Free Republic

[dayglored comment] Those of us who have been forced to wait forever as Windows copies some huge file... well here's a way to make the wait more tolerable. Copying a large file from one drive to another, or over a network, can take quite a while, and there’s nothing you can do in that time, but wait. However, an enterprising developer has found a way to make the copy dialog more interesting -- he’s added a fully playable version of the arcade classic Lunar Lander to it. And this is no basic addition -- you can choose your difficulty level...

Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr.(Voice of Apollo) has just passed. Confidence is high on this. Should be breaking soon.

Our nation yesterday rightly treated itself to a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. Vice President Pence summed it up this way: "This may be the only event of the 20th century that will be remembered in the 30th. But it wasn’t celebrated by everybody. Even for an event like this, there are conspiracy theorists. They claim that the Apollo program never happened, that it was all faked by the United States government, as in the movie Capricorn-1. Examples: Some conspiracy theorists talk about the fluttering in the flag planted by Buzz Aldrin. (Explanation: it was vibrations in the wires...

The Washington Monument has been transformed into a stunning tribute to the first moon landing through a dazzling series of projections. Crowds packed the National Mall to watch the 17-minute show, which was projected three times each on Friday and Saturday, marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Cheers rose from the crowd as the Saturn V rocket was seen lifting off. The show also included various scenes of the stages separating, the moon landing, and splash-down as the hero astronauts returned to Earth.

Watching the Moon landing 50 years ago from his comfortable Paris home, Yves Beon could barely contain himself at the spectacle unfolding on TV. Dozens of white-shirted scientists and engineers at the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, were on their feet, many waving flags, cheering at a triumph that was enhancing American prestige and unleashing an ocean of apple-pie patriotism. Yet Beon, a hero of the French Resistance, was spitting venom at the screen that night and, had he been alive to see last week’s documentaries repeating the footage of Neil Armstrong’s ‘giant leap for mankind’, his reaction...

For a 12-year-old schoolboy, Armstrong's moonwalk couldn't have been worse timed. The summer vacation had given over in the middle of July and for desis, the Eagle landed- given the time difference - on a Monday. That wouldn't have been so bad if Armstrong hadn't taken hours - bloody hours - to undo the hatch and climb down the ladder. The Lunar Module (it was capitalized in our heads) landed at a quarter to two in the morning. That wasn't so bad because in my brother's head and mine, that wasn't the main event and we could sleep through it....

On July 20, 1969, most Americans were consumed by the event of a lifetime: the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The Giants were no different. Giants groundskeeper Matty Schwab found space in his work area underneath the right-field grandstand at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to plug in a black-and-white television set. Schwab’s hidden headquarters was close to the double doors adjacent to the Giants’ bullpen. So, thanks to Schwab, Giants relievers could sneak peeks at history during the early innings of San Francisco’s game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Right-hander Bob Bolin was among the Giants with divided attention. As he...

It’s genuinely tragic, but July 4th has come to signify the death of common culture within America. While most red-blooded Americans were celebrating the birth of the greatest country in the world, the left was singing an entirely different tune. Anyone active on social media undoubtedly witnessed the screeds of social justice warriors attempting to justify their hatred of all things red, white, and blue. And while those unhinged rants could be dismissed as the ravings of liberal lunatics, the far left wasn’t alone in its anti-American sentiments. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman Democratic Congresswoman and hero of the progressive left,...

Normally, I try to steer clear of putting opinion pieces into the first person, but the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing is enormously personal for me.  I was the kid in 5th Grade who dressed as Neil Armstrong in order to give a presentation of my report on Armstrong as one of the great “explorers” in world history.And I find it interesting that like the trashing of the legacy of those other great explorers by today’s progressives, the singular event of man’s achievement of landing on the moon is not spared the smearing of the world’s left....

A new film, Hidden Figures, tells the story of the maths wizards who Nasa relied on. When John Glenn was waiting to be fired into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, there was one person he trusted with the complex trajectory calculations required to bring him down safely from his orbital spaceflight: Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician who worked in Nasa’s segregated west area computers division. “Get the girl, check the numbers,” Glenn said before boarding the rocket. “If she says they’re good, I’m good to go.” Johnson was one of three female African-American mathematicians known as the “computers in...

