoint.

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I was in late elementary school when the Mercury program started. The Space Race years were an incredible time to be alive. Every space mission was cover 24/7 on tv. There was such a feeling of national pride

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Oyster, you are so right. Something tells me we are about the same age. Out here on the west coast, we used to have to get up at 5 am to watch the launches. They were an event that the entire country took part in. Great sense of national pride.

The Mercury and Gemini programs also introduced to some of the most incredible news reporting and reporters that this country has ever seen. To me, Frank McGee of NBC was the best news anchor of them all.

Another thing that was mind boggling, the computer power on Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo was less that what the average smartphone has today. Yet, they did all that they did.

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All that was built without really using any computing (or the most basic computing you can think of).

How the shite is that possible??

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One has to recall the infrastructure upon which the space program was built - the U.S. had slowly become an industrial juggernaut - we flirted with war during the last year or so of the Great One, and the rest of Europe exhausted itself. When that war opted for a sequel, we were still a people with heavy isolationist instincts - once we committed to effort 100%, we built more planes than we could fly, more ships than we could sail, more tanks than we could crew - and built a bomb that some who worked on it were worried that we would destroy the world with it and we set it off anyway.

So, 15 years after that war, when the President said, "We choose to go to the Moon" - than goddammit we were going to go to the Moon or die trying. Folks back then did their own math and physics, with slide rules and primitive computers to basically check their work and offer some capacity for speed.

Today's kids couldn't get to the Moon because there are no Google Maps directions for it on their smartphones. That's the God's honest truth.

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Another thing that was mind boggling, the computer power on Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo was less that what the average smartphone has today. Yet, they did all that they did.

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Facty: the Apollo program used an onboard infrastructure with less computational power than a Commodore 64.

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Another thing that was mind boggling, the computer power on Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo was less that what the average smartphone has today. Yet, they did all that they did.

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That's an understatement.

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NASA sucks right now.

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One thing they are doing is crowdsourcing some things - they've embraced a computer game called Kerbal Space Program - which centers around a fledging space program on a planet with a race of creatures not unlike the Minions from Despicable Me. They've already studied certain concepts that heretofore have only been done in simulations (like asparagus staging, popular in the game).

It's on Steam and I highly recommend it for any space nuts who are also into gaming.