Apollo 11

pages: 370 words: 100,856

Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure by Dan Parry

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, undersea cable, white flight

Soviet Union and see Soviet Union Apollo 1 Apollo 2 Apollo 3 Apollo 4 Apollo 5 Apollo 6 Apollo 7 Apollo 8 Apollo 9 Apollo 10 Apollo 11 abort procedures adapter alarms command module Columbia Command Module Pilot (CMP) see also Collins, Michael communications computers and computer programs conspiracy theorists and contractors, role in building of descent from lunar orbit to moon surface (DOI) (PDI) disaster, preparation for experiments, scientific flight-plan launch vehicle/fuel tanks joystick landing sites launch launch preparation life support system, portable (PLSS) lunar extra-vehicular visor assembly (LEVA) lunar orbit insertion (LOI) LOI-2 lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) lunar orbit, getting into lunar orbit, leaving meals mission patch Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) modular equipment stowage assembly (MESA) Official Flight Kit 'parking orbit' passive thermal control (PTC) personal preference kits (PPKs) PR and press primary guidance and navigation system (PGNS) readiness review re-entry and landing rendezvous rest periods rockets see also Saturn V rules, mission selection process for mission service module solar wind collector (SWC) stack ('space vehicle') suits, pressure toilet facilities training for mission trans-lunar injection (TLI) pictures, TV and camera UFO sighting, possible water supply Apollo 12 Apollo 13 Apollo 14 Apollo 16 Apollo 17 Apollo Spacecraft Program Office Apollo-Soyuz Test Project Armstrong, Eric ('Ricky') Armstrong, Janet Armstrong, Karen Armstrong, Mark Armstrong, Neil Aldrin and ambition to be an astronaut Apollo 8 career post-Apollo college Collins and early life Ed White and Gemini flights heart rate on landing, Apollo 11 landing on/descent to the moon (DOI) (PDI), Apollo 11 launch, Apollo 11 launch preparation, Apollo 11 lunar landing research vehicle and lunar orbit insertion, Apollo 11 moon walk, Apollo 11 navy service on chances of survival, Apollo 11 'one small step' line pictures, TV and camera, Apollo 11 position in Apollo program PR duties, Apollo 11 quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 rendezvous techniques return to Eagle, Apollo 11 return to earth, Apollo 11 selected for Apollo 11 selected to be first man to walk on the moon test pilot training undocking, Apollo 11 view from Apollo 11 X-15 Armstrong, Stephen Armstrong, Viola Bales, Steve Bassett, Charlie Bassett, Jeannie Bean, Alan Bell Aerosystems Belyaev, Pavel Beregovoi, Georgi Bondarenko, Valentin Borman, Frank Braun, Dr Wernher von Brown, Dick Calle, Paul CapCom see also Mission Control Center, Houston Cape Kennedy see Kennedy Space Center Carlton, Bob Carpentier, Bill Cernan, Gene Chaffee, Roger Charlesworth, Cliff CIA Cobb, Jerrie Cold War see also Soviet Union Collins, Major General James Collins, Michael Air Force Apollo Project, position within Buzz Aldrin and career post-NASA childhood command module pilot (CMP) Gemini flights joins NASA launch preparation, Apollo 11 lunar orbit insertion (LOI), Apollo 11 LOI-2, Apollo 11 meals on Apollo 11 moon, on appearance of moon orbit, Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong and pictures, TV and camera, Apollo 11 pressure suits, hatred of quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 return to earth, Apollo 11 selected for mission, Apollo 11 task list, Apollo 11 trans-lunar injection (TLI), Apollo 11 training, Apollo 11 undocking, Apollo 11 views from Apollo 11 weightlessness, Apollo 11 Collins, Patricia command modules Block I Block II see also Apollo 11 Conrad, Pete Cooper, Gordon Cronkite, Walter Cunningham, Walter Day, Dick Deiterich, Chuck descent orbit insertion (DOI) direct ascent Duke, Charlie Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP) earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) Edwards Air Force Base Ellington Air Force Base extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) early NASA Apollo 11 Gemini Soviet Explorer 1 F-1 engine Faget, Max Fendell, Ed Feoktistiv, Konstantin Freeman, Ted free return Frick, Charles Gagarin, Yuri Garman, Jack Gemini, Project Gemini 4 Gemini 5 Gemini 6 Gemini 7 Gemini 8 Gemini 9 Gemini 10 Gemini 11 Gemini 12 Gemini 13 Gilruth, Dr Robert Glenn, John Goodard Space Flight Center, Maryland Goldstone communications station, California Gordon, Dick Greene, Jay Grissinger, John Grissom, Gus Grumman Corporation Haise, Fred Hamblin, Dora Jane Hatleburg, Lieutenant Clancy Hinch, Derryn Hirasaki, John Honeysuckle communications station Hornet, USS Houbolt, John Humphrey, Hubert In the Shadow of the Moon International Space Station Irwin, Jim Jodrell Bank Observatory Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Johnson Space Center, Houston see also Manned Spaceflight Center, Houston Jupiter booster Kelly, Tom Kennedy Space Center, Florida Kennedy, John F.

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.), Before This Decade Is Out, University Press of Florida, 2002 Loyd Swenson, James Grimwood and Charles Alexander, This New Ocean, NASA, 1998 Guenter Wendt, The Unbroken Chain, Apogee Books, 2001 Websites history.nasa.gov/monograph4 history.msfc.nasa.gov/saturn_apollo/first_saturn_rocket.html history.nasa.gov/SP-4205 www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1 www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/jfk/houston/stories/dinner.html www.britannica.com/eb/article-9057747/Outer-Space-Treaty#145193.hook www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/670127.asp www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-fm.html en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/attm/a11.jo.fc.1.html www.thespacereview.com/article/188/3 www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1 www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/moon/peopleevents/p_wives.html news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7085003.stm www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4204 www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11 www.uss-hornet.org/history/apollo www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/samples news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2272321.stm news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2410431.stm Use the following NASA link to find out when the International Space Station can be seen with the naked eye above your home town: spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/index.html INDEX Aaron, John Abernathy, Reverend Ralph Agena target vehicle Air and Space Museum see Smithsonian Institution Aldrin, Buzz (Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr) Apollo 8 career post-Apollo 11 childhood Gemini flights landing on the moon launch, Apollo 11 launch preparation, Apollo 11 MIT moon, on appearance of moon walk, NASA, joins Neil Armstrong and position in Apollo program PR duties, Apollo 11 quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 rendezvous expert return to Eagle, Apollo 11 return to earth, Apollo 11 selected for Apollo 11 selection for moon walk on surface of moon, Apollo 11 training undocking, Apollo 11 command and lunar modules US Navy Aldrin, Gene Aldrin, Joan Algranti, Joe Anders, Bill Apollo, Project Apollo 1 tragedy, effect upon costs of Kennedy and see Kennedy, John F. Soviet Union and see Soviet Union Apollo 1 Apollo 2 Apollo 3 Apollo 4 Apollo 5 Apollo 6 Apollo 7 Apollo 8 Apollo 9 Apollo 10 Apollo 11 abort procedures adapter alarms command module Columbia Command Module Pilot (CMP) see also Collins, Michael communications computers and computer programs conspiracy theorists and contractors, role in building of descent from lunar orbit to moon surface (DOI) (PDI) disaster, preparation for experiments, scientific flight-plan launch vehicle/fuel tanks joystick landing sites launch launch preparation life support system, portable (PLSS) lunar extra-vehicular visor assembly (LEVA) lunar orbit insertion (LOI) LOI-2 lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) lunar orbit, getting into lunar orbit, leaving meals mission patch Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) modular equipment stowage assembly (MESA) Official Flight Kit 'parking orbit' passive thermal control (PTC) personal preference kits (PPKs) PR and press primary guidance and navigation system (PGNS) readiness review re-entry and landing rendezvous rest periods rockets see also Saturn V rules, mission selection process for mission service module solar wind collector (SWC) stack ('space vehicle') suits, pressure toilet facilities training for mission trans-lunar injection (TLI) pictures, TV and camera UFO sighting, possible water supply Apollo 12 Apollo 13 Apollo 14 Apollo 16 Apollo 17 Apollo Spacecraft Program Office Apollo-Soyuz Test Project Armstrong, Eric ('Ricky') Armstrong, Janet Armstrong, Karen Armstrong, Mark Armstrong, Neil Aldrin and ambition to be an astronaut Apollo 8 career post-Apollo college Collins and early life Ed White and Gemini flights heart rate on landing, Apollo 11 landing on/descent to the moon (DOI) (PDI), Apollo 11 launch, Apollo 11 launch preparation, Apollo 11 lunar landing research vehicle and lunar orbit insertion, Apollo 11 moon walk, Apollo 11 navy service on chances of survival, Apollo 11 'one small step' line pictures, TV and camera, Apollo 11 position in Apollo program PR duties, Apollo 11 quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 rendezvous techniques return to Eagle, Apollo 11 return to earth, Apollo 11 selected for Apollo 11 selected to be first man to walk on the moon test pilot training undocking, Apollo 11 view from Apollo 11 X-15 Armstrong, Stephen Armstrong, Viola Bales, Steve Bassett, Charlie Bassett, Jeannie Bean, Alan Bell Aerosystems Belyaev, Pavel Beregovoi, Georgi Bondarenko, Valentin Borman, Frank Braun, Dr Wernher von Brown, Dick Calle, Paul CapCom see also Mission Control Center, Houston Cape Kennedy see Kennedy Space Center Carlton, Bob Carpentier, Bill Cernan, Gene Chaffee, Roger Charlesworth, Cliff CIA Cobb, Jerrie Cold War see also Soviet Union Collins, Major General James Collins, Michael Air Force Apollo Project, position within Buzz Aldrin and career post-NASA childhood command module pilot (CMP) Gemini flights joins NASA launch preparation, Apollo 11 lunar orbit insertion (LOI), Apollo 11 LOI-2, Apollo 11 meals on Apollo 11 moon, on appearance of moon orbit, Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong and pictures, TV and camera, Apollo 11 pressure suits, hatred of quarantine, Apollo 11 re-entry and landing, Apollo 11 return to earth, Apollo 11 selected for mission, Apollo 11 task list, Apollo 11 trans-lunar injection (TLI), Apollo 11 training, Apollo 11 undocking, Apollo 11 views from Apollo 11 weightlessness, Apollo 11 Collins, Patricia command modules Block I Block II see also Apollo 11 Conrad, Pete Cooper, Gordon Cronkite, Walter Cunningham, Walter Day, Dick Deiterich, Chuck descent orbit insertion (DOI) direct ascent Duke, Charlie Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP) earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) Edwards Air Force Base Ellington Air Force Base extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) early NASA Apollo 11 Gemini Soviet Explorer 1 F-1 engine Faget, Max Fendell, Ed Feoktistiv, Konstantin Freeman, Ted free return Frick, Charles Gagarin, Yuri Garman, Jack Gemini, Project Gemini 4 Gemini 5 Gemini 6 Gemini 7 Gemini 8 Gemini 9 Gemini 10 Gemini 11 Gemini 12 Gemini 13 Gilruth, Dr Robert Glenn, John Goodard Space Flight Center, Maryland Goldstone communications station, California Gordon, Dick Greene, Jay Grissinger, John Grissom, Gus Grumman Corporation Haise, Fred Hamblin, Dora Jane Hatleburg, Lieutenant Clancy Hinch, Derryn Hirasaki, John Honeysuckle communications station Hornet, USS Houbolt, John Humphrey, Hubert In the Shadow of the Moon International Space Station Irwin, Jim Jodrell Bank Observatory Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Johnson Space Center, Houston see also Manned Spaceflight Center, Houston Jupiter booster Kelly, Tom Kennedy Space Center, Florida Kennedy, John F.

After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, general purpose technology, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Teledyne

You are welcome in our quarters at any time.” Instead of dining with the Apollo 11 crew on July 15, Richard Nixon called them as they were having dinner and sent them a telegram saying: “On the eve of your epic mission, I want you to know that my hopes and my prayers—and those of all Americans—go with you . . . It is now your moment.”17 Apollo 11, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy There was little inclination on Richard Nixon’s part to acknowledge President John Kennedy’s role in initiating the lunar landing program as the launch of Apollo 11 approached. Indeed, throughout the many celebrations of the Apollo 11 achievement, Nixon never once publicly spoke Kennedy’s name.

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In addition, the carrier Kennedy and her battle group were on a just-begun deployment as part of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea in mid-1969; it would have taken a major effort to re-deploy the Kennedy to the Pacific Ocean for the sole purpose of being the recovery ship for Apollo 11. So the notion that the Kennedy might have served as the Apollo 11 recovery ship if not for Nixon White House ill-will is almost certainly one of the long-standing inaccuracies in the history of Apollo 11. (The worst, of course, being that the mission never happened and that there has been since 1969 a well-orchestrated conspiracy to conceal this reality.) Final Preparations With most preparations for President Nixon’s involvement with Apollo 11 in place, Frank Borman in early July made a quick visit to the Soviet Union.

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There was some concern that the trajectory of the Soviet mission might intersect with Apollo 11 while both were in lunar orbit, resulting in a collision. At NASA’s request, Borman used the White House–Kremlin “hot line” to send a message to Keldysh requesting the orbital parameters of the Soviet probe. On July 17, Keldysh replied with the requested information, saying that “the orbit of probe Luna-15 does not intersect the trajectory of Apollo-11 spacecraft.” Never before had the Soviet Union provided such detailed information on one of its ongoing space missions. While Luna-15 did reach lunar orbit, it crashed onto the Moon on July 21 as the Apollo 11 crew was preparing to lift off of the lunar surface.22 By July 14, Borman was back from his trip to the Soviet Union; he would stay involved with President Nixon until the Apollo 11 astronauts were safely back on Earth on July 24.

pages: 377 words: 21,687

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight by David A. Mindell

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 1960s counterculture, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Mars Rover, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Soul of a New Machine

In any case, the P66 Auto function relied primarily on the inertial system and not on radar to measure velocity. 9 ‘‘Pregnant with alarm’’: Apollo 11 1. Numerous versions of the Apollo 11 landing exist in the literature but I have compiled this account from a few primary sources, and will cite the major ones here: NASA’s ‘‘Apollo 11 Mission Report’’; ‘‘Apollo 11 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription’’; ‘‘Apollo 11 On-Board Voice 296 Notes to Pages 220–227 Transcription’’; and ‘‘Apollo 11 Technical Debrief.’’ The best technical account is Floyd V. Bennett, ‘‘Apollo Experience Report: Mission Planning for Lunar Module Descent and Ascent,’’ by the man who planned the descent, for both Apollo 11 and 12 landings.

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Inadvertent LPD in Bennett, ‘‘Apollo Experience Report.’’ 12. Bennett interview with Ross-Nazzal, 24; Bennett, ‘‘Apollo 11 LM Descent Postflight Analysis’’; figure 12 seems to show that Armstrong was well outside the abort boundary between 200 and 100 feet. 13. Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 380. 14. Bennett, ‘‘Apollo 11 LM Approach and Landing Phase Groundtrack’’; and idem. ‘‘Apollo 11 LM Descent Postflight Analysis,’’ 6. 15. Bennett, ‘‘Apollo 11 LM Descent Postflight Analysis,’’ 9. 16. Hansen, First Man, 467. 17. Martin, ‘‘Apollo 11: 25 Years Later.’’ Notes to Pages 228–236 297 18. My explanation of the program alarms is based on: George Cherry, ‘‘Exegesis of the 1201 and 1202 Alarms Which Occurred During the Mission G Lunar Landing,’’ MIT Instrumentation Laboratory memo AG#370-69, August 4, 1969; Clint Tillman, ‘‘Program Alarms in Powered Descent, Apollo 11,’’ Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation Memo #LAV-500-940, July 31, 1969; Clint Tillman, ‘‘Simulating the RR-CDU Interfaces When the RR Is in the SLEW or AUTO (not LGC) Mode in the FMES/FCI Laboratory,’’ Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation Memo #LMO-500-723, August 13, 1969.

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Real landings, with skilled but fallible people flying magnificent but imperfect machines in less than ideal circumstances, would begin to answer these questions. 9 ‘‘Pregnant with alarm’’: Apollo 11 Armstrong, sitting in the commander’s seat . . . is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks . . . a man somewhat more than a pilot, somewhat more indeed than a superpilot, is in fact a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini-cathedral, a general of the forces of technology . . . of the vast multibillion dollar technological bands which belted the very economy of the nation . . . the methods of the hospital mixed with the methods of the football team. —Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon Apollo 11 was a test flight whose major goal was simply to prove the feasibility of lunar landing with the Apollo system. Most aspects of the flight to the moon had been tried before. Apollo 10 had gone right down to 50,000 feet and then returned home, only a PDI burn remaining between it and the lunar surface. Yet from that point downward everything was new on Apollo 11—accomplished many times before, but only in simulation. The Apollo 11 landing was the climax of the development program, of Apollo’s methods of integrating the efforts of diverse organizations into a flight system.

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 by James Donovan

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, drop ship, Gene Kranz, Hans Lippershey, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, white flight

The “Great Train Wreck”: the Apollo command-module simulator at the Cape. The traditional steak-and-eggs breakfast on the morning of the launch of Apollo 11 (left to right): Bill Anders, Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin, and Deke Slayton. Armstrong (foreground) and Collins, followed by a technician, cross the access walkway to the command module. Apollo 11 launches at 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969, from pad A, launch complex 39. Thousands of reporters watched from the press site three miles away as Apollo 11 launched. The launch team rise to watch as Apollo 11 clears the tower. Deke Slayton is in the second row in the dark pullover shirt. At a July 18 pool party at the Armstrong house, (left to right) Jan Armstrong, Pat Collins, and Joan Aldrin meet the press on the front lawn.

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The second evening on the carrier, Collins entered the command module through the tunnel connecting it to their trailer, and with a ballpoint pen, above the sextant mount on the wall of the lower equipment bay, he scrawled this legend: Spacecraft 107—alias Apollo 11 alias “Columbia” The Best Ship to Come Down the Line God Bless Her Michael Collins CMP Back in Houston, Steve Bales had left after the ascent shift, his last one on Apollo 11. He went home and slept for a long time. The next day, he drove back to work and walked into the staff support room. Jack Garman was there. Bales walked over to Garman, shook his hand, and said, “Jack, thanks for everything.” Then the two engineers got back to their jobs. At that point, the Apollo 11 crew was still in space, and Garman was providing backroom support for the onboard computer.

