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Posted on 12/08/2009 4:41:33 PM PST by KevinDavis
Merry Christmas my fellow Space Freepers...
That was an awesome time. A time when we never said, as a country, anything was impossible. It was a time when the phrase "Yes we can" was more that a hollow political jingle.
Wonderful.
Merry Christmas
and my GOD bless
KevinDavis
I watched The Astronaut Farmer today. Not a particularly good movie but I love the dream that seems to be missing from so many hearts these days.
Sat around the kitchen table eating Cremettes with my buddies in college when this went down. Bet they wouldn’t get away with reading Bible verse today! Seems like yesterday .
I agree with you...
Yesterday I watched October Sky, the movie about Homer Hickam.
Good movie, however, if you go to his site.. He would tell you different.. If Homer did that today, they would take the rockets away and put him in jail..
I know that these days you have to have permits and file flight plans for any rocket you launch above a certain altitude.
It was the bread and butter of the General Dynamics Corp space program while I was there in San Diego.
The movie showed the dream and it showed how the government could try to squash any initiative.
I was a lucky kid who got to meet James McDivitt many times because my grandfather did business with him. I was pretty young but he didn’t seem to mind telling me about what it felt like to launch.
I was awestruck at the fact that at that time he was one of the few men who had actually been in orbit.
Excellent, thanks!
If you ever get the chance, and if you haven’t seen it already, check out Destination Moon. The perfect sort of hokieness that makes old sci-fi so wonderful (although at the time probably as near to accurate as a movie could possibly be) and a terrific message of private industry meeting a responsibility the government would not and using nuclear power to do so! Good stuff.
We got to meet a few astronauts at the plant. Most were surprisingly uncomfortable “pressing the flesh”. One, Anders later became the CEO of General Dynamics.
That Christmas Eve message from Apollo 8 is still one of the most moving moments from the entire space flight endeavour.
Frank Borman got the idea from a friend and loved it. He took it to Jim Lovell and Bill Anders and took them a short second to agree to the idea. When they got back, Madldyn Murray O’Hare tried to sue the crew and NASA for mixing religion and government. She lost that case, badly.
Years later, I got to see the original flown flight plan that had the Genesis reading in it. That was special. The Apollo 8 command module is in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
But, ah yes, I remember it well.
When I arrived at the hospital the receptionist said that they didn't allow pizza deliveries. I said that I was an expectant father and the pizza was for the dads in the waiting room. She told me that the maternity ward was quarenteened due to an influenca outbreak at that I was to go home and wait by the phone for the doctor's call.
I went home and sat in front of the TV watching the Apollo 8 mission. It was about 3:00AM or so when the crew read from Genesis. They signed off for the night and "brrrinng" the phone rang. The doctor said I had a healthy daughter and mom and kid were fine. He told me that I could visit the next day but would be dressed in scrubs.
The next day I arrived and was excited with a suggested name for my daughter.
Apollonia! ( I had found the name in the book "The Godfather". That was Michaels wife who he met and married while hiding out in Sicily!
My wife said, "No Way"! Thus Lisa was named after....never mind.
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