My dad was USAF, stationed at Minot AFB, ND. I was a 9 year-old space nerd. Most of my friends were also space nerds and we followed the Apollo program closely. During the summer, the housing area was crawling with kids all day until the sun set about 10:00 pm. Every house had at least one kid, and most had 2 or 4. The winters were harsh, so we took full advantage of the summers and stayed outside as much as possible. GREAT place to grow up. The best. The evening of July 20, 1969, I was playing with some...

50 years ago this summer, the U.S. landed men on the moon. We’ve all seen the grainy video footage of Neil Armstrong. We’ve heard the recording of his famous words about the “small step" and the "giant leap." And in our imaginations, this unbelievable achievement has essentially been distilled down to that. But this accomplishment was the result of a massive team of people laboring for a decade on an effort unlike anything that came before it. And it was driven largely by a desire to keep the world from being enslaved to a most dangerous ideology. In this episode,...

In the summer of 1962, Walter Schirra — who would soon become America's third man to orbit the Earth — walked into a Houston photo supply shop looking for a camera he could take into space. He came out with a Hasselblad 500C, a high-end Swedish import that had been recommended to him by photographers from Life and National Geographic. "He was sort of an amateur photographer," Jennifer Levasseur, a curator in charge of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's astronaut cameras, says of Schirra. "Somewhere along the line, the decision was made that he could select what camera...

For more than 40 years, the "Apollo to the Moon" gallery at the National Air and Space Museum has provided millions of visitors a close-up look at some of the key artifacts from humanity's first visit to another world. On Monday (Dec. 3), the gallery will close forever. "This was one of the original galleries built for the museum in 1976," explained curator Michael Neufeld, during a tour of "Apollo to the Moon" streamed live on Facebook from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. on Friday (Nov. 30). "It has many key artifacts that are great...

An explorer's adage says to "take only photos, leave only footprints." But it seems the footprints of NASA's Apollo astronauts had unintended consequences for the surface of the moon after they landed there nearly 50 years ago. Newly discovered temperature data from the 1970s moon landings, released in the Journal of Geophysical Research in April, reveals that NASA astronauts probably warmed up the moon's surface temperature by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit by walking around and poking into the lunar surface. The data comes from so-called heat-flow experiments that were installed on the moon in 1971 and 1972 during...

Explanation: Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this stereo scene from Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon! The color anaglyph features a detailed 3D view of Apollo 17's Lunar Rover in the foreground -- behind it lies the Lunar Module and distant lunar hills. Because the world was going to be able to watch the Lunar Module's ascent stage liftoff via the rover's TV camera, this parking place was also known as the VIP Site. In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited...

Apollo 14 -- the safely numbered one after that, um, other one -- splashed down 40 years ago today. Since there were no dancing-on-the-edge death-defying dramatic escapes on this one, the mission is largely lost to history. It did get NASA back on track, of course, and paved the way for as many additional moon landings as the budget could afford (three). But there were some oddities attached to Apollo 14. Here are six: 6. The astronauts got lost on the moon. 4. Astronaut Ed Mitchell became a raving UFO loon. 2. Shepard: Least-liked Apollo astronaut? Shepard was a Machiavellian,...

Below Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck explains the Apollo Alliance on his July 28 show. Beck mentions the Obama administration’s “stimulus” blueprint, “The New Apollo Program: Clean Energy, Good Jobs,” which you can read here.

For years there have been rumours that the Apollo lunar landings were faked, staged on a movie set to convince the world that the US had beaten the Soviets to the Moon. And, despite evidence to the contrary, the belief that the "one small step for man" was a sham continues to spread. Now, having tried to stay above the rumours, the US space agency (Nasa) has finally got fed up with the conspiracy theorists and asked James Oberg, a leading aerospace writer, to produce a book that it hopes will settle the issue. But will it work, or will...