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At a July 18 pool party at the Armstrong house, (left to right) Jan Armstrong, Pat Collins, and Joan Aldrin meet the press on the front lawn. (AP) Mission Control during the Apollo 11 landing. The flight dynamics staff-support room during Apollo 11. Jack Garman, wearing a dark jacket, sits second from left in the front row. Garman (shown here on the right receiving an award from Chris Kraft after Apollo 8) was a computer whiz kid, only twenty-four during Apollo 11. Though it had the equivalent of only 72 kilobytes of memory, the rope-wired Apollo guidance computer was extremely reliable. Jack Garman’s cheat sheet, which he consulted to make sure the 1201 and 1202 alarms would not impede the landing.

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

Instead, NASA was introducing the newly named crew of what was expected to be the first mission to attempt a landing on the Moon in just six months. Designated Apollo 11, it would undertake the landing as long as Apollo 9—the debut flight of the lunar module in Earth’s orbit, in March—and Apollo 10—a test of the lunar module’s systems a mere ten miles above the Moon’s surface, two months later—were both successful. All three of the Apollo 11 astronauts were known to those who had covered the space program in recent years. The commander was Neil Armstrong, well remembered from the crisis on Gemini 8; the lunar-module pilot was Gemini 12’s ace spacewalker Buzz Aldrin; and the command-module pilot was Michael Collins, a veteran of Gemini 10.

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And unlike the Apollo 8 crew, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were fairly reserved when appearing in public. No one could argue with Deke Slayton’s selection of Armstrong to command this mission. He and Aldrin had just come from serving as part of the Apollo 8 backup crew, so their assignment to Apollo 11 followed Slayton’s normal rotation. Michael Collins, who had been replaced on Apollo 8 by Jim Lovell due to his surgery, had since returned to flight status and been reassigned by Slayton to Apollo 11’s third couch. The ungainly and dangerous Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was nicknamed the “Flying Bedstead.” In May 1968, Neil Armstrong narrowly escaped an LLRV accident in Houston when his vehicle suddenly became dangerously unstable, causing him to fire his ejection seat when only 200 feet above the ground.

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And it had to have a sustainable cooling system that would prevent the person wearing it from overheating. Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, the “amiable strangers” of Apollo 11, photographed on the deck of a modified landing craft used for spacecraft water recovery training in the Gulf of Mexico. The preparations required the crew to practice changing into sealed garments, an attempt to keep the astronauts physically isolated in the event they returned to Earth infected with an extraterrestrial life form. Apollo 11’s chosen landing site was a relatively level and smooth area in the Sea of Tranquility, near the lunar equator. It had been photographed from orbit by the Lunar Orbiter mapping probe and later by the Apollo 8 crew.

pages: 477 words: 165,458

Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, card file, centre right, data acquisition, Eratosthenes, Gene Kranz, invention of gunpowder, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

This is the transcript on that mighty event: CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. We are slightly less than one minute to ignition and everything is GO. COLLINS: Roger. ARMSTRONG: Ignition. (The sound of rocket motors are faintly heard.) CAPCOM: We confirm ignition and the thrust is GO. CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston at 1 minute. Trajectory and guidance look good and the stage is good. Over. COLLINS: Apollo 11. Roger. CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Thrust is good. Everything is still looking good.… COLLINS: Roger. CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Around three and a half minutes.

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Around three and a half minutes. You’re still looking good. Your predicted cutoff is right on the nominal. ARMSTRONG: Roger. Apollo 11’s GO. CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. You are GO at five minutes. ARMSTRONG: Roger, we’re GO. CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. We show cutoff and we copy the numbers in Noun 62 … COLLINS: Roger, Houston. Apollo 11. We’re reading the VI 35579 and the EMS was plus 3.3. Over. CAPCOM: Roger. Plus 3.3 on the EMS. And we copy the VI. ARMSTRONG: Hey Houston, Apollo 11. This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride. CAPCOM: Roger, 11, we’ll pass that on, and it looks like you are well on your way now.

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, and worked their muscles with a spring exerciser in obedience to the depressing discovery by previous flights that muscles go slack in weightlessness at a much accelerated pace. There, all resemblance to America’s good morning could end—the radio was working. They were on. There would be voices in their ear for the next sixteen hours. CAPCOM: Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston. Over. ALDRIN: Good morning, Houston. Apollo 11. CAPCOM: Roger, Apollo 11. Good morning. When you’re ready to copy, 11, I’ve got a couple of small flight plan updates and your consumable updates, and the morning news, I guess. Over. COLLINS: Standing by for your updates. Over. CAPCOM: In your postsleep checklist and in all other postsleep checklists, we’d like you to delete the statement that says AUTO RCS jet select 16 to ON, and what we’re doing here is picking this up in the procedure for exiting PTC that’s in your CSM checklist and in the CSM checklist on page foxtrot 9-8—if you want to turn to that—we’d like to change the order of the steps in that.

pages: 472 words: 141,591

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

IEEE Spectrum 1 (April 2005). http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/apollo-13-we-have-a-solution/4. “Console Audio of Apollo 11 Landing.” NASA Office of Logic Design. http://www.klabs.org/history/apollo_11_alarms/console/. “Dallas Family’s Tradition Boosts NASA for 110 Flights, Says Thank You on Final Shuttle Flight.” NASA, 9 July 2011. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts135/135_roses.html. Dyson, Marianne J. “NASA’s First Women Flight Controllers.” Copyright 2012 by Marianne Dyson. Last updated 8 February 2014. http://mariannedyson.com/women.html. “Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing.” Thamtech LLC. www.firstmenonthemoon.com.

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When I called Steve Bales at the appointed time for our interview, he began the conversation by saying that he had already ordered a couple of the NASCAR-related books that I have written and asked if I would sign them for a friend of his. Wait a second. Steve Bales—the Steve Bales, of Apollo 11 lunar descent fame—was asking me for my autograph? Then, when Steve read a draft of the Apollo 11 chapter, he again surprised me by sending me a lengthy e-mail describing in detail what he had liked about it. I immediately printed it out and placed it next to my computer screen. Others dug into old mission reports and research material to refresh their memories.

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The telemetry, electrical, and communications (telcom) position was renamed telmu following Apollo 11 when responsibility for the moonwalkers’ Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) was added and communications moved to the consolidated INCO position. The EMUs had until then been monitored down on the far left-hand end of the Trench, after the spots were vacated by the booster controllers. William L. “Bill” Peters, Donald R. “Don” Puddy, Jack Knight Jr., W. Merlin Merrit, Gary C. Watros, and Robert H. “Bob” Heselmeyer all worked the console. Bill Peters sat the telcom console during the flights of Apollo 9 and 10, and then moved down a row to watch over Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin’s EMU during the first moonwalk.

pages: 308 words: 87,238

Apollo 11: The Inside Story by David Whitehouse

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip

According to the capsule communicator for that phase of the mission, Michael Collins, soon to become a member of the historic Apollo 11 crew, Apollo 8 and the first leaving may in the long term be considered as more important than the first landing: I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the moon. As you look back 100 years from now, which is more important, the idea that people left their home planet or the idea that people arrived at their nearby satellite? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11, even though today we regard Apollo 11 as being the showpiece and the zenith of the Apollo program but, as I say, 100 years from now, historians may say Apollo 8 is more significant; it’s more significant to leave than it is to arrive.

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Index A Aaron, John 1 AFD Conference Loop 1 Agena target vehicle 1, 2, 3 Agnew, Spiro 1, 2 Aldrin, Edwin (Buzz) after Apollo program 1 Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 background 1 oldest moonwalker alive 1 and being first out of Lunar Module 1 Gemini 12 1 Moon landing 1, 2 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 see also Apollo 11 Aldrin, Edwin Sr 1 Aldrin, Joan 1, 2 Aldrin, Lois 1 all-up testing 1 Allen, Harvey 1 ‘America’ (Apollo 17 Command Module) 1 Anders, William (Bill) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 quotes 1, 2 ‘Angry Alligator’ 1 Anikeyev, Ivan 1 ‘Antares’ (Apollo 14 Lunar Module) 1, 2 Apollo 1 1, 2 Apollo 4 1 Apollo 5 1 Apollo 6 1 Apollo 7 1, 2 Apollo 8 1, 2, 3, 4 Apollo 9 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Apollo 10 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Apollo 11 abort handle 1 Armstrong chosen as commander 1 astronauts on lunar surface 1 chosen for first lunar landing 1 descent towards lunar surface 1 first man on lunar surface issue 1 journey to the Moon 1 landing site search 1 launch 1 orbiting Moon 1 pre-launch preparation 1 radars 1 return to Earth 1 significance 1 timing of mission 1 touchdown 1 Apollo 12 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Apollo 13 1 abort decision 1 crew selection 1 oxygen tank problems 1, 2 preparation 1 re-entry 1 return to Earth 1 water problem 1 Apollo 14 1, 2 Apollo 15 1, 2 Apollo 16 1 Apollo 17 1 Apollo program announcement 1 as faltering 1 mission cancellations 1, 2, 3 planning for 1 summary 1 White House discussion 1 Apollo-Soyuz docking mission 1 Apollo-Saturn 500-F 1 ‘Aquarius’ (Apollo 13 Lunar Module) 1, 2, 3 Armstrong, Carol (née Knight) 1 Armstrong, Jan 1 Armstrong, Neil after Apollo program 1, 2 Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 chosen as commander 1 background 1, 2, 3 death and memorial 1 first Moon landing contender 1 and being first out of Lunar Module 1 first words on Moon 1 Gemini 8 1 LLRV incident 1 and Lovell 1 Moon landing 1, 2 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4 on Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 recruitment 1, 2 see also Apollo 11 Armstrong, Stephen Koenig 1 Atlas rocket 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘Aurora 7’ (Mercury capsule) 1 B Babakin, Georgy 1 Babbitt, Don 1 Baikonur 1 Bales, Steve 1 Bassett, Charles 1 Bean, Alan 1 Becker, Karl 1 Belyayev, Pavel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Beregovoi, Georgi 1, 2, 3 Beriya, Lavrenti 1 Berlin Wall 1 Bibby, Cecilia 1 Blagonravov, Anatoli 1 Block D booster stage 1, 2 Blok E 1 Borman, Frank and Apollo 1 1, 2, 3 Apollo 8 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Gemini 7 1, 2 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 recruitment 1 and returning Moon astronauts 1 Borman, Susan 1 Bourgin, Si 1 Brezhnev, Leonid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Bykovsky, Valeri 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 C capsules, design 1, 2 Carlton, Bob 1, 2 Carpenter, Scott 1, 2, 3, 4 Carr, Gerry 1 Cernan, Gene 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Apollo 10 1 Apollo 17 1 last words on Moon 1 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4 on special few who went to Moon 1 Cernan, Tracy 1, 2 Chaffee, Roger 1 ‘Challenger’ (Apollo 17 Lunar Module) 1, 2 Challenger Space Shuttle accident 1 ‘Charlie Brown’ (Apollo 10 Command Module) 1 Chekunov, Boris 1 Chelomei, Vladimir 1, 2 Chertok, Boris 1 chimpanzees, in space 1, 2 Churchill, Winston 1, 2 CIA 1 Clarke, Rosemary 1 Cobb, Geraldyn (Jerrie) 1 Collins, James L. 1 Collins, Michael after Apollo program 1, 2 on Aldrin 1 and Apollo 8 1, 2, 3, 4 Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4 on Armstrong 1, 2 background 1 Gemini 10 1 Paris Air Show 1 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 see also Apollo 11 Collins, Pat 1 ‘Columbia’ (Apollo 11 Command Module) 1, 2, 3, 4 Columbus, Christopher 1 Command Module (CM) 1, 2, 3 Apollo 1 1, 2, 3 Apollo 9 (‘Gumdrop’) 1 Apollo 10 (‘Charlie Brown’) 1 Apollo 11 (‘Columbia’) 1, 2, 3, 4 Apollo 12 (‘Yankee Clipper’) 1, 2 Apollo 13 (‘Odyssey’) 1, 2, 3 Apollo 14 (‘Kitty Hawk’) 1 Apollo 15 (‘Endeavour’) 1 Apollo 17 (‘America’) 1 redesign 1 test in space 1 Command and Service Module (CSM) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Apollo 8 1, 2 Cone crater 1 Conrad, Charles (Pete) 1, 2 Apollo 12 1, 2, 3 Gemini 11 1 quotes 1 recruitment 1 Cooper, Gordon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Copernicus crater 1, 2 cosmonauts, first 1 Council for the Problems of Mastering the Moon 1 crawler 1 cryogenics 1, 2 Cunningham, Walter 1, 2, 3, 4 D Debus, Kurt 1 Descartes crater 1 Descartes highlands 1 Dezik (dog) 1 Disney, Walt 1 dogs, in space 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Dönitz, Karl 1 Dornberger, Walter 1, 2 Dryden, Hugh 1, 2 Duke, Charlie 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 E E-1 Moon probes 1 ‘Eagle’ (Apollo 11 Lunar Module) 1, 2, 3, 4 communication problems 1, 2 computer alarms 1 landing 1, 2 lift-off and docking 1 Earth, Lunar Orbiter 1 picture of 1 as spacecraft 1 ‘Earthrise’ picture 1 Einstein, Albert 1 Eisele, Donn 1, 2 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ‘Endeavour’ (Apollo 15 Command Module) 1 Engel, Viola Louise 1 Engle, Joe 1 Evans, Ron 1 Explorer 1 1 F F-1 engines 1, 2, 3 Faget, Max 1, 2 ‘Faith 7’ (Mercury capsule) 1 ‘Falcon’ (Apollo 15 Lunar Module) 1 Feoktistov, Konstantin 1, 2, 3, 4 Filatev, Valentin 1 flags, on lunar surface 1, 2 Fra Mauro 1, 2, 3 ‘Friendship 7’ (Mercury capsule) 1 G G levels 1 Gagarin, Alexei 1 Gagarin, Anna 1 Gagarin, Boris 1 Gagarin, Valentin 1 Gagarin, Valya 1 Gagarin, Yuri background 1, 2, 3 chosen as first cosmonaut 1 disciplined 1 first space flight 1 in ground role 1, 2, 3, 4 and Soyuz program 1, 2, 3 and Vostok 6 1 Gagarin, Zorya 1 Gallay, Mark 1 Gazenko, Oleg 1, 2 Gemini program 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gemini 3 1 Gemini 4 1, 2 Gemini 5 1 Gemini 6 1 Gemini 7 1, 2, 3, 4 Gemini 8 1, 2 Gemini 9 1 Gemini 10 1 Gemini 11 1 Gemini 12 1 importance 1 German measles 1 ‘Giant Leap’ tour 1 Gilruth, Robert (Bob) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 GIRD 1, 2 Glenn, Annie 1 Glenn, John at Armstrong memorial 1 first space flight 1, 2, 3 in Mercury Seven 1 quotes 1, 2 on Space Shuttle 1 on women astronauts 1 Glennan, T.

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Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Schmitt APPENDIX Lunar Exploration Time Line Acknowledgments Further Reading Photo Credits About the Author FOREWORD LET’S GET OUR GLOBAL SPACE ACT TOGETHER BY BUZZ ALDRIN LUNAR MODULE PILOT, APOLLO 11 FIFTY YEARS AGO, ON JULY 20, 1969, I know exactly where I was standing. I was well suited for where I was, but without a tie. On the Moon, my get-down-to-business attire weighed 180 pounds. After stepping down from the Eagle lander, I stood there with my fellow space traveler, Neil Armstrong. High above the barren lunar scenery that I viewed as “magnificent desolation” was our Apollo 11 partner, Mike Collins, orbiting the Moon. America’s Apollo program was an impressive team effort.

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Consider this futuristic outlook. If preservation advocates are successful, the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base touchdown zone where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed 50 years ago could become the number one tourist hot spot, a mecca for rubbernecking, camera-toting visitors. Encompassed within a large transparent protective dome, onlookers would take in the celebrated landing site, gaze upon still visible footprints stamped in the lunar dust, and witness hardware left behind from that first human sortie to the Moon in July 1969. In this not-so-distant future, Apollo 11’s Tranquility Base is just one of many sightseeing attractions, a consequence of nations that cross the void between Earth and our neighboring Moon to image, survey, land upon, and attempt to maintain an enduring foothold on the lunar globe.

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“Even though we were all farther away than humans had ever been, we always felt connected to home,” Aldrin has since remembered. That feeling seemed mutual. Back on Earth, an estimated 600 million people witnessed on television the momentous Apollo 11 landing. Ninety-four percent of American televisions tuned in to view the historic event, which took place just before 11 p.m. eastern daylight time. That fact made President John F. Kennedy’s proclamation eight years earlier even more prophetic: “It will not be one man going to the Moon, it will be an entire nation.” The voyage of Apollo 11 was a product of nearly a decade of work, hardships, tragedy, and awe. It all began earlier, with a plan. President John F.

pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Buzz presents his Unified Space Vision during the 40th anniversary celebration of Apollo 11. (Illustration Credit 1.12) We can dare to dream again and to lead. Let us challenge NASA, challenge the White House to think bigger, challenge ourselves to look beyond the moment, and inspire again an entire nation in a way that is evocative, at a time when our country is ready for real inspiration, challenge, leadership, and achievement. I hold dear my litmus test for the country’s space future: timeliness, affordability, and popularity. Apollo 11 symbolized the ability of this nation to conceive a truly pathbreaking idea, prioritize it, create the technology to advance the idea, and then ride it to completion.

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And if we persevere on this path, we can reach out some 200 million miles to Mars before 2035—66 years after Neil Armstrong and I flew the quarter-million miles through the blackness of space to touch down onto Tranquillity Base. There’s a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight. But to realize the dream of humans on Mars, we need a unified vision. We need to focus on a pathway while keeping an ever vigil eye on the prize. Several years ago NASA was put on a technical trajectory to resume lunar exploration, duplicating, albeit in more complicated ways, what the Apollo 11 flight did some four decades ago. The looming dilemma that stemmed from that approach then—called the Vision for Space Exploration—was a five-year gap between the shuttle program’s slated retirement in 2010 and the debut of the Ares I rocket and the new Orion spacecraft in 2015.

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Homesteading our solar system is a reach outward to what lies beyond—and beyond to the stars. I was deeply saddened by the passing of my good friend, and space exploration companion, Neil Armstrong, in 2012. As Neil, Mike Collins, and I trained together for our momentous Apollo 11 expedition, we knew of the technical challenges we faced as well as of the magnitude and weighty implications of that historic journey. We will now always be connected as the crew of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969. Yet for the many millions who witnessed that remarkable achievement for humankind, we were not alone. An estimated 600 million people back on Earth, at that time the largest television audience in history, watched Neil and me walk on the moon.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

There are many, many links in the daisy chain which may yet break, but at least three of the biggest and most fragile ones (launch, TLI, transposition and docking) are behind us. We are on our way, and it is necessary that we sleep. * * * The next thing I hear is Houston’s insistent call, summoning the faithful to the temple for another day. “Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston. Over.” “Good morning, Houston, Apollo 11.” “Roger, Apollo 11. Good morning. When you’re ready to copy, 11, I’ve got a couple of small flight-plan updates and your consumable update, and the morning news, I guess. Over.” Jesus, no coffee, no amenities, simply pull out pen and paper and copy what they say. The news is pretty thin: the Russian space probe, Luna 15, has preceded us to the moon by a couple of days.

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He also had a great impassive dignity, and seemed surprised at nothing, not even the news that we were practicing in his jungle so as to be able to fly to the moon. Perhaps he did not believe it. Years later, in Washington, I met Antonio again, at the Smithsonian, in the hall containing the original Wright Brothers airplane and, almost directly below it, the Apollo 11 command module. I patiently explained to Antonio about Apollo 11, about flying to the moon, and I learned from his interpreter that he was not particularly interested in the Apollo 11 craft. He didn’t disbelieve my story, he simply could not relate it to the ugly triangular chunk of heat-shield-covered machinery. He liked the idea of flight to the moon, and obviously knew a lot about it—that it was a satellite of earth, and so forth—but the machinery he was interested in was the Wright Flier.

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Not that I disapproved, quite the contrary, but I simply was putting too much of myself into Apollo 11 to consider doing it all over again at a later date; besides, the strain on my wife was not good and should end as soon as possible. Consequently, one day when Deke and I shared a T-38 for the Houston-to-Cape run, and he said he wanted to “plug me in” to the sequence of later flight assignments, I politely declined. I told him if Apollo 11 aborted and fell into the ocean after takeoff, I would be back knocking on his door, but if we were able to fly it as planned, Apollo 11 would be my last space flight. I didn’t have the foggiest notion what I would do after that, nor did I know what seat I might have later occupied.

pages: 386 words: 92,778

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today by Jay Barbree

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, dark matter, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, white flight

Twenty-eight thousand gallons of water smashing into curving flame buckets to absorb the mighty rocket’s fire. Apollo 11’s Saturn V roared to life, but it was anchored to its launch pad by huge hold-down arms, chaining it to Earth until computers judged it was howling with full energy. “SIX, FIVE, FOUR…” And chunks and sheets and flakes of ice fell steadily from the coatings formed by the super-cold oxidizers and propellants on the huge fuel tanks. Apollo 11 was ready to leave, Saturn V’s mighty engines were screaming, get the hell outta the way… “THREE, TWO, ONE, ZERO, all engines running, LIFTOFF. We have a liftoff, thirty-two minutes past the hour. Liftoff of Apollo 11. Tower cleared.”

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It shook for all to feel, and in a firestorm of flame and crackling thunder Apollo 11 began its journey. Birds flew for safety, wildlife fled for shelter, and Apollo 11’s Saturn V slammed shock waves into the chests of the million-plus pressed against the moonport’s fences and gates. Suddenly their teeth were rattling and their skin and clothes were fluttering. They were forced to lean into the powering wave of thundering air now splitting the launch center. Saturn V had in fact created its own earthquake. It generated seven-and-a-half million pounds of thundering energy and headed skyward on its hunt for the moon. From atop its gantry, Apollo 11 is seen beginning its journey to the moon.

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Deke Slayton got on with the job of picking the astronauts for the first landing attempt. The normal rotation of crews was playing right in his hands. The way it was working out, Neil Armstrong would command Apollo 11 and Pete Conrad would be at the helm of Apollo 12. Deke had long ago made the decision to have either Neil or Pete land the first lunar module on the moon. Neil was learned, experienced, and had the moxie to get out of a harrowing situation. As NASA’s own test pilot, he had survived potential tragedies time and again. Apollo 11 would get the first shot, but the odds were very high something would go wrong and 11 would have to abort. Deke realized there was no other feasible plan, and he called Neil Armstrong and crew into a private room.

pages: 338 words: 112,127

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

It can’t be a coincidence that the sixties era of creative nonfiction overlaps so perfectly with the heroic era of American spaceflight, the big egotistical voices turning journalism inside out at the same time the innovators in Houston and Huntsville and the Cape were redefining what machines were capable of, what human beings were capable of. Norman Mailer’s book is about witnessing the launch of Apollo 11—Life magazine had commissioned him to go to the Cape to write about the launch in exchange for a sum of money rumored to be somewhere between extraordinary and obscene. I hadn’t known, before I came across it, that Norman Mailer had written a book about Apollo 11—I knew him for having written the best-selling novel The Naked and the Dead, for cofounding the Village Voice and helping to spearhead New Journalism, for winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, for running for mayor of New York and finishing fourth out of a field of five in the Democratic primary, and for stabbing his second wife, nearly to death, at a dinner party.

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All of them disgusted that the future they worked so hard to understand and to put on the page has been canceled. What would it mean to go to the last launch and write about it the way Mailer wrote about the launch of Apollo 11? To spend time with the people involved and write about them the way Fallaci did? The last launch of the space shuttle would unfold with all the glory and boredom and strangeness of Apollo 11, would provide an ending to the story. I think about how time-consuming and expensive it would be to try to do this—after all, fewer than half of shuttle missions launch on the first attempt; some have taken as many as seven attempts (separated by days or weeks or months) to get off the ground.

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When I’d finally called, the harassed-sounding woman on the phone promised to e-mail me, and when she did, saying that my application for credentials had been accepted, I burst into tears of relief at my computer. The Press Site is closer to the launchpad than I’ve ever been: the site from which Norman Mailer watched the launch of Apollo 11, the site from which Walter Cronkite narrated the moon landings, the site from which all the space journalists have watched all the launches. Over twenty-seven hundred journalists from all over the world are expected to cover this launch (also a record unmatched since Apollo 11), and I hope not to get caught in the line for badges behind too many of them. The press badging office turns out to be a tiny shack on State Road 3, a fluorescent-lit Apollo-era building staffed by a few slightly harried but extremely competent middle-aged women, the same women who spoke to everyone’s editors on the phone.

pages: 816 words: 242,405

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Gene Kranz, gravity well, index card, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

By comparison, Apollo 8 had almost been simple. Both would have to be nearly perfect for Apollo 11 to attempt a landing in July. Attempt was really the right word; there was no assurance that the first mission assigned to land would succeed. Nevertheless, as 1969 opened there was more than a little speculation, both inside and outside the Astronaut Office, on who would get the chance to try. Of course, anyone who went through the arithmetic of Slayton's crew rotation had a good idea of who it would be. The crew that backed up Apollo 8 would skip 9 and 10 and fly the next mission, Apollo 11. Pete Conrad had figured that out some time ago, and he didn't like the answer.

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In Collins’s mind, the eighteen rendezvous scenarios and the probe and drogue swirled around twin responsibilities: He must get his crewmates back to earth safely, and he must not do anything to screw up the mission. During the spring of 1969 Collins felt the eyes of the world upon him as he never had before, and his labors were tinged with anxiety. He also knew that Apollo 11 was putting a great strain on his wife, and that was something he wanted to stop as soon as possible. One day when they were flying a T-38 to the Cape together, Deke Slayton offered to put Collins back in the rotation after Apollo 11. Collins knew he’d probably command one of the later lunar landings, but he declined Slayton’s offer. He had already decided that, assuming it was successful, this flight would be his last.

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Even on the morning of July 16, 1969, as Armstrong led his crew out into the TV lights and onto the transfer van, with an old comb and a package of Life Savers in the pocket of his space suit, he had little doubt they would make it safely back to earth. But the landing, in his mind, was still a fifty-fifty proposition. CHAPTER 5 The First Lunar Landing APOLLO 11 I: The Eagle Has Landed Saturday, July 19, 1969 5:30 A.M., Houston time 2 days, 21 hours Mission Elapsed Time Aboard Apollo 11, 177,000 miles from earth Buzz Aldrin opened his eyes and floated in the darkness, collecting his thoughts, remembering where he was. All was still inside the command module Columbia; only the hum of the cabin fans broke the total silence of the void.

pages: 409 words: 138,088

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

Apollo 9 then tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, Apollo 10 did the same in lunar orbit, and finally Apollo 11 set down. Ten such landings were planned, but the last three (18, 19, 20) were cancelled as the programme’s budget was progressively slashed. Furthermore, Apollo 13 nearly ended in disaster when an explosion in an oxygen tank crippled the Command Module, forcing the landing to be abandoned and the LM to be used as a makeshift life raft to get the crew home. Thus, only six ships reached the surface, between July 1969 and December 1972, each with two astronauts aboard. Those astronauts were: APOLLO 11 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (CM pilot Michael Collins) APOLLO 12 Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (CM pilot Richard Gordon) APOLLO 14 Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell (CM pilot Stu Roosa) APOLLO 15 David Scott and James Irwin (CM pilot Al Worden) APOLLO 16 John Young and Charles Duke (CM pilot Ken Mattingly) APOLLO 17 Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt (CM pilot Ron Evans) Irwin, Shepard and Conrad are gone (heart attack, cancer, motorcycle accident), so nine of the Moon men remain.

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His pulse at takeoff was 110 bpm, the lowest of any Apollo astronaut, but around the Astronaut Office he was considered to be an agitator and political game-player, though he certainly wasn’t the only one and looks actually to have been rather clumsy and unskilled at manoeuvring in the subtle, back-slapping, one-of-the-guys way that men like David Scott and Gene Cernan excelled at. He wasn’t one of the guys and nor, for that matter, were either of his Apollo 11 crewmates. The German-born Pad Leader Guenter Wendt (known to the astronauts as Pad Führer, ruler of the launchpad) will tell you that, for all Deke Slayton’s efforts, the Apollo 11 crew never gelled, and remained remote from each other throughout. You’ll still find Apollo vets muttering darkly about Aldrin, though. Wendt is not courting controversy when he avers that “some considered him to be arrogant … he became quite a bit of a loner and not too many people cosied up to him.”

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Conspiracy theorists like to imagine that he was assassinated. Finally, a year after Gagarin’s death and just three weeks before Apollo 11 flew in July 1969, a gigantic N-1 Moon rocket, the largest ever built, exploded twelve seconds into its flight, finishing off Soviet lunar ambitions for good. The rocket stages and fuel tanks of leftover N-1s were reportedly hammered into storage sheds and playgrounds for children. The Space Race had a winner. The point is that there was nothing inevitable about the safe return of Armstrong’s Apollo 11 crew. Most of the astronauts privately rated its chances of success at between 50 and 30 per cent, with a 30 per cent likelihood of the unthinkable happening.

pages: 431 words: 118,074

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Low, Glynn Lunney, and Chris Kraft discussing Apollo 8’s progress, 1968 19. Low and Chris Kraft congratulating each other, 1968 20. Low conducting a meeting in his office as Apollo program manager, 1969 21. Low monitoring progress during the Apollo 11 lunar landing, 1969 22. Low expressing his delight during the first steps on the moon, 1969 23. Chris Kraft, Low, and Bob Gilruth during the Apollo 11 splashdown, 1969 24. Low accompanying the first Apollo 11 sample return container, 1969 25. Low at his desk at the MSC, 1969 26. Low and other NASA officials applauding the splashdown of Apollo 13, 1970 27. Low wearing his T-38 flight jacket, 1970s 28.

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The moon race, which Low had helped define back in 1961, had been won. Throughout the preparation and lead-up to the flight, Low stayed close to the Apollo 11 crew, as he had with all the preceding crews. They were as much the designers and engineers of their mission as Low, Kraft, Slayton, or anyone else. “I spent considerable time today with the newly named Apollo 11 crew in talking to them about all of the things that might be of concern at the press conference,” he noted for example in January 1969. “We touched all sorts of subjects from the probability of Apollo 11 actually being a G mission [lunar landing] to weights, delivery schedules, lunar surface timelines, the requirement of the F mission, etc.

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Courtesy of the Institute Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. 21. Low intently monitoring progress in mission control during the Apollo 11 lunar landing on 20 July 1969. Courtesy of NASA. 22. Low expressing his delight in mission control during the first steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong on 20 July 1969. Courtesy of NASA. 23. Chris Kraft, Low, and Bob Gilruth in mission control during the Apollo 11 splashdown on 27 July 1969. Courtesy of NASA. 24. Low smiling broadly while accompanying the first Apollo 11 sample return container with lunar surface material at Ellington Air Force Base, 25 July 1969. Happily posing for photographs with the rock box are (left to right) George M.

pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

(The Lessons of Vietnam) The Death of Marilyn Monroe: “Anyone who ever felt resentment against the good for being good and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.” (Through Your Most Grievous Fault) Apollo 11: “For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw the lift-off had to feel—not ‘How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!’—but ‘How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!’ ” (Apollo 11) DR. LEONARD PEIKOFF worked closely with Ayn Rand for many years and was designated by her as heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College, Long Island University, and New York University, and he lectures on Ayn Rand’s philosophy throughout the country.

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Anyone who has ever felt resentment against the good for being the good and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe. 17 Apollo 11 by Ayn Rand This article was published in The Objectivist, September 1969. “No matter what discomforts and expenses you had to bear to come here,” said a NASA guide to a group of guests, at the conclusion of a tour of the Space Center on Cape Kennedy, on July 15, 1969, “there will be seven minutes tomorrow morning that will make you feel it was worth it.” It was. The tour had been arranged for the guests invited by NASA to attend the launching of Apollo 11. As far as I was able to find out, the guests—apart from government officials and foreign dignitaries—were mainly scientists, industrialists, and a few intellectuals who had been selected to represent the American people and culture on this occasion.

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(The fact that man is the only species capable of transmitting knowledge and thus capable of progress, the fact that man can achieve a division of labor, and the fact that large numbers of men are required for a large-scale undertaking, do not mean what some creeps are suggesting: that achievement has become collective.) I am not implying that all the men who contributed to the flight of Apollo 11 were necessarily rational in every aspect of their lives or convictions. But in their various professional capacities—each to the extent that he did contribute to the mission—they had to act on the principle of strict rationality. The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.

pages: 549 words: 162,164

Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, white flight

Cliff walked into my office, stood at the window, stared out for a moment, and then turned with a smile on his face. He knew that I wanted to get down to business, but he just toyed with me for a few moments, passing the time of day, then abruptly said, “I think it’s time to decide on the Apollo 11 phase assignments.” With no further preliminaries, he continued, “I think I should launch Apollo 11 and do the EVA. Milt [Windler] will take the entry. This leaves Glynn for the lunar ascent . . . and you with the landing. Is that okay with you?” I nodded, and the meeting was over. The entire session had taken less than sixty seconds. I had drawn the flight director assignment to put the first man on the Moon.

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Kennedy Space Center, Florida LM lunar module, previously called lunar excursion module (LEM) LMP lunar module pilot LOI lunar orbit injection (maneuver to enter into lunar orbit) LOS loss of signal LRC Langley Research Center (Langley Field, Virginia) MA- Mercury-Atlas-(followed by mission number) Mach ratio of airspeed to the speed of sound at a given altitude MCC Mercury Control Center at Cape 1960-65 or Mission Control Center at Houston 1965-1972 MET mission elapsed time (time since liftoff) MPAD Mission Planning and Analysis Division—responsible for analytic trajectory design MR- Mercury-Redstone-(followed by mission number) MSC Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas, used through 1973 MSFC Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama) NACA National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration NoGo the decision to cancel a planned event OD operations director position in Mercury Control, changed to FOD for Gemini and Apollo PAO public affairs officer—position in the MCC to release mission information POGO rapid up-and-down maneuver that if continued would destroy launch vehicle psi pounds per square inch PTC passive thermal control RCS Reaction Control System—small propulsion jets for attitude control and small maneuvers Refsmmat reference to stable member matrix—technique for conversion between coordinate systems RETRO retrofire officer—the MCC specialist in reentry trajectories RSO range safety officer—responsible for protecting landmass across the world from errant rockets SCE signal conditioning electronics SimSup simulation supervisor—the leader of the training team in the MCC SM service module—portion of Apollo CSM that contained main engines and power systems SPAN spacecraft analysis team—small group in MCC to access design and manufacturing SPC stored program command, a command stored in a computer or program that will activate a function at a specific clock time Stay NoStay Time-critical decision to remain on the Moon or lift off at the next opportunity SYSTEMS Mercury control center engineer responsible for electrical, attitude control, display, and structural systems TEC trans-Earth coast TEI trans-Earth injection (maneuver to return the spacecraft to Earth from the Moon) TELMU Lunar Module engineer responsible for electrical, environmental, communications, pyrotechnic, structural, and EVA systems TLC translunar coast TLI translunar injection (the maneuver to take the spacecraft to the Moon) TM telemetry Trench the MCC trajectory team consisting of the RETRO, FIDO, and GUIDO TVC thrust vector control (rocket steering mechanism) Z Zulu—shortened term for Greenwich Mean Time used in logs and messages Manned Mercury Remote Sites BDA Bermuda ATS/RKV Atlantic Tracking Ship/Rose Knot Victor—designation changed in middle of the program CYI Canary Islands KNO Kano, Nigeria ZZB Zanzibar IOS/CSQ Indian Ocean Ship/Coastal Sentry Quebec—designation changed in middle of program MUC Muchea, Australia WOM Woomera, Australia—tracking station in a remote desert location on a military test range CTN Canton Island—FAA ground beacon for aircraft navigation in South Pacific HAW located at edge of Waimea Canyon on Hawaiian island of Kauai CAL California, site located at Point Arguello GYM Guaymas, Mexico TEX Corpus Christi, Texas Manned Gemini Remote Sites CYI Canary Islands CRO Carnarvon, Australia HAW located at edge of Waimea Canyon on Hawaiian island of Kauai GYM Guaymas, Mexico CSQ Coastal Sentry Quebec ship RKV Rose Knot Victor ship TEX Used as a training site only INDEX Aaron, John and Apollo 1 fire and Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 and Apollo 13 crisis Abort in mission rules training sessions Abort command Abort switch problem Agena Africa tracking sites Air Force Agena upper-stage rocket Atlas program Fighting 69th man in space program satellite missions 6555th test wing Aldrich, Arnold (Arnie) and Apollo 13 crisis Aldrin, Edwin (Buzz) Apollo 11 as CapCom EVA training America American flag on Moon American public and space program Anders, William Apollo Anderson Anderton, David Antares Apollo 1 fire Apollo 4 Apollo 5 Apollo 6 Apollo 7 Apollo 8 Apollo 9 Apollo 10 Apollo 11 astronaut badge phase assignments Apollo 12 lightning strike Apollo 13 explosion reentry Apollo 14 Apollo 15 Apollo 16 Apollo 17 Apollo 18 Apollo 19 Apollo Application Program Apollo missions canceled duration of final splashdown parties unmanned Apollo program final missions first manned missions guidance and navigation systems and software leaders in problems in Apollo spacecraft Apollo Saturn Aquarius “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” Arabian, Don Armed Forces Judo Association Armstrong, Neil Apollo 11 Gemini 8 remote site assignment Army Redstone Arsenal Astronauts in Apollo 13 crisis resolution ejection expected loss of experiments performed by food hands-on control of spacecraft and Mercury Control Mercury Seven and Mission Control relationship with ground control remote site CapComs right stuff second group seven original training for Apollo program training for lunar exploration Atlas rocket blockhouses failures MA-3 Atlas/Agena Attitude control problem Attitude control systems Attitude control tests Augmented target docking adapter (ATDA) Aurora 7 Australia tracking station Aviation Week magazine Avro Arrow (aircraft) Avro flight test and design team B-52 Bales, Steve Ballistic missions Bassett, Charlie Bay of Pigs Bean, Alan Apollo 12 Beck, Hal Bendix (Co.)

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Borman, Frank Apollo 8 Gemini 7 Bostick, Jerry Bowen, Maureen Brand, Vance Bray, Don Bronze Team Brooks, Mel Brotherhood Brown, Bob Bucholz, Bill (Big Shoes) Burke, Walter Burton, Clint Burton, Mary Shep Byrd, Richard Caidin, Martin California tracking station Canary Islands tracking site Canin, Larry Canton Island CapCom (CTN) Canton Island tracking site CapCom(s) remote site Cape Canaveral, Florida Capsule systems, handbooks for Capsules problems recovering “Captain Refsmmat” Cargill, Eugene Carlton, Bob Carnarvon, Australia Carpenter, Scott as CapCom second Mercury orbital mission Carr, Gerry Carroll, Harry Casey, Chuck Casper Castro, Fidel Cernan, Gene Apollo 17 Gemini 9 Chaffee, Roger Apollo 1 death of Challenger Charlesworth, Cliff Earth Resources Project Office flight director in management Charlie Brown Chimpanzees Coastal Sentry Quebec (CSQ) tracking ship Cocoa Beach Coen, Gary Cohen, Aaron Cold War Coleman, Jack Collins, Mike Apollo 11 Columbia Columbus, Christopher Command and control principle Command and Service Module (CSM) Apollo 7 Apollo 9 Apollo 11 Apollo 12 Apollo 13 Apollo 14 Apollo 15 Apollo 17 “funnies” in modifications to power provided by qualifying testing Command module Apollo missions Communications blackout(s) Communications system remote site Communications technology Computer program alarms Computers in Apollo program crashing digital in dual launch lunar module new software in onboard simulation trajectory software Congress funding for space program and future of space program Conrad, Charles (Pete) Apollo 12 Gemini-Titan 5 Contractors Control systems Controllers background of culture of debriefings FCD failures information available to knowledge level of learning by doing Mercury program new post-Apollo relations among relationship with astronauts responsibilities Cook, James Coons, Dwight Cooper, Gordon (Gordo) final Mercury mission Gemini-Titan 5 one-day mission Craven, Jack Critzos, Chris Cryogenics Cuba Cunningham, Walt Daley, Richard Dana, Bill De Atkine, Joe Decision making Decision process Deiterich, Chuck Docking Apollo 14 Apollo 15 Gemini missions by Russians Doctors see also Flight surgeons Doerner, George Douglas, Bill Dowling, Jack Dual launch capability Dual launch missions Duke, Charlie Apollo 11 Apollo 13 Apollo 16 “Dumb shit medals” (DSM) E mission Eagle Earth Resources Project Office Echo check Eisele, Donn Eisenhower, Dwight Ejection seats Electrochemistry Ellington Air Force Base Officers Club Endeavour Engineering Directorate Engineers Apollo and Apollo 13 crisis based at Space Task Group headquarters becoming operators recruiting and rockets Enos (chimpanzee) Ernull, Bob Ernst, Jack Erwin, Sue Escape tower Eshelman (Teletype operator) EVA (extravehicular activity) Apollo 9 Apollo 11 Apollo 13 Apollo 15 Apollo 16 Apollo 17 Apollo missions Gemini 4 Gemini 9 Evans, Ron Apollo 17 Experiment Packages Experiment Systems Branch Experiments F-86F Sabre jets F-100 Super Sabres Faget, Max Failure not an option Faith 7 Falcon Fendell, Ed Fenner, Will Field geology trip Fire-in-the-hole “Firefly” phenomenon Flight Control Air Force officers assigned to beer mug systems team toughness and competence turning point in Flight Control Branch Flight Control Division (FCD) Experiment Packages Kranz made chief of operations branches Simulation Branch Flight Control Operations Branch Flight control team Apollo 11 emblem training of Flight directors colors retired debates among dual honorary title honored for Apollo 13, crisis resolution identifying colors job description lead mandate need for information pre-mission period and NASA management new generation of press conferences role of training Flight Dynamics Flight dynamics team see also Trench, The Flight Operations Flight Operations Directorate Flight Operations Division (FOD) Flight Readiness Review Apollo 11 Flight rules Flight surgeons and EVA Flight tests manned Four-inch Flight Frank, Pete Freedom 7 Freeman, Ted Frenchman’s Flat Friendship 7 Fucci, Jim Fuel cells Apollo 12 Apollo 13 “Funnies” (anomalies, glitches) Gagarin, Yuri Gardner, Spencer Garman, Jack Gemini 1 Gemini 2 Gemini 3 Gemini 4 Gemini 5 Gemini 6 second launch attempt Gemini 7 Gemini 8 Gemini 9 Gemini 9A second launch attempt Gemini 10 Gemini 76 Gemini missions duration of first manned Gemini program human factor in leadership of Gemini spacecraft German rocket scientists Gilruth, Robert became director of Manned Spacecraft Center Gimbal lock Glenn, John as CapCom orbital flight Go NoGo criteria for Go NoGo decisions Apollo 11 Apollo 13 reentry Gemini-Titan Mercury-Atlas 6 Mercury-Atlas 9 Go NoGo mission rules EVA Go NoGo points Goddard, Robert Goddard Space Flight Center “Goddard voice” Goett, Harry Gold Team Goldin, Daniel Gordon, Dick Apollo 12 Gordon Highlanders Green Team Greene, Jay Greenwich mean time Griffin, Gerry field geology trip flight director handing over to new generation of flight directors Griffith, Gerry Grissom, Virgil I.

pages: 628 words: 170,668

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 by Francis French, Colin Burgess, Walter Cunningham

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, lost cosmonauts, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne, X Prize

Without it, Aldrin might not have been considered experienced enough to be assigned to Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 crew. “A lot of fate determines where you fit into the puzzle,” he later reflected. There would only be one other American spacewalk mission flown before Aldrin was in space again and once more making an eva. His next one would be on the surface of the moon. After their Gemini 11 flight, Dick Gordon and Pete Conrad served as the backup crew for Apollo 9, along with another old naval aviator friend, Alan Bean. As was customary, the backup crew flew three flights later, as the Apollo 12 moon landing mission. Since there had been no guarantee that Apollo 11 would be the first landing mission and as Apollo 9’s mission was originally planned as the second manned Apollo flight instead of the third, Conrad and Bean could easily have been the first people to land on the moon.

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On the morning of launch Eisele was in the command module for several hours, thoroughly checking all the systems. But then he was required to carefully climb out, to allow the prime crew to enter and journey to the moon. He would never fly in space again. By the time of the next mission, Apollo 11, the divorce became front-page news. “It was rough when the rumors of the divorce triggered constant phone calls from reporters,” Harriet remembers, “with some even knocking on the door. The divorce became final during the Apollo 11 mission. I watched the news come over the wire in the cbs office in Houston where I was working. I felt publicly humiliated, being plastered in newspapers, magazines, and tv news reports all over the country.”

…

Everything had worked so well that there would be no need to schedule any more Apollo test flights in Earth orbit. In fact, the euphoria over Apollo 9 even led to talk that the Apollo 10 mission, then scheduled for May, could be bypassed and replaced by Apollo 11. However, most nasa officials considered that to be a remote possibility, as the Apollo 11 spacecraft was still being assembled and was unlikely to be ready before June. Lt. Gen. Sam Phillips, the Apollo program director, said that a decision would be made before the end of March but that any alternatives to the set flight plan “stand small chance” of being accepted.

pages: 469 words: 124,784

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, clockwatching, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making

If nothing went awry, if the two missions were successful, if the next great booster was ready, if the Apollo spaceships were ready to go, if no one broke a toe or came down with the flu at the last moment, if, if, if, then the first landing assignment would go to the crew of Neil Armstrong, who had pulled Gemini 8 out of its deadly spin; Buzz Aldrin, who had solved the problems of space-walking on the very last Gemini mission; and Mike Collins, the space walker of Gemini 10. Mike didn’t think they would avoid all the potential pitfalls. He figured that if the Las Vegas bettors were brought in, they’d say the odds of Apollo 11 getting the choice plum would be only one in ten, and the odds would improve to four in ten for Pete Conrad’s Apollo 12 crew. Deke Slayton was staying with a tried-and-proven system in selecting these three for Apollo 11. His strategy, which he employed with Alan Shepard, was to select three astronauts who had skills that complemented one another’s, and who would serve as a team—commander, command module pilot, and lunar module pilot—and assign them as a backup crew.

…

Investigators said the fire was caused by defective electrical wiring. The Apollo 11 crew: Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Mike Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin. On July 16, 1969, Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin rocketed away from earth and four days later Armstrong and Aldrin rode the Lunar Module Eagle to a touchdown on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility while Collins stood watch in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module Columbia. Aldrin (shown here) and Armstrong were on the moon more than 21 hours and spent two hours exploring outside their lander. President Richard M. Nixon greeted Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean following the spacemen’s return from man’s first moon-landing mission.

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., 155, 217 Byrd, Harry, 151 B-25 bombers, 37, 283 B-26 Invader bombers, 88 C Caidin, Martin, 361 Cape Canaveral, Florida, 57 Atlas testing, 57-58, 126 candidate for new Manned Spacecraft Center, 152-53 crew quarters, 72-73 lighthouse, 69 preparations for first manned flight, 57-58, 69-78 Redstone testing, 31, 58 Vanguard explosion, 30-31 Carpenter, Malcolm Scott, 50, 65, 133, 285, 365, 367, 368 Aurora Seven mission, 144-45, 146 Carr, Jerry, 219 carrier pilots, 42-47 Casper (Apollo 16 command module), 334 Castro, Fidel, 86, 88 “celestial fireflies,” 135-36, 144 centrifuge training, 58-59, 60 Cernan, Gene, 365 Apollo 10 mission, 12, 229, 231, 345 Apollo 17 mission, 338, 339 Gemini 9 mission, 12, 172-74 Chaffee, Martha, 191, 196 Chaffee, Roger, 197, 365 Apollo 1 mission, 177, 179, 186, 188, 190, 192, 196, 197, 201, 372-73 Apollo 1 mission and death of, 185-92, 194-97, 252 Challenger (Apollo 17 lunar module), 338 Charlie Brown (Apollo 10 command module), 229, 229-32 Chauvin, Skip, 181, 182-83, 186 chimpanzees, 72, 73, 76-77, 132 CIA, 87, 213-14, 223 circumlunar missions Apollo 8 possibility, 215, 217, 218 Soviet plans for, 164, 213-14, 345 Clark, Sumner, 55 Clear Lake, Texas, 154 Cocoa Beach, Florida, 73, 101 cold war, 335, 340, 344, 344-45 See also U.S.-Soviet competition Cold war, 12, 335, 340, 344, 344-45, 346-47 Collins, Michael, 212 Apollo 11 mission, 233-47, 374-76 Gemini 10 mission, 174 Columbia (Apollo 11 command module), 234, 239, 243, 253, 375 “common docking device,” 336, 346 See also Apollo-Soyuz Test Project communications satellite system, 123 computers, 7, 9 lunar descent problems, 192, 224, 305-6 Concert of the Spacecraft, 105 Cone Crater, Moon, 311, 313, 322 Connelly, Phil, 38 Conrad, Charles (“Pete”), 146, 365 Apollo 12 mission, 226, 258, 260-61, 262 Gemini 5 mission, 217 Convair, 56, 131-32 Cooper, Leroy Gordon, Jr.

pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Nixon’s signature is on the plaque left on the Moon in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts. And maybe it’s just coincidence, but twenty-four astronauts hail from the swing state of Ohio—more than from any other state—including John Glenn (America’s first to orbit Earth) and Neil Armstrong (the world’s first to walk on the Moon). If partisan politics ever leaked into NASA’s activities, it tended to appear on the fringes of operations. For example, President Nixon could, in principle, have dispatched the newly commissioned USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier to pluck the Apollo 11 command module from the Pacific Ocean. That would have been a nice touch.

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Given sufficient political will, this step should enable its aerospace engineers, assembly lines, and funding streams to focus on a new suite of launch vehicles designed to do what the shuttles can’t: take us beyond low Earth orbit, with sights on farther frontiers. • • • CHAPTER TWENTY HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, APOLLO 11* The National Air and Space Museum is unlike any other place on this planet. If you’re hosting visitors from another country and they want to know what single museum best captures what it is to be American, this is the museum you take them to. Here they can see the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1927 Spirit of St. Louis, the 1926 Goddard rocket, and the Apollo 11 command module—silent beacons of exploration, of a few people willing to risk their lives for the sake of discovery.

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Fact is, a lot of image reconnaissance goes into planning these journeys. For example, in 1966–67 five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were sent to study the Moon and photograph possible landing sites. The photograph of what became Apollo 11’s landing site is now part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at the NASA Ames Research Center. Fast forward four decades, and the NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the LRO, returned its first images of the Apollo 11 landing site, with the lunar module still sitting right there, casting a long, distinctive shadow. LRO is the next step in returning astronauts to the Moon—it’s a robotic scout that’s helping to find the best places to explore.

pages: 133 words: 47,871

Flying to the Moon: An Astronaut's Story by Michael Collins

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, place-making

The news was not long in coming, and it was all good. I was assigned to the Apollo 11 crew, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin! We were to be the first crew to attempt a lunar landing, provided everything went well. By that I mean that Apollos 9 and 10 must make near-perfect flights before us. Apollo 9 was the first test flight of the lunar module, in earth orbit, and Apollo 10 was to be a dress rehearsal in lunar orbit, involving a rendezvous but not a landing. I figured the chances were about fifty-fifty for Apollo 11 to be the first flight to try a landing. I would know in six months’ time, but meanwhile it was back into the simulator for me, because that is where I would get the knowledge I needed to fly safely and well.

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NASA wasn’t too fond of names for spacecraft, and during the Gemini program we had used numbers only (like Gemini 10), but now we had two spacecraft, and we couldn’t call them both Apollo 11 on the radio, so we needed names. Apollo 9 had called theirs Gumdrop and Spider, which I thought were neat names because the command module was shaped like a gumdrop and the lunar module did look sort of like a spider. But for Apollo 11 we wanted something which sounded a little more important. We also wanted an emblem which didn’t show the spacecraft themselves but which somehow said our country was making a peaceful landing on the moon.

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The idea was to expose the mice to the moon rocks. If the mice stayed healthy, then the moon rocks must be safe and we were free to rejoin our families without fear of infecting anyone. As the days passed and the mice stayed healthy, our spirits rose, and finally, on August 10, 1969, the flight of Apollo 11 ended and we were released to the world. 12 The flight of Apollo 11 ended a remarkable part of my life. For quite a while afterward, my life really was different than it had been before. I received mail from all over the world, from common people and from kings, from a few people I knew and from thousands I did not know. I got a nice letter from Charles Lindbergh, who thought that my flight around the moon by myself must have been similar to his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

pages: 453 words: 142,717

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space by Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, full employment, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, Teledyne, white flight

The choices made at that point also contributed to the string of historic circumstances which led to Neil Armstrong taking the first steps on the Moon. McDivitt’s backup on the original Apollo 8 was Pete Conrad, who would have rotated three missions later to command Apollo 11. Instead, when Jim passed on the Moon ride, and was bumped back to Apollo 9, his backup team, with Pete in command, shifted back along with him. Pete eventually commanded Apollo 12. Neil, who was Borman’s backup on the original Apollo 9, moved ahead by one important notch when Borman did, and three missions later, he flew Apollo 11. VIETNAM DID IN PRESIDENT Johnson, and Richard Nixon squeaked by Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace in the November presidential election.

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He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spacecraft Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious—that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil Armstrong, the mission commander, should be the first one down the ladder on Apollo 11. Since I shared an office with Neil, who was away training that day, I found Aldrin’s arguments both offensive and ridiculous. Ever since learning that Apollo 11 would attempt the first Moon landing, Buzz had pursued this peculiar effort to sneak his way into history, and was met at every turn by angry stares and muttered insults from his fellow astronauts. How Neil put up with such nonsense for so long before ordering Buzz to stop making a fool of himself is beyond me.

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Neil, Buzz and Mike had blasted off from Earth without incident four days earlier, and an incredible sense of worldwide anticipation grew as Apollo 11 rushed through space. Thanks to the advent of global communications, this would be the most-watched event in history, and when the lunar lander Eagle uncoupled from the command module Columbia, the world held its breath as the two spacecraft zipped into a tandem orbit around the far side of the Moon. When they reappeared, the impossible would be about to happen, although the men actually flying the machines that day put their chances of actually landing on the Moon at no better than fifty-fifty. I was in Mission Control, watching and sweating with everyone else, as Apollo 11 went out of radio contact.

pages: 410 words: 120,234

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings by Earl Swift

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, COVID-19, data acquisition, Internet Archive, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, zero-sum game

Charlie Duke described an astronaut’s limited visibility in a telephone interview on August 27, 2020. Jerry Schaber, who mapped the Apollo 11 traverses, described the limited range of the crew’s travels in an interview at his home in Flagstaff on October 11, 2019. The white-knuckle moments before Apollo 11’s landing are so well known it seems silly to cite a source here, but if you haven’t seen the amazing 2019 CNN Films picture Apollo 11, here’s your kick in the pants. The July 29, 1969, debriefing was described in the weekly notes of August 4, 1969. The Apollo 11 crew made the twenty-foot-wheel suggestion in an August 7, 1969, meeting chronicled by George M.

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“He wound up on an airplane runway about a quarter of a mile off, and the men in the control tower had to stop air traffic so he wouldn’t be hit by an incoming 707.” 33 ON JULY 16, 1969, FIVE DAYS AFTER MOREA RELEASED THE REQUEST for proposals, Apollo 11 launched for the moon from an oceanfront pad at the Kennedy Space Center. When the lunar module Eagle touched down, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped from its relative safety into the Sea of Tranquility’s “magnificent desolation,” rover teams at companies scattered across the United States were racing to assemble proposals by the August deadline. Apollo 11’s brief lunar visit offered a strong argument for the LRV project. Moving in a space suit proved tiring and clumsy: the outer garment was twenty-one layers thick and resisted bending as a matter of course, but when pressurized, it blew into a stiff balloon that required real muscle to flex.

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Officials in Houston, especially Jim McDivitt—a Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut who now led Houston’s Lunar Landing Operations office—argued in the name of safety that hover time was too dear to trade away. The Apollo 11 experience seemed to back him up. So, even as NASA ploughed ahead with the procurement, the rover remained a fragile addition to the Apollo program. This became all too evident five days after Apollo 11’s splashdown, when Armstrong and Aldrin sat down with NASA officials for their technical debriefing. The two “were questioned about using a roving vehicle,” read a summary prepared for von Braun.

pages: 538 words: 153,734

Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, company town, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, trade route, white flight

In the wake of the mission’s triumph, the Agency decided that it would need just two more warm-up flights to prove the soundness of its equipment and its flight plan. Then, sometime in July, Apollo 11—the lucky Apollo 11—would be sent out to make the descent into the ancient lunar dust. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin would make the trip, and at the moment it looked like it would be Armstrong who would take the historic first step. Following Apollo 11, there would be nine more lunar landings, and Lovell, now one of the most experienced men on the astronaut roster, figured he had a pretty good shot at commanding one of them.

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If the schedule ran the way it was supposed to run—and there was no reason to assume it wouldn’t—April 21 was the day they would splash down in the Pacific Ocean and climb aboard the deck of the helicopter carrier Iwo Jima, having just completed humanity’s third and most ambitious landing on the moon. Unlike Apollos 11 and 12, which had been sent to the glass-smooth plains of the Sea of Tranquillity and the Ocean of Storms, Apollo 13 would be heading for a high-wire touchdown in the moon’s Fra Mauro highlands. Negotiating a terrain that treacherous would require some sublimely good piloting, the kind that would prove not only the soundness of the translunar ships but the skill of the men who had been tapped to fly them.

…

The fact that they did escape was the longest of piloting long shots, and a space agency surviving on public goodwill was not about to push things now, packing the same three men into the same sort of ship, flinging them back into the void, and inviting fate to have a go at them again. If the astronauts could not rewrite their personal story, however, they could still tell the one they had. Apollos 11 and 12 might have landed on the moon a year earlier; Apollos 8 and 10 might have orbited it before them. But no other crew—no Americans, no Soviets, not a soul who had ridden a rocket into space before—had ever come so heartstoppingly close to cashing it in out there and yet somehow managed to make it home.

Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, centre right, desegregation, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic

See low Earth orbit Leonard Mason (destroyer), 128 Leonov, Alexi, 186 Lewis Research Center, 107 Ley, Willy, 85 life, search for, 222–24 Life (magazine), 83 Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 66 liquid-fueled rockets, 11, 12, 24, 284 LK lander, 191 Lockheed Corporation, 93, 101, 113 Loewy, Raymond, 236–37 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 59, 96 Lost in Space (TV series), 292 Lovell, Jim, 118, 124–25 low Earth orbit (LEO), 211, 217, 251 and commercial space enterprises, 296 dangers of debris found in, 258–59, 263 rescue plans for, 214–15 Lowell, Percival, 36–42, 222, 223 low-energy routes between planets, 93 Lunar Expedition Plan. See LUNEX Project lunar flyby mission of Soviet Union, 202–210 lunar landing program (Apollo 11). See Apollo program, Apollo 11 lunar module used in Apollo program, 34, 77, 94, 102, 147–56, 154, 204, 214, 236, 307n5 LK lander compared to, 191 supposed to be tested before Apollo 11, 206, 209 lunar pressure suit design for Project Horizon, 33 LUNEX Project, 8, 69–79, 70, 72, 99, 109–119, 308n7 compared to Apollo programs, 74–78, 308n7 compared to Project Horizon, 69, 71–72, 73–74, 78 Lunar Based Earth Bombardment system, 71, 307n2 Lunar Launching Stage of, 76–77 M-18 Claymore mine, 32 M-29 Davy Crockett Tactical Nuclear Recoilless Gun, 32, 275 Manhattan, scenario of a Nazi attack on.

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The Gemini capsule has a hatch in its heatshield to allow the crew to transit from the capsule into the MOL without having to open hatches and conduct an EVA (“spacewalk”). Image from NASA. Fabrication of the MOL mock-up at the McDonnell plant. MOL never flew with a crew aboard. Image from NASA/USAF. Buzz Aldrin in the lunar module as Apollo 11 heads to the moon. Within hours he and Neil Armstrong would be standing on the lunar surface. Image from NASA. Apollo 11's lunar module, taken shortly after landing. Inside the lower half, an ice plug that formed in a fuel line, causing excess pressure, had briefly threatened the mission. Image from NASA. Artist's impression of the X-20 Dyna-Soar launching on a Titan II booster.

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See ARPA African American astronaut in Matt Mason toy line, 292 Agena rocket and Gemini missions, 117–18, 119, 122 docking mission with Gemini 8, 122–26, 123, 128 Agnew, Spiro, 250 AK-47, 263–77 Aldrin, Buzz, 35, 118, 243 and Apollo, 11, 147, 148–49, 150, 151, 152–53, 154–55 honoring Komarov, Gagarin, and Apollo 1 crew, 198 Almaz space stations. See Salyut space stations Amazon (company), 216 Amerika Bomber. See Silverbird, Project Ames Research Center, 52 AM General, 52 AMU. See Astronaut Maneuvering Unit “antipodal bomber.” See Silverbird, Project Apollo 13 (movie), 297 Apollo Applications Program (AAP), 234–35 Apollo Extension Series, 234 Apollo program, 25, 65, 100, 201 abort capabilities, 76 Apollo 1 fire, 190, 198, 308n8 Apollo 7, 138, 142, 189, 209 Apollo 8, 187, 206, 209–210 Apollo 11 (lunar landing program), 44, 50, 52, 56–57, 107, 114, 123, 128, 140, 147–56, 204.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Peter, with the camera on, read the words “MAN ON THE MOON: THE EPIC JOURNEY OF APOLLO 11.” He listened to a clip from a speech given by President Kennedy in May 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The onscreen countdown began for Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to park their lunar lander on the surface of the Moon, a quest for the ages, a Cold War imperative, and a high-stakes contest between nations that had begun when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957.

…

Peter left Montrose suffused with the feeling of certainty and promise, the way he’d felt as a child when he watched Apollo 11. Part Two THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE 11 Eyes on the Prize Peter stood between Friendship 7, the titanium-skinned capsule that took the first American, John Glenn Jr., into orbit, and a display of a lunar rock sample said to be four billion years old. Not far away were the Wright Flyer from 1903 and the Voyager, the spindly winged Rutan flying machine that made it around the world in 1986 without stopping or refueling. Next to Peter was the one and only Apollo 11 command module, Columbia, and directly above was the international orange Bell X-1, the first plane to exceed the speed of sound.

…

There was a rocket in the Mojave Desert in California called the Roton, which promised to “put NASA out of business.” But the rocket appeared impossible to control, and looked quite perilous to me. So I kept looking. Space was something that I had dreamed of for decades. I can still clearly remember sitting with my mum and dad and my two sisters watching Apollo 11 land on the Moon. I was nineteen years old and spellbound by these men who had traveled to another world. It went without saying that in my lifetime ordinary people would get to travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Then decades passed and governments were not sending the general public to space.

pages: 619 words: 197,256

Apollo by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cuban missile crisis, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, index card, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, old-boy network, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ted Sorensen, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty, white flight

(NASA) The man who forced all-up on everybody and made it possible to get to the moon before the decade was out. George Mueller watches the Apollo 11 launch. (NASA) “A voice in the wilderness.” Trying to land the whole spacecraft assembly on the lunar surface would have been like trying to back an Atlas back down on the pad, and no one had figured out how to do that. But there was a strange and probably crazy idea called lunar-orbit rendezvous, promulgated relentlessly by this man, John Houbolt. (NASA) The consequence of Houbolt’s crazy idea was this unearthly machine, the Lunar Module. This one is Apollo 11’s Eagle, showing Buzz Aldrin with his back to the picture.

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Their account of the little-known problem with the blocked fuel line, pp. 166–68, is by far the most complete ever published, and is the main source for our description. Additional technical information was obtained from Donald Arabian et al., Mission Evaluation Report: Apollo 11. Such a report was prepared by the Test Division for each of the flights, and was provided to the authors courtesy of Robert Fricke. Neil Armstrong breaking the arming switch: Pellegrino and Stoff, Lunar Module, pp. 168–69. Additional technical information from Arabian et al., Mission Evaluation Report: Apollo 11. Mike Collins awaiting Eagle’s liftoff: Collins, Carrying the Fire, p. 418. Display on the MOCR’s screens after splashdown: Baker, History of Manned Space Flight, p. 358. 26.

…

When he was once asked what the highlight of the Apollo Program had been for him, his answer had nothing to do with honors or awards or the moment of his own most personal triumph, the successful flight of the first Saturn V. The most memorable moment of all his years on Apollo, George Mueller said, had been the surprise birthday party that his staff gave him after Apollo 11. Or there would be the night after the Apollo fire, when the supposedly implacable Mueller would twice put aside technical arguments in order to help a troubled Joe Shea. The people who saw Mueller at closest hand seem to have admired him the most, which is one of the ultimate compliments. But at least this much may be said without qualification: He was the undisputed boss of manned space flight from the day he walked into the office in 1963 until the day he left six years later. 2 Mueller didn’t so much sell the all-up idea as dictate it.

pages: 361 words: 110,905

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

the reporter asked. “Apollo 11,” Borman said. What Borman didn’t say was that he, Lovell, and Anders might have been the crew for Apollo 11—if only Borman had wanted it. Deke Slayton, who assigned crews, thought that the Apollo 8 astronauts were best positioned to train for the first Moon landing, since they’d already made a lunar orbit flight. But given Borman’s decision that Apollo 8 would be his last trip in space, Slayton didn’t need to further consider Borman and his crew. In the end, Slayton decided to stay with the planned rotation, with Neil Armstrong as commander of Apollo 11. The day after the press conference, the astronauts were honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, an appearance at the United Nations, and a party at the Waldorf Astoria with Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller.

…

When asked to compare Apollo 8 to his historic flight, astronaut Mike Collins said, “I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the Moon. As you look back one hundred years from now, which is more important? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11.” Astronaut Ken Mattingly said, “Of all of the events to participate in, you know, I was lucky because I could do Apollo 11 as well as 8 and then 13. But being part of Apollo 8, it made everything else anticlimactic.” For Chris Kraft, it was simple: “It took more courage to make the decision to do Apollo 8 than anything we ever did in the space program

…

* * * — On January 20, following Richard Nixon’s inauguration, NASA announced that Lovell and Anders would be on the backup crew for Apollo 11, the mission expected to make the first lunar landing. That meant if the primary crew—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins—made the trip, Lovell and Anders likely would be primary crew for another lunar landing, Apollo 14. However, Slayton had made Anders the backup command module pilot for Apollo 11, which meant Anders would be the one who stayed with the orbiting spacecraft while his two crewmates flew the lunar module to the Moon’s surface and back.

pages: 570 words: 151,609

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

As the MOL group pressed their case in interviews with Deke Slayton, the director of Flight Crew Operations, in July 1969, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin were already on their way to the moon aboard Apollo 11. TWELVE Houston, 1969 With Neil Armstrong’s descent to the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, NASA, after an extraordinary eight-year campaign, had succeeded in “putting a man on the moon.” Inside Mission Control, John Young wasn’t sure anyone was following the journey with deeper interest than he and his Apollo 10 comrades were. Been there, done (almost) that, he thought as he layered his own insights and feelings over what was unfolding. He regarded the Apollo 11 crew as very atypical. The command module pilot, his good friend Mike Collins, whom he’d flown with on Gemini X, he regarded as one of the Astronaut Office’s outstanding characters.

…

., 180 Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau (MiG), 142, 143, 204, 205 MiG-25 “Foxbat,” 143 MiG 105.11 “Lapot,” 204 Milky Way, 340 Mill, Jerry, 157, 171 missiles Atlas, 11 ICBMs, 219 Minuteman ballistic program, 193 Polaris, 47 R-7 intercontinental, 11, 262 Redstone missile, 24 Tomahawk, 268 V-2 ballistic, 56, 88, 141 Mission Control Apollo 13, 76–79, 80, 348 Apollo 16, 95 Columbia’s auxiliary power units (APUs), 337–39, 342 Columbia’s damaged heat shield, 277, 278, 282, 293, 301, 335–37 Columbia’s malfunctioning flight recorder, 325–26, 329–31 Columbia’s reaction control system burns, 304–5, 309–15, 317–22 development flight instrumentation (DFI), 284 loss of Columbia, 392 Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, 165, 172 Skylab, 112, 119 STS-1, 235, 249, 290, 295, 298, 304–15 STS-1 launch, 245, 260, 262, 267, 268, 270, 303 STS-1 reentry and landing, 343, 345, 347–49, 352, 353, 355–56, 359, 361–62, 366, 368, 369, 371–72, 373 wake-up music, 303, 341 missions. See specific STS mission Moffett Field, California, 341 Mojave Desert, California, 165–77, 368 moon missions, 46, 142 Apollo 8, 55 Apollo 11, 62–65, 100–101, 246 Apollo 16, 94–95 Apollo 17, 121 landing simulations, 135 Moonraker (film), 212–14 Morgenstern, Oskar, 89, 90 Moser, Tom, 102 airframe testing, 207–8 Apollo 11 flag, 100–101 Columbia’s damaged heat shield, 279, 280, 285, 294, 300, 301, 324–25, 327, 328, 335, 350 John Houbolt’s concern over Columbia, 246–47, 250 on-orbit tile repair kits, 235 searches for solution to heat shield concerns, 212, 218, 221, 222–23, 229, 235 Shuttle’s heat shield development, 102–3, 211 Shuttle’s payload bay doors, 276 STS-1 launch, 266, 275 STS-1 reentry and landing, 374 Mueller, George, 66, 67, 69–70 Mullane, Mike, 389–90 Mullite, 133 Mullon, Nick, 243, 244 Multimission Modular Spacecraft, 189 NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics).

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Now, thirty years later, she was working as an engineer at Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the prospect of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin realizing that goal was just months away. After graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1948, Lee had trained on the job under Houston’s chief engineer, Max Faget. Part of the team working on the heat shield that would protect the Apollo 11 crew as they returned to Earth, she was already anticipating the celebrations that would mark their safe return. On April 1, 1969, Lee took a phone call from Faget’s office asking her to report to a room on the third floor of Houston’s Building 36. She was told not to tell anybody where she was going.

pages: 263 words: 72,899

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, Gene Kranz, ice-free Arctic, index card, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, panic early, Strategic Defense Initiative, two and twenty, women in the workforce

I took a week’s vacation to recharge my batteries, just spending time at home with my family. Bill Anders let me know that our new assignment was with Jim Lovell as the backup crew for Apollo 11. The Apollo 11 training ahead offered a few new things to prepare for, and now I was back with a familiar friend—the LM. It was the LM-5 that I spent quite a few hours testing at Grumman in 1967. Traveling to the Moon, getting into its lunar orbit, and reaching home through a Mach 36 entry are all of the mission phases that had been proven valid with Apollo 8. However, Apollo 11 covered new training for LM operations at the Moon, including landing on the Moon, subsequent extravehicular activity (EVA), and walking on the lunar surface.

…

When I joined the Astronaut Office at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), which is now known as the Johnson Space Center (JSC), Warren North headed the Crew Training and Procedures Division, and Joe Algranti headed the Aircraft Operations Division. I served on the backup crew with Neil Armstrong for the Apollo 8 Mission and as the backup lunar module (LM) pilot for his Apollo 11 Mission. I was impressed with the array of aircraft on the hangar floor. I saw a Navy R4D and a USAF C-47 that served as our transport aircraft for personnel and cargo. The Air Force had offices on the first floor of the hangar, facing the runways. A colonel was in charge of several personnel to oversee and observe specific aircraft engine tests of interest to the USAF.

…

I looked forward to flying the lunar landing training vehicle because of the potential that I would enjoy it, but management decided that only commanders on designated landing missions would fly the vehicle. My turn came when I served as Apollo 16’s backup commander. Bill left the training cycle for Apollo 11, despite the fact that he wanted to make a landing on the Moon. I think he figured that he would never pass through the mission cycles to have that opportunity. I also think Bill was smarter than I about the political world and its conceivable effect on NASA’s budget. No one really knew if the space program would always be funded at the same level.

pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

“Between the third”: Hans Koenigsmann, NASA Oral History, January 15, 2013. “We wanted to keep”: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-making-of-the-apollo-11-mission-patch. And when the NASA officials: “Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Industrial Empire,” 60 Minutes, March 30, 2014. Goddard was derided: “Apollo 11: How America Won the Race to the Moon,” Associated Press, August 21, 2016. “That Professor Goddard”: “A Severe Strain on Credulity,” New York Times, January 13, 1920. Goddard responded by saying that: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/research/f_goddard.html. “How many more years”: “Apollo 11.” “Further investigation”: “A Correction,” New York Times, July 17, 1969. 9.

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Knowing the importance that symbolism and superstition had for its astronauts, NASA allowed its crews to design their own patches. For Apollo 11, which would become one of the most recognizable, the astronauts decided to omit their names in a self-effacing gesture, though listing the crew members had been the practice in the past. “We wanted to keep our three names off it because we wanted the design to be representative of everyone who had worked toward a lunar landing,” said Michael Collins, a member of the Apollo 11 crew. “And there were thousands who could take a proprietary interest in it, yet who would never see their names woven into the fabric of a patch.

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But the landings were reminiscent of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s touching down on the surface of the moon in the lunar module. Or the “seven-minutes of terror” landing of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The sight of the boosters standing on terra firma, scorched but triumphant, portended a sense of arrival, and offered hope for another Apollo 11 moment, the next giant leap many had felt they were promised but had never come. Even more impressive was that the landings had been accomplished not by nations—not even NASA had pulled off such a feat—but by a pair of private companies. Backed by billionaires intent on developing reusable rockets, which could fly, land, then fly again, they were pursuing a holy grail—a technology with the potential to dramatically lower the cost of space travel.

pages: 396 words: 112,354

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, space junk, white flight

But the odds of that happening were slim: Collins kept exceedingly fit and did not do a lot of the hard drinking and fast driving some of the other astronauts did. If he was assigned to fly a mission, there was very little chance he wouldn’t go. That meant that Lovell would get a starting spot on a later, distinctly better, flight: the center seat on Apollo 11, between Neil Armstrong on the left and Buzz Aldrin on the right. Apollo 11 might or might not be a lunar landing, and even if it was, Lovell would have to wait overhead in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin flew down in the LEM and got their boots covered with moon dirt. Still, 11 could easily be a bona fide moon shot, an adventure that looked a lot better than the Earth-orbit dog-paddling Borman had been assigned.

…

So the first-man-on-the-moon profiles of Stafford were shelved, to be replaced by stories about Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong—and those were the stories that ultimately ran. Initially, Armstrong’s assignment had not been a sure thing. NASA, reflexively risk averse, was always looking for ways to improve the reliability of the hardware and the skill of the crews. After Apollo 8 returned to Earth, Deke Slayton and a few others in the flight planning office began talking quietly about the possibility of giving Borman, Lovell, and Anders a few weeks off to rest, then putting them right back into training and sending them off to fly Apollo 11. The crew was uniquely qualified for lunar flight, after all, and they would have at least seven months to prepare for their new assignment.

…

When Lovell heard that the crew assignments would not change, he was as delighted as Borman. Had the crew been assigned to Apollo 11, he would have occupied the center seat again, meaning that he would once again orbit the moon but not land on it. That held almost no appeal. He would much prefer to pass up an immediate return, put his name back into the flight rotation, and take his chances on commanding a later mission. Anders, however, was not the least bit pleased when he heard that he wouldn’t be flying on Apollo 11. He had lost his chance to fly a LEM once, and now, with a trip scheduled for just seven months later, he had had a shot at a new one.

pages: 306 words: 36,032

John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology) by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Ted Sorensen

To reinforce his commitment to President Kennedy’s space legacy, less than a week after the assassination Johnson announced that Cape Canaveral would be renamed Cape Kennedy and that the space launch facilities located there would be called the John F. Kennedy Space Center.1 In the more than five-and-a-half years between Kennedy’s death and the July 20, 1969 landing of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, dedication to Kennedy’s commitment to achieving that feat “before this decade is out” sustained the program through delays and difficult times, including the death of three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad accident on January 27, 1967. When the Apollo 11 command module Columbia returned to Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean at dawn on July 24, 1969, a large video screen in Apollo Mission Control in Houston displayed these words: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.

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As I moved from Catholic to The George Washington University in 1970, the MIT Press brought out a hardcover edition of the dissertation as The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest. The University of Chicago Press published a paperback edition in 1976. (As a side note, working on the study of the Apollo decision provided an opportunity to be present at the July 16, 1969, launch of the Apollo 11 mission, and also the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 launches. Those experiences alone were worth the effort that went into research and writing the dissertation and subsequent book.) My detailed study of the decision-making process by which President Kennedy became convinced that it was in the national interest for the United States to enter, with the intent of winning, the space race with the Soviet Union has been described as “classic” and “powerful and seminal” by leading space historian Roger Launius.1 Such an assessment is, of course, very gratifying.

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As Johnson addressed the Senate’s Democratic caucus on January 7, 1958, in an address Reedy characterized as having “compelling power,” he claimed that “control of space means control of the world.”51 As the Senate organized itself to deal with space issues, Johnson named himself chairman of the new Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, even as he maintained his position as majority leader. In a 1969 interview with veteran television journalist Walter Cronkite on the occasion of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, Lyndon Johnson told Cronkite that president-elect Kennedy had asked him whether there was anything “that I thought I could be helpful to the Administration on.” Johnson replied that “I would like to work in the field of space,” and that Kennedy had replied that “a President had all a person could do and the Law provided that the President would be Chairman of the Space Council.”

pages: 362 words: 134,405

Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic of the Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic by James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Neil Armstrong, Skype, social distancing, UNCLOS

In Memory of the Great Ocean Rower Don Allum (1937–1992) And all the other “completely mad” adventurers who bless and honor the human experience From the Apollo 11 Astronauts To John Fairfax: May we of Apollo 11 add our sincere congratulations to the many you have undoubtedly already received for your bold and courageous feat of rowing alone across the Atlantic. We who sail what President Kennedy once called “The new ocean of space” are pleased to pay our respects to the man who, single handedly, has conquered the still formidable ocean of water. We find it an interesting coincidence that you completed your arduous voyage here on earth at a spot very near the one from which we started our voyage to the moon.

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And that you arrived at your destination quite near the time that we reached ours. Yours, however, was the accomplishment of one resourceful individual, while ours depended upon the help of thousands of dedicated workers in the United States and all over the world. As fellow explorers, we salute you on this great occasion. The Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong Michael Collins Edwin A Aldrin Jr. —Telegram from the Apollo 11 astronauts in quarantine inside the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, to ocean rower John Fairfax, July 30, 1969 “More than twice as many people have walked on the Moon as have soloed the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat.”

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“John Fairfax, who crossed oceans in rowboats dies,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 21, 2012, accessed at https://www.smh.com.au/world/john-fairfax-who-crossed-oceans-in-rowboats-dies-20120220-1tjg3.html. “John Fairfax, who rowed Atlantic alone, dies,” CBS News, February 19, 2012, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-fairfax-who-rowed-atlantic-alone-dies/. Lange, Jeva. “The forgotten adventurer who made history in Apollo 11’s shadow,” The Week, July 18, 2019, https://theweek.com/articles/853544/forgotten-adventurer-who-made-history-apollo-11s-shadow. Long, Brent. “Why Hollywood Should Make a Movie About John Fairfax—Rower, Pirate’s Apprentice and Gambler,” Reuters, February 19, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS258393619220120219. “Man who crossed oceans, dead at 74,” UPI, February 19, 2012, https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/02/19/Man-who-crossed-oceans-dead-at-74/55251329672731/?

pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the Moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all mankind." As the United States was dropping 7½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. That plaque is there still, attached to the base of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, on the airless desolation of the Sea of Tranquility. If no one disturbs it, it will still be readable a million years from now. Six more missions followed Apollo 11, all but one of which successfully landed on the lunar surface.

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SPACECRAFT EXPLORATION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM NOTABLE EARLY ACHIEVEMENTS UNITED STATES 1958 First scientific discovery in space-Van Allen radiation belt (Explorer 1) 1959 First television images of the Earth from space (Explorer 6) 1962 First scientific discovery in interplanetary space -direct observation of the solar wind (Mariner 2) 1962 First scientifically successful planetary mission (Mariner 2 to Venus) 1962 First astronomical observatory in space (OSO-1) 1968 First manned orbit of another world ( Apollo 8 to the Moon) 1969 First landing of humans on another world ( Apollo 11 to the Moon) 1969 First samples returned to Earth from another world ( Apollo 11 to the Moon) 1971 First manned roving vehicle on another world ( Apollo 15 to the Moon) 1971 First spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mariner 9 to Mars) 1973 First flyby of Jupiter (Pioneer 10) 1974 First dual-planet mission (Mariner 10 to Venus and Mercury) 1974 First flyby of Mercury (Mariner 10) 1976 First successful Mars landing; first spacecraft to search for life on another planet (Viking 1) 1977 First flybys of Saturn (Pioneer 11) 1981 First manned reusable spacecraft (STS-1) 1980- First satellite to be retrieved, repaired, 1984 and redeployed in space (Solar Maximum Mission) 1985 First distant cometary encounter (International Cometary Explorer to Comet Giacobini-Zimmer) 1986 First flyby of Uranus (Voyager 2) 1989 First flyby of Neptune (Voyager 2) 1992 First detection of the heliopause (Voyager) 1992 First encounter with a main-belt asteroid (Galileo to Gaspra) 2 1994 First detection of a moon of an asteroid (Galileo to Ida) SOVIET UNION/RUSSIA 1957 First artificial satellite of the Earth ( Sputnik 1) 1957 First animal in space ( Sputnik 2) 1959 First spacecraft to escape the Earth's gravity ( Luna 1) 1959 First artificial planet of the Sun ( Luna 1) 1959 First spacecraft to impact another world ( Luna 2 to the Moon) 1959 First view of the far side of the moon ( Luna 3) 1961 First human in space ( Vostok 1) 1961 First human to orbit the Earth ( Vostok 1) 1961 First spacecraft to fly by other planets ( Venera 1 to Venus; 1962 Mars 1 to Mars) 1963 First woman in space ( Vostok 6) 1964 First multi-person space mission ( Voskhod 1) 1965 First space "walk" ( Voskhod 2) 1966 First spacecraft to enter the atmosphere of another planet ( Venera 3 to Venus) 1966 First spacecraft to orbit another world ( Luna 10 to the Moon) 1966 First successful soft landing on another world ( Luna 9 to the Moon) 1970 First robot mission to return a sample from another world (Luna 16 to the Moon) 1970 First roving vehicle on another world (Luna 17 to the Moon) 1971 First soft landing on another planet (Mars 3 to Mars) 1972 First scientifically successful landing on another planet (Venera 8 to Venus) 1980 First approximately year-long manned spaceflight 1981 (comparable to Mars flight time) (Soyuz 35) 1983 First full orbital radar mapping of another planet (Venera 15 to Venus) 1985 First balloon station deployed in the atmosphere of another planet (Vega 1 to Venus) 1986 First close cometary encounter (Vega 1 to Halley's Comet) 1986 First space station inhabited by rotating crews (Mir) 3 CONTENTS WANDERERS: AN INTRODUCTION 5 1.

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OTHER WORLDS, OTHER SKIES: Mercury, the Earth's Moon, and most satellites of the other planets are small worlds; because of their feeble gravities, they are unable to retain their atmospheres—which instead trickle of into space. The near-vacuum of space then reaches the ground. Sunlight strikes their surfaces unimpeded, neither scattered nor absorbed along the way. The skies of these worlds are black, even at noon. This has been witnessed firsthand so far by only 12 humans, the lunar landing crews of Apollos 11, 12, and 14-17. A full list of the satellites in the Solar System, known as of this writing, is given in the accompanying table. (Nearly half of them were discovered by Voyager.) All have black skies— except Titan of Saturn and perhaps Triton of Neptune, which are big enough to have atmospheres.

pages: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

But not all old code is actively depended upon, even if it continues to exist. For example, the code used to manage Apollo 11’s command and lunar modules, first written in 1969, was published on GitHub in 2016, meaning that it is still publicly accessible today.193 We can view, fork, and modify Apollo 11’s code, but it’s widely understood that the code is archival. The code that is available on GitHub was digitized from a hard copy that lives in the MIT Museum; it’s not expected that anyone will run it today. Apollo 11’s code is roughly the same age as C, a programming language first released in 1972, three years after Apollo 11’s code was written. C still powers much of our underlying software and hardware today, including the Windows, Linux, macOS, iPhone, and Android kernels.

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C still powers much of our underlying software and hardware today, including the Windows, Linux, macOS, iPhone, and Android kernels. Both C’s and Apollo 11’s code were written around the same time, but while we understand that Apollo 11’s code is a historical exercise, we actually do need C to keep working, because so much of our daily life depends on it. The difference between these two codes highlights an important characteristic of code, which is that it can exist in either static or active state. Apollo 11’s code lives in static state: It’s a commodity, like lumber. When we treat code as a commodity, we’re thinking about it on the basis of pure consumption.

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., https://opensource.guide/metrics/. 182 Eghbal, “Methodologies for Measuring Project Health.” 04 183 Kevin Kelly, “Immortal Technologies,” The Technium, February 9, 2006, https://kk.org/thetechnium/immortal-techno/. 184 Nathan Ensmenger, “When Good Software Goes Bad: The Surprising Durability of an Ephemeral Technology,” Indiana University, September 11, 2014, http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/ensmenger-mice.pdf. 185 Fergus Henderson, “Software Engineering at Google,” ArXiv, February 19, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf. 186 Alex Handy, “Ruby on Rails 3.0 Goes Modular,” SD Times, February 12, 2010, https://sdtimes.com/ruby-on-rails/ruby-on-rails-3-0-goes-modular. 187 Yehuda Katz, “Rails and Merb Merge,” Katz Got Your Tongue, December 23, 2008, https://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/. 188 Byrne Hobart, “The Case for Subsidizing, or Banning, COBOL Classes,” Medium, March 29, 2019, https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/you-cant-reduce-all-economic-decisions-to-a-series-of-financial-bets-but-it-s-a-good-way-to-d40e88e89e17. 189 Chris Zacharias, “A Conspiracy To Kill IE6,” Chris Zacharias (blog), May 1, 2019, http://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6. 190 Jacob Friedmann, “SmooshGate: The Ongoing Struggle between Progress and Stability in JavaScript,” Medium, March 10, 2018, https://medium.com/@jacobdfriedmann/smooshgate-the-ongoing-struggle-between-progress-and-stability-in-javascript-2a971c1162dd. 191 Michael Ficarra (michaelficarra), “Rename Flatten to Smoosh,” Tc39 / Proposal-flatMap Pull Requests, GitHub, March 6, 2018, https://github.com/tc39/proposal-flatMap/pull/56. 192 Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1999), 88. 193 Chrislgarry / Apollo-11, GitHub, accessed March 31, 2020, https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11. 194 Nadia Eghbal, “The Hidden Costs of Software” (lecture, the Web Conference, San Francisco, May 16, 2019). 195 Free Software Foundation, “What Is Free Software?,” GNU Operating System, July 30, 2019, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html, 196 Jacob Thornton, “What Is Open Source & Why Do I Feel So Guilty?

pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

An interesting example of the difficulty of site characterization on the Moon takes us back to the Apollo era. There was little knowledge of the regolith properties where Apollo 11 was to land, and therefore much uncertainty about how deep the lander would sink into the regolith. Figure 3.8 shows one of the lander’s legs, with the large saucer at the base designed to distribute the lander weight. Figure 3.8.Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. walks on the surface of the Moon near a leg of the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity. Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, Apollo 11 commander, took this photograph with a 70-mm lunar surface camera. The astronauts’ footprints are clearly visible in the foreground.

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Kennedy announces his intention to put a man on the Moon before a joint session of Congress on May 25 1961. “10, 9, ignition sequence start, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero. All engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff! Thirty-two minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11!” Jack King, NASA Chief of Public Information, on the launch of the Apollo 11 over a live television broadcast on July 16, 1969. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Neil Armstrong tells NASA’s Mission Control base in Texas that the Eagle landing module has reached the Moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. “This is the LM pilot.

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Quotes “We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction , design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.” Neil Armstrong concludes the final television broadcast from Apollo 11 on the night before splashdown, July 23, 1969. “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it’s a long one for me!” Charles Conrad Jr., Commander of Apollo 12, on becoming the third man to walk on the Moon on November 20, 1969. “There’s a need for accepting responsibility – for a person’s life and making choices that are not just ones for immediate short-term comfort.

pages: 259 words: 94,135

Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Lynn Ross, John Norberg

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, glass ceiling, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, space junk, Ted Sorensen

–Neil ArmStroNg, Commander of Apollo 11 “this is the story of one man’s lifelong quest to explore the unknown, overcome setbacks and obstacles, and keep the beacon of space shining in the hearts of all people, young and old. this book is about an American Dream.” –eugeNe CerNAN, NASA gemini and Apollo astronaut “this book is the story of a common man from the midwest who became an American hero . . . a model for the youth of our nation and for those who will accept the challenge to follow in his footsteps.” –geNe KrANz, NASA Flight Director for gemini and Apollo, including Apollo 11 and 13 From the age of ten, looking up at the stars, Jerry ross knew that he wanted to journey into space. this autobiography tells the story of how he came not only to achieve that goal, but to become the most-launched astronaut in history, as well as a NASA veteran whose career spanned the entire uS Space Shuttle program.

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The most senior person in the Astronaut Office when I arrived was John Young.John is one of the most amazing people to ever fly into space. He is also one of my personal heroes.John flew on the first manned Gemini flight with Gus Grissom. Then he flew on Gemini 10 with Michael Collins, who would later serve as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 11—the first mission to land on the Moon. John flew on Apollo 10 with Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford. Apollo 10 did everything Apollo 11 accomplished, except for landing and walking on the lunar surface. Additionally, Captain Young commanded Apollo 16 and walked on the Moon. He also commanded the first and ninth Shuttle missions. That totals six missions for John,including two that went to the Moon and one that landed.

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“As an astronaut for over three decades, one who participated in some of the most challenging and exciting Shuttle missions, Jerry Ross knows spaceflight. In Spacewalker, he details the exultation of actually being in space and brings to life the realities of preparing for and executing one of the most difficult of all human endeavors. Spacewalker is the book for anyone who ever dreamed of flying in space.” –Neil Armstrong, Commander of Apollo 11 “I have known Jerry Ross for many years, as an astronaut, a friend, and as a fellow alumnus of Purdue University. We’ve had many opportunities to share our experiences and our dreams for space exploration. We share a passion for inspiring young people.This is the story of one man’s lifelong quest to explore the unknown, overcome setbacks and obstacles, and keep the beacon of space shining in the hearts of all people, young and old.

pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

AAA guns Above & Beyond Abu Ghraib Aerion Agin, Cheryl Chihuahuas and crash of SpaceShipTwo and at Disneyland at first rocket-powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo first space flight of SpaceShipTwo and in Idaho looks at real estate in New Mexico meets with Saling moves to New Mexico orders a bidet at SETP at Space Mirror Memorial at SpaceShipTwo’s first space flight Stucky moves in with Stucky’s convalescence and Stucky’s 2019 paragliding accident and Air Force Air Force reserves Aldrin, Buzz Allen, Paul Alsbury, Ainsley Alsbury, Liam Alsbury, Mike added to Space Mirror Memorial crash of SpaceShipTwo and death of first rocket-powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo legacy of memorial for not mentioned often by Branson and Whitesides as Siebold’s copilot altitude discrepancy, SpaceShipTwo and “angel’s wings”. See also feather Antares rocket Apollo 11 (film) Apollo program Apollo 1 Apollo 7 Apollo 11 Apollo 15 Area 51 Armstrong, Neil Associated Press Astronaut Memorial Foundation Attenborough, Stephen Avila, Steven Bahrain Basic School, The Basra, Iraq Bassett, Mark BBC Beal, Andrew Beechcraft Behind the Mask beta dot technique Bezos, Jeff Binnie, Brian bin Salman, Mohammad Bissinger, Buzz Blackwell, Eric Blue Origin Blue Zebra Boeing Bowie, David Branson, Holly Branson, Richard accused of hucksterism ambitions of attends ceremony commemorating SpaceShipOne at ceremony honoring Stucky and Sturckow crash of SpaceShipTwo and criticisms of dolls based on donates rocket motor to National Air and Space Museum first space flight of SpaceShipTwo and funding and giving flight attendants tour of hangar in Helsinki invites Schmidle (author) to Virgin Islands IPO and media and Moses and at National Air and Space Museum “overview effect” and party in 2009 and personality contrasted with Whitesides press coverage and registers Virgin Galactic renegade credentials of restlessness of rumor about pulling out of project Rutan and in Saudi Arabia sees Virgin Galactic as a movement SpaceShipTwo flight with Beth Moses and SpaceShipTwo’s first foray into space and at SpaceShipTwo’s first rocket-powered flight test support for human rights thanks Schmidle (author) for “Rocket Man” profile of Stucky at 2016 SpaceShipTwo rollout Branson, Sam Braun, Wernher von Brenner, Joël Glenn Brightman, Sarah burn time Bush, George H.

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FORGER STUCKY SURVIVED OFFICER candidate school in Quantico but not the medical exams that followed: his heartbeat was testing lower than the doctors liked. Stucky insisted that it was always slow, but the medics wanted to wait before clearing him for flight school. Stucky took advantage of the downtime. He flew his hang glider and read a lot of books, including one by Michael Collins, the third and often forgotten member of the Apollo 11 crew. Stucky appreciated Collins’s sense of humor; when asked how he felt on the dark side of the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were making cosmic history, Collins joked, “I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.”

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He couldn’t believe they were conducting their first mated taxi with SpaceShipTwo in such horrid weather—a violation of all the core tenets of flight test. Easing the jet into its slip, Stucky could hear the thumping music and see the strobes out of the corner of his eye. When he shut down the engines, an audio clip from the Apollo 11 mission crackled over the speakers: “The Eagle has landed.” Branson came out and met the mated airplanes on the runway. “Isn’t that the sexiest spaceship ever?” he asked. Branson urged Schwarzenegger and Richardson to smash bottles of champagne on the nose of SpaceShipTwo, before they all made haste for the warm tent.

pages: 70 words: 22,172

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

The intention is to create a viable population of 50,000 within a few decades. They can preserve the collective wisdom and achievement of humanity even if those of us back on Earth are annihilated. The truth is that it has been possible to reach Mars for at least thirty years. Within a decade or so of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on Earth’s moon, we could have landed humans on the Red Planet. Almost every technology required has long been available. We simply have not chosen to pursue the opportunity. The backstory of that mistake is worth understanding—how a single decision by one US president stunted space travel for decades, how we might have inspired two generations of earthlings with humankind’s ability to deliver on almost anything our brains can imagine.

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Unfortunately, both von Braun and Robert Goddard were so far ahead of their time that they suffered a great deal of bad publicity, criticism, and abuse from authority figures who simply didn’t get it. When Goddard said that a rocket could reach the moon, the news made the front page of the New York Times, but on its editorial page, the paper mocked his vision. (Nearly five decades later, and a day after Apollo 11 took off for the moon, the Times printed a correction.) In the early 1950s, when von Braun proposed a serious plan for going to Mars, his vision must have been experienced as absurd—even by scientists and engineers. Hundreds of rockets sent into low Earth orbit to build ten giant interplanetary spacecraft filled with tens of millions of pounds of fuel and oxygen and food?

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And although there is no shortage of private projects intending to send people to Mars, only one company can currently make a realistic promise to deliver human bodies to the Red Planet before NASA finally gets around to it. • • • In the same way we can draw a line from Wernher von Braun straight to Apollo 11, when a spaceship carrying astronauts lands on Mars in 2027, we may well be able to draw a line straight to Elon Musk—because that Mars lander will most likely have the SpaceX logo on it. Musk is arguably the most visionary entrepreneur of our time. Seven years after he quit a PhD program in applied physics at Stanford University, he sold his share of PayPal and Zip2, companies he cofounded, giving him a reported net worth of $324 million.

pages: 343 words: 89,057

Artemis by Andy Weir

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Apollo 11, centre right, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme

My dress and hijab might not be enough of a disguise. He stepped through the aperture and adjusted his uniform—a silly, nineteenth-century-style, navy-blue outfit with brass buttons and a conductor’s cap. Giddy folks returning from the Apollo 11 site exited the train. Many of them carried souvenirs from the Visitor Center: lunar modules carved from local rocks, Apollo 11 mission patches, and so on. Once everyone de-trained, Raj called out in a clear, loud voice, “This is the 2:34 p.m. traaaain to Apollo Eleeeeeven! All aboooooard!” He held out a vintage-looking brass ticket shredder. Of course, there were no paper tickets to shred.

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Most were headed to the city reactors and Sanchez Aluminum’s smelter, a kilometer south of town. The smelter uses insane amounts of heat and extremely nasty chemicals, so everyone agrees it should be far away. As for the reactors…well…they’re nuclear reactors. We like those far away too. Dale slithered over to the train platform. He’d be going to the Apollo 11 Visitor Center. Tourists love it. The half-hour train ride provides stunning views of the moon’s terrain, and the Visitor Center is a great place to look at the landing site without ever leaving pressure. And for those who do want to venture outside to get a better view, Dale and other EVA masters are ready to give them a tour.

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“Actually”—Jin Chu held up a finger—“Kirk only had sex with three alien women in the entire classic series. And that number assumes he slept with Elaan of Troyius, which was implied but never made clear. So it might just be two.” Trond bowed in supplication. “I will no longer challenge you on anything Star Trek–related. Are you going to the Apollo 11 site while you’re here?” “Absolutely,” Jin said. “I hear there are EVA tours. Should I do one, you think?” I piped in. “Nah. There’s an exclusion perimeter around the whole site. The Viewing Hall in the Visitor Center gets you just as close.” “Oh, I see. Guess there’s no point, then.” Suck it, Dale.

The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001). 42.Ibid. 43.“NASA Anniversary: Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 20, 1969,” NASA, last modified July 20, 2010, https://www.nasa.gov/news/media/audiofile/Apollo_11_Moon_Landing.html. See also “Apollo 11 Mission Logs, July 20, 1969,” NASA, accessed May 22, 2019, https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo11/july20.htm. Much as Hamlet might have said “Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt . . .” or maybe “solid flesh,” or maybe “sallied flesh,” depending on the folio, the Apollo 11 transcripts are in a constant state of historical reevaluation. For example, did Neil Armstrong say “One small step for a man” or “One small step for man”?

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Garver, interview by author, August 2, 2016. 388.White House, “President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration Program,” news release, January 14, 2004, https://history.nasa.gov/Bush%20SEP.htm. 389.B. Weinraub, “Bush May Back Manned Flights to Moon and Mars,” New York Times, July 18, 1989, A14. See also G. H. W. Bush, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing,” American Presidency Project, accessed March 12, 2020, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-20th-anniversary-the-apollo-11-moon-landing. In 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11, newly elected president George H. W. Bush wanted to get the space program back on track, and he wanted to do it in a major address. He didn’t run for office as a “space president,” but the problem had festered long enough—the dearth of science missions (not a single science spacecraft launched during the Reagan administration), the shuttle hemorrhaging billions, and NASA still space-station-less and thus devoid of purpose—it was as good a time as any to get things back in order.

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“Hubble Space Telescope Sees Evidence of Water Vapor Venting off Jupiter Moon,” NASA, last modified August 7, 2017, http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water-vapor. 475.Wright Brothers National Memorial North Carolina, “Announcing Details of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Event,” press release, July 16, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/planyourvisit/apollo-11-50th.htm. 476.A. Hamer, “Neil Armstrong Took a Piece of the North Carolina Outer Banks to the Moon,” Curiosity, last modified October 13, 2018, https://curiosity.com/topics/neil-armstrong-took-a-piece-of-the-north-carolina-outer-banks-to-the-moon-curiosity. 477.W.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Hal Laning, a computer scientist with degrees in chemical engineering and applied mathematics, worked in a messy office at MIT, and out of an aversion for the spotlight rarely published a paper. You would never know that his invention cleared the way for Apollo 11’s successful lunar launch. Like Katherine Johnson, Laning was obsessed with numbers from the time he was very young. Every Sunday, he used the hymn numbers on the signboard outside the church to make up math problems. Colleague Donald Fraser said, “He could read a hexadecimal dump of data as easily as I could read a novel. At any time challenged, he could recite at least the first thirty digits of pi.” In the case of Apollo 11, two innovations were mission-critical. Laning employed silicon integrated-circuit chips, which were small and lightweight (their advent would speed up the microchip technology that we all take for granted).

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Sperry Gyroscope Company ad, 1945 (Gyrosyn Compass Flux Valve Repeater Aviation Instrument). https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1945-ad-sperry-gyrosyn-compass-flux-valve-repeater-aviation-instrument-wwii-art-216158-ysw3-34. Teitel, A. S. “Hal Laning: The Man You Didn’t Know Saved Apollo 11.” Discover Magazine, May 23, 2019. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/hal-laning-the-man-you-didnt-know-saved-apollo-11. Thompson, C. Coders. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. Thompson, C. “The Secret History of Women in Coding.” New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2019. U/Entrarchy. “Mechanical Engineering vs Industrial Design.” Reddit, May 3, 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndustrialDesign/comments/1dmuoa/mechanical_engineering_vs_industrial_design/.

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Journal of Animal Science 42 (1976): 831–37. Whitman, A. “Richard Rodgers Is Dead at Age 77; Broadway’s Renowned Composer.” New York Times, December 31, 1979. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/31/archives/richard-rodgers-is-dead-at-age-77-broadways-renowned-composer.html/. Witt, S. “Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control.” Wired, June 24, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control/. Woolley, A. W., et al. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science 330, no. 6004 (September 30, 2010): 686–88. Woolley, A. W., et al. “Using Brain-Based Measures to Compose Teams.”

pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

disturbingly real but oddly indistinct. In the 40-minute periods they spent over the daylit surface they tried—and, frequently, failed—to pick out the features —Hey, you know something; it’s gray, huh? of the strangely lit sideways-seen land below—features which, a few months later, would guide their comrades on the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, down to the first landing. In the 40-minute nights they attended to their own needs, and those of their vessel. It was only on the fourth orbit, when the spacecraft’s orientation had changed, that they had the vision for which their mission will always be remembered. Shortly after they had swept from night to day, a bright, colourful complexity came past the limb of the Moon and into view —Oh my God!

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Sixty ambassadors, half of Congress and about a quarter of America’s governors, watching with awe, shaken by “a sound that became your body”, as the artist Robert Rauschenberg put it. The roar lasted less than three minutes. But by the time the F-1s fell silent, the rocket was travelling at over 8,000kph and was 600km from Cape Kennedy. Apollo 11 was on its way to the Moon. Gene Shoemaker was not aboard. He had not been able to become an astronaut; Addison’s disease had put paid to the Moonshaker’s dreams of being a Moonwalker. The astrogeology programme that he had created, though, shaped where the astronauts would go on the Moon and what they would do there.

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In her book “The Planets” (2005), Dava Sobel recalls hearing that her friend Carolyn, on being presented with a speck of moondust by a planetary scientist boyfriend, impulsively ate it. The Apollo astronauts ingest it without choosing to. In their dust-dirtied LM tiny particles move through the alveoli of their lungs and across the microvilli of their guts into their blood, tissues and cells. They bring the Moon home incorporated. They bring themselves home changed. APOLLO 11: SEA OF TRANQUILITY On the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin In lunar orbit: Michael Collins TIME SINCE LAUNCH 102:45:58 —Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. —Roger, Twan . . . Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

pages: 357 words: 121,119

Falling to Earth by Al Worden

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, California energy crisis, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, lost cosmonauts, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley

Some spectacular test piloting proved that NASA was ready to go all the way on the next flight: a lunar landing. Apollo 11 was in many ways the whole point of NASA’s efforts over the preceding eight years. The Apollo program had been created to land humans on the moon and return them safely to Earth. I wasn’t going to get an opportunity to fly until after that mission had taken place at least once. Although NASA still had an ambitious schedule of lunar landing missions, I had noticed how politicians were still whittling back the budget. Rather than the fulfillment of an ambition, I hoped that Apollo 11 would be the beginning of sustained exploration of the moon.

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The American public was losing interest in Apollo, even as NASA grew in confidence and carried out some amazing lunar exploration. People would ask me, “We landed on the moon once on Apollo 11, so why bother doing it again?” NASA had flown missions repeatedly, and they had been generally successful. When you do that often, people lose interest. Strangely, the rest of the world still seemed fascinated by Apollo’s continued explorations. They bought into the concept of Apollo 11 being just a first step and loved the idea of extended explorations on the moon. But back at home, interest waned sharply. The American public thought if they had seen one moon flight, they had seen them all.

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I vividly remember the moment in July 1969 when mission commander Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, his lunar module pilot, touched down on the moon. I had been on yet another trip to the North American plant and was in the cockpit of my T-38 at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, south of Downey, preparing to fly home. The tower at the airfield told me that Apollo 11 was about to land and asked me if I would like them to relay the audio coverage. “Absolutely,” I replied. “I am staying right here.” So I sat in the aircraft and listened to the magical, nail-biting, unreal moment as guys I knew gingerly guided a spacecraft to the lunar surface. We had done it. Humans were on the moon.

pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

Precisely two hours and eighteen minutes later, Armstrong closed the hatch behind him and prepared to return to orbit and then to the Earth itself.3 These hours had been the result of many years of training and preparation. In the run-up to Apollo 11, each of the aspiring astronauts4 had taken on a different area to focus on. Buzz Aldrin – who also walked on the moon that day – had studied mission planning; Ted Freeman – who did not – looked into boosters. The third man chosen for the Apollo 11 mission, Michael Collins, who stayed in orbit as his fellows cavorted in the lunar dust, had taken responsibility for the pressure suits that the astronauts would wear. ‘I made this choice slightly hesitantly,’ he later wrote.

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., The Story of Linen (New York: Chemical Publishing Company, 1945) Lenzing Group, The Global Fibre Market in 2016 (Lenzing Group, 2017) <http://www.lenzing.com/en/investors/equity-story/global-fiber-market.html> [accessed 19 September 2017] Levey, Santina M., Lace: A History (London: W. S. Maney and Son, 1983) Lewis, Cathleen, ‘What Does Alan Shepard’s Mercury Suit Have to Do with Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 Suit?’, National Air and Space Museum, 2015 <https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/what-does-alan-shepard%E2%80%99s-mercury-suit-have-do-neil-armstrong%E2%80%99s-apollo-11-suit> [accessed 9 December 2017] Lewis, David, The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island Navigators (Sydney: Collins, 1978) Lewis, Randy, Molecular Biologist at the University of Utah, interview with author, September 2016 Lightfoot, Amy, ‘From Heather-Clad Hills to the Roof of a Medieval Church: The Story of a Woollen Sail’, Norwegian Textile Letter, II (1996), 1–8 Linden, Eugene, ‘The Vikings: A Memorable Visit to America’, Smithsonian, December 2004 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vikings-a-memorable-visit-to-america-98090935/> [accessed 18 October 2017] Litherland, Piers, ‘Re: Egyptian Linen’, 12 June 2017 Litsky, Frank, ‘El-Guerrouj Sets Record in Mile’, New York Times, 8 July 1999, section Sports, pp. 56, 60 Lu, Yongxiang (ed.), A History of Chinese Science and Technology, trans. by Chuijun Qian and Hui He (Shanghai: Springer, 2015), ii Lucas, A., and Harris, J.

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‘Clearly this was not the largest piece of the pie: it was not in the thick of things, such as cockpit design, or guidance and navigation, and therefore it might cause me to be overlooked as an early candidate for flight.’ It is odd that he saw it this way: as trivial or even as a hindrance. On the contrary, spacesuits – or pressure suits as they referred to them – are critical to survival in space and therefore to the success of the Apollo 11 mission.5 Space is the most alien environment in which a human being has survived. The dangers faced there are legion. In space, temperatures fluctuate between -157ºC in the shade and as high as 154º in a sunny spot. Because there is no atmosphere through which it is being filtered, there is a great deal of ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which is harmful to our eyes and skin.

pages: 300 words: 87,725

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, systems thinking

OF THE MILLIONS of pages of documents and reports generated by the first moon landing, none is more telling, to me anyway, than an eleven-page paper presented at the twenty-sixth annual meeting of the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillology is the study of flags, not the study of vexing things, but in this case, either would fit. The paper is entitled “Where No Flag Has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon.” It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag on the moon. The Outer Space Treaty, of which the United States is a signer, prohibits claims of sovereignty upon celestial bodies. Was it possible to plant a flag without appearing to be, as one committee member put it, “taking possession of the moon”?

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America’s first astronauts were selected by balls and charisma. All seven Mercury astronauts, by requirement, were active or former test pilots. These were men whose nine-to-five involved breaking altitude records and sound barriers while nearly passing out and crashing in screaming-fast fighter jets. Up through Apollo 11, every mission included a major NASA first. First trip to space, first orbit, first spacewalk, first docking maneuver, first lunar landing. Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis. With each successive mission, space exploration became a little more routine. To the point, incredibly, of boredom.

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Mental as opposed to written, because the last thing you want to be doing when you’re fighting off motion sickness is reading. In particular, avoid reading papers such as “Analysis of Vomitus and Contents of Gastrointestinal Tract.” RUSTY SCHWEICKART DID everything wrong. Schweickart was an astronaut on Apollo 9, charged with testing the life-support backpack that the Apollo 11 crew would wear on their history-making stroll on the moon. Schweickart was to put it on, power it up, and head into the depressurized Lunar Module. Because he’d been sick during parabolic-training flights, he’d been exceedingly cautious the three days leading up to the spacewalk. “My whole modus operandi…” he said in his NASA oral history, “was to keep my head as still as possible and not to move around a lot.”

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

For one rare moment, a political victory was also a triumph for all mankind. However, it is not widely known that as the Apollo 11 lunar module rested on the Moon, a Soviet spacecraft was also in lunar orbit. The unmanned Luna 15 was the Soviets’ third attempt to land on the Moon and collect lunar rock samples. Launched three days before Apollo 11, Luna 15 was a last-ditch attempt to win the scientific race to return rock samples from another world. Unfortunately, although Luna 15 successfully began its descent to the Moon’s surface, it crashed into it shortly afterwards. Only Apollo 11 returned with moon rocks, which continue to be analysed to this day in the high-security labs of the lunar sample building in Houston, Texas.

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Despite forty years of study, one thing has been clear pretty much from the start: these priceless examples of alien geology are remarkably similar to rocks found on Earth. In the main, they are composed of the common rock-forming elements oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium and aluminium, but there is absolutely nothing on the Moon’s surface that couldn’t be found here on Earth. Since Apollo 11’s success, we have landed on Mars and Venus, parachuted into Jupiter’s atmosphere, touched down on Saturn’s moon Titan, and visited asteroids Eros and Itokawa and the comet Tempel 1. Each time the story is the same; the Solar System is made of the same stuff as we are. To date, eight landings on our nearest neighbour, Mars, have allowed us to explore the planet’s geology in intimate detail.

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On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon. This successful landing also opened up infinite possibilities for scientists to understand the formation of the lunar landscape. This photo shows Aldrin collecting some of the lunar rock samples that they took back to Earth for analysis. NASA The Apollo 11 lunar mission was launched from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 16 July 1969 and safely returned to Earth on 24 July 1969, complete with its priceless cargo of samples from the Moon’s surface. The first container was transferred to Ellington Air Force Base and was taken directly to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas.

pages: 425 words: 116,409

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

CHAPTER 23: TO BOLDLY GO 235 a hundred or so black women: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013. 236 groups of them perching in front of the screen: Ibid. 236 a total of six hundred million people: Scott Christianson, “How NASA’s Flight Plan Described the Apollo 11 Moon Landing,” Smithsonian.com, November 24, 2015, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/us-history/apollo-11-flight-plan-180957225/?no-ist. 236 four hundred thousand: “NASA Langley Research Center’s Contributions to the Apollo Program,” n.d., http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Apollo.html. 237 the weekend leadership conference: “Alpha Kappa Alpha’s 39th Mid-Western Regional Conference at LU,” Langston University Gazette, July 1969. 237 96 degrees in Hampton: Weather History for Hampton, Virginia, Farmer’s Almanac (accessed via Almanac.com). 237 a car full of sorority members: Johnson interview, September 15, 2015. 237 pink-and-green-clad women: Pink and green are the official colors of Alpha Kappa Alpha. 237 the most promising young women: 237 a full-time job training center: Ibid. 237 Hillside’s thirty-three rooms: Matt Birkbeck, Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money and Madness (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 162. 238 bought the land with his Jewish business partner: Wendy Beech, Against All Odds: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Followed Their Hearts and Found Success (New York: Wiley, 2002), 204. 238 The Hillside advertised: The Hillside was a mainstay of these black publications, its small black-and-white ad appearing regularly: “Pennsylvania’s Famous Resort Hotel HILLSIDE INN in the Heart of the Poconos Mountains Air Conditioned Rooms, Swimming Pool.

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Most of them joined their friends and families in gathering around the televisions as well. Among the black women watching the television, far from Mission Control, tucked away at a resort in the Poconos, Katherine Johnson divided her attention between the weekend leadership conference being held by her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and the fortunes of the Apollo 11 astronauts on their way to becoming the three most solitary beings in the history of humanity. As she watched the delicate dance of physics that propelled the Apollo capsule forward toward the Moon, her mind’s eye superimposed equations and numbers upon each stage of the craft’s journey, from launch to Earth orbit, from translunar injection to lunar orbit.

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Who among them would have ever imagined, however, that Katherine’s future, and their country’s future, and the future, as imagined by the likes of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, would converge to be one and the same? Yet four days earlier, on July 16, 1969, fifty-year-old Katherine Johnson had been part of that group of insiders when the three-hundred-foot Saturn V rocket boosted the Apollo 11 craft and its three human occupants down the road to history. Mission Control set the candle on fire at 9:37 a.m., early enough for the East Coast brain busters to take in the big event and get to work, then spend the rest of the day getting the color commentary. If the space shots hadn’t exactly become commonplace since Alan Shepard’s first foray, they happened often enough for talking heads like CBS’s Walter Cronkite to wield the jargon of max Q and apogee and trans-Earth injection with the same nonchalance as the flight operations crew in the trenches of Mission Control.

pages: 577 words: 171,126

Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, place-making, Silicon Valley, William Langewiesche

Then the two men walked off along the sand, to talk alone as the countdown to Apollo 11’s blastoff continued. Shepard told Lindbergh how his 1927 flight had inspired him as a three-year-old boy, had planted the seeds of his future and boosted him toward a career as a Navy pilot. Lindbergh told Shepard that his 1961 space flight had been pretty heroic, too. They talked about the similarities between the early days of aviation and the genesis of the space race—the danger, the media crush, the politics. The two men talked for thirty minutes and then watched as a river of fire trailed behind Apollo 11 as it began its 250,000-mile journey.

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In a way, Shepard wanted to be an amalgam of all three, but it was Lindbergh first and foremost who inspired the dozens of balsa-wood, rubber-band-powered model airplanes dangling from his bedroom ceiling. “He was always my hero,” Shepard once said, never dreaming that he’d meet Lindbergh, would stand by his side the morning Apollo 11 launched to the moon. “I was just fascinated by planes. They were going somewhere. They were doing things. They were getting faster every year and they were flying higher every year.” Human flight had begun just twenty years before Shepard’s birth, when the Wright brothers first caught air on December 17, 1903.

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Two months later Apollo 10 performed a dress rehearsal of the moon landing that was planned for mid-July. During Apollo 10’s flight to and around the moon, astronauts Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan flew their lunar module down to within nine miles of the moon’s surface. The final step would be taken later that summer by Apollo 11. By mid-1969 Slayton—with Shepard’s help—had adopted a fairly consistent method of choosing astronaut crews for the Apollo flights. First a three-man crew would serve as another crew’s backup. Three flights later that backup crew would become the prime crew. The three men who backed up Apollo 7, for example—Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, and John Young—became the prime crew for Apollo 10.

Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, full employment, gravity well, horn antenna, hydroponic farming, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, place-making, Ronald Reagan

It is typically hot, humid Florida weather here, on this historic day, Thursday, March 21, 1985. T minus three minutes forty seconds and counting. I am told that there are an estimated one million here with us today, the largest turnout for a launch since Apollo 11. Welcome to all of you. You might like to know that among the celebrities watching the launch today in the VIP enclosure are Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Joe Muldoon, and Michael Collins, cosmonaut Vladimir Viktorenko, along with Liza Minnelli, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Shatner, sci-fi authors Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov, and singer John Denver.

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I had those put there for you to find.” York studied the bags. “Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.” She looked at Stone. “What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.” “I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after translunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.” “All right,” Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out of the potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm. York looked at the bags again. Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam.

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Almost every one of the J-class mission’s innovations — the upgraded LM, the Rover, the orbiting Service Module’s instrument pallet — had worked without a hitch. Apollo 14 had been the biggest success since the first landing: even skeptics among the scientists were applauding the mission. But it was done. Seger’s footsteps echoed in the quiet. It was just two years since Apollo 11, he thought, and yet the first age of lunar exploration was already over. Damn it, Seger thought. We’ve just gotten good at this stuff, and now we have to stop. He stopped at the door of the MOCR, Mission Control, and stepped in. The MOCR was deserted; everybody had already left for the splashdown party, some almighty gumbo affair the Mission Evaluation guys were holding over in Building 45.

pages: 319 words: 84,772

Speed by Bob Gilliland, Keith Dunnavant

Airbus A320, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, US Airways Flight 1549, work culture

.: air strikes of, against Libya, 207–8; and Berlin Airlift resupply mission, 55; and the Blackbird program, 126, 133, 135–36; and CL-400 “Project Suntan,” 142; during the Cold War, 58, 202–7; and deaths during supersonic testing, 88–89; and deaths during transition to jets, 68; 86th Fighter-Bomber Wing of, 66–74; establishment of, 47; high-altitude testing programs of, 123–24; and missile-bomber debates, 134–35; 9th Reconnaissance Wing of, 189–90, 207; RJG commissioned as second lieutenant in, 52; and RJG requesting assignment to Eglin, 83; RJG resigning from, 94–95; and RJG’s flight training at Randolph, 57–62; and RJG’s flight training at Williams, 62–66; RJG’s impact on SR-71 program of, 176–78; rules of, on fighter pilot height, 60–62; and rushed testing and development programs, 88–89; and SR-71 reconnaissance capabilities, 182; and SR-71 reconnaissance missions, 189–90, 203–8; at SR-71’s first test flight, 152–53, 155–56, 161–71; and SR-71’s phasing out, 209; and SR-71’s unmasking by Lyndon Johnson, 135–36; and struggle with CIA for primacy, 135, 190; and testing airsickness pill, 58–59; and testing operational aircraft at Eglin, 92–93; and testing to break the sound barrier, 84–88; 36th Fighter-Bomber Wing of, 66; transitional strategy of, for officer corps training, 47–49; during Vietnam War, 190; and X-1 program, 84–85, 87–88; and X-2 program, 91; YF-12A for, 131, 134 Alford, Billy, 191 American Legion (Memphis), 12, 49 Anderson, Bud, 221 Anderson, Rudolph, 135 Andonian, Harry, 90, 93, 139, 230 Andre, George, 165 Andre, Lenene, 165 Apollo 8, 69, 197 Apollo 11, 198, 217, 225 Apollo 13, 69, 197 Apollo 15, 194–95 Apt, Milburn “Mel,” 91 Arceneaux, Tom, 201 Arctic Circle missions (SR-71), 205 Area 51. See Groom Lake Arkansas farm (Gilliland family farm), 14–15 Armstrong, Neil: and Apollo 11, 198, 217, 225; awards and honors of, 131, 225; friendship of, with RJG, 221; and “Legends of Aerospace” goodwill tour, 197–200, 215–20 Army, U.S., 3, 5–7, 47–48 Arnold, Henry “Hap,” 86 astronauts: Jim Irwin, 194–95; Jim Lovell, 69, 197–200, 215–19; on the “Legends of Aerospace” goodwill tour, 197–200, 214–20; of the Mercury missions, 122–24, 140; Neil Armstrong, 131, 197–200, 215–20, 221; RJG’s admiration of, 194–95, 217 atomic bombs, 34, 66, 115, 117 Australian infantry (World War I), 6 automobiles: of the Jordan family, 7–8; RJG’s Ford convertible, 62, 63–64; RJG’s Ford Mustang, 174–75; RJG’s Mercedes Benz, 1; RJG’s specially designed red SUV, 224 aviation industry: and commercial industry growth, 34, 140; Lockheed’s impact on, 97–98; and propeller-powered aircraft, 34, 63, 74; supersonic age of, 76, 88–89, 102; and technological advancements, 140; transition to jet-powered, 63, 74.

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So as it got very, very bumpy when he tried one approach . . . and he pulled off and tried another and it was bumpy as hell, I thought for sure we were going to Montreal.” Among the other passengers of this very special flight was David Hartman, the affable longtime host of ABC’s Good Morning America, who happened to be sitting next to Armstrong, the calculating engineer turned astronaut who had pushed the Apollo 11 lunar module to within seconds of running out of gas while searching for Tranquility Base on that memorable July night in 1969, when the world held its collective breath. Like the other aviators surrounding him, Armstrong was trained to view the severe turbulence through a detached, scientific lens.

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Among his most vivid childhood memories was sneaking in under the ropes to visit with his dad’s buddy Greenamyer on the day in 1969 when he shattered the speed record for a piston engine airplane (483.04 miles per hour) in his F8F-2 Bearcat, Conquest I. For this he shared the Kincheloe Award with the Apollo 11 astronauts. The distinctive yellow plane is now on display at Udvar-Hazy. The son grew up hearing tales about daring men who ventured off on dangerous missions. Learning to appreciate the delicate balance between risk and reward, he met many of his father’s colleagues, including NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson, who had been lucky to survive the crash of his wingless M2-F2 craft at Edwards in 1967.

pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

“The surface is fine and powdery,” the thirty-eight-year-old captain radioed to his crew and ground control. “I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch.” But that was about the extent of the surprises for Apollo 11. The rest of the humans on Earth, hundreds of thousands of miles away, and months and years earlier, had successfully applied frames to understand what would be needed to bring the astronauts to the moon and back. Being able to conceive of what we’ve never experienced doesn’t come naturally all the time. The day after the Apollo 11 launch, the New York Times ran what might be considered the best newspaper “correction” ever—some forty-nine years after the original article.

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They extend our ability to reach decisions by harnessing our imagination, letting us transcend the immediate and embrace ideas that are more general and abstract. This empowers us to put our intellect to uses that we could have only dreamed of. To appreciate how frames can be used to fill in the blanks, consider the moon landings. When the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the surface of the moon in the summer of 1969, it was a remarkable achievement. But neither the thundering Saturn V engines nor the novel, rudimentary digital computers got the astronauts to the moon. Rather, in many ways, it was the ability to use frames to “see” what wasn’t there.

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They found that people rapidly shifted their focus to visually imagine the possible trajectories of the ball. In other words, they applied counterfactual reasoning to anticipate what might happen. Recall that NASA’s engineers were able to predict (almost) everything that would happen during the Apollo 11 moon landing, despite never having been on the moon. They were following the footsteps of generations of scientists before them. Galileo is famously said to have let two objects fall from the Tower of Pisa to refute a theory advanced by the ancient Greeks that heavier things fall faster than lighter ones.

pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The ridged imprints from Armstrong’s rubber soles—tiny, perfectly geometric mountain ranges—still stand, preserved in the windless stasis of our favorite celestial boulder. No matter what happens on frenzied Earth, the traces of Apollo 11 should serve as a testament to human ingenuity for millions of years. Almost as significant as what happened in space exploration in July 1969, however, is what did not happen. Two weeks before the Apollo 11 launch, on the other side of the Atlantic, the F-8 rocket assembled by ELDO, the European Launcher Development Organisation, failed on the launch pad. It was ELDO’s fifth consecutive total failure.

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“240,000 miles away” . . . “Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, July 21, 2014, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/MkATdOcdU06X5uNHbmqm1Q.aspx. 600 million . . . “Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Ten Facts About Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins’ Mission,” Telegraph, July 18, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5852237/Apollo-11-Moon-landing-ten-facts-about-Armstrong-Aldrin-and-Collins-mission.html. bleached white . . . Clara Moskowitz, “American Flags Planted on the Moon Are Still Standing Decades Later,” Business Insider, July 30, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/american-flags-planted-on-the-moon-still-stand-2012-7.

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On the other side of the pond, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concurred that Europe suffered from a managerial deficit: “The technological gap was misnamed.” It was a space age Tower of Babel: the countries’ inability to speak to one another obstructed their joint effort to reach the heavens. • • • Like Taylor’s world’s fair exhibition in Paris, the success of Apollo 11 and the concurrent shambles of Europa I shone a spotlight on the role of management in large-scale endeavors. Congress held hearings to study NASA’s managerial secrets. The systems management put in place at NASA became a core process of aerospace research and development, essential to everything from the International Space Station to the Boeing 777.

pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

During the early 1970s, each of three Soviet Luna missions drilled about fourteen inches into the lunar soil, placed its haul into a capsule, and brought it back to Earth, where they parachuted their precious cargo into Kazakhstan for easy recovery. The three missions brought a total of 325 grams (about 11 ½ ounces) to Earth. The six Apollo missions brought about 1200 times more than this, some 845 pounds of material, home with them. The amounts from the individual missions ranged from 49 pounds from Apollo 11’s first landing on the moon to 211 pounds from the final lander, Apollo 17. Today some of this moon matter appears on the open market at impressively high prices, not least b ecause ownership of rock from the moon remains illegal in the United States (if you did not gather it on the moon yourself).

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For understandable reasons, primary attention within the media, along with concern among scientists, put a spotlight on the danger that lunar pathogens could arrive with the astronauts. In response to this concern, as well as from the less-publicized fear of contaminating the lunar soil, 68 · THE END OF ASTRONAUTS NASA decided that the three Apollo 11 astronauts would spend three weeks in quarantine both before their journey and afterward. The quarantines aimed mainly to ensure that the astronauts would leave in perfect health, thus eliminating the possibility of returning with an illness that could cause the public to panic over “moon germs” reaching the Earth, and to demonstrate, a fter the journey, that this had not occurred.

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This approach should work as well around Mars as around the moon; its drawback lies only in the extra mass for the entire transport system. At present, NASA’s plans track t hose of the Apollo program, setting an initial goal of placing astronauts in orbit around Mars before attempting a landing, as Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 did before Apollo 11’s first lunar landing. HOW MUCH W ILL AN ASTRONAUT MISSION TO MARS COST? One factor in our attempt to determine the costs of robotic and human exploration to Mars is that we already have a good grasp of the costs of robotic missions from a ctual experience. In recent de cades, each major mission has cost from $1 billion to several billion dollars.

pages: 366 words: 119,981

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by James Schefter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, Great Leap Forward, Kitchen Debate, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

But if the first lunar sample came home to Mother Russia, that would be a major victory. He launched Luna 15 on July 13, 1969. Three days later, the same day Apollo 11 was launching from Kennedy Space Center, it braked into lunar orbit. The Russian space team was taking its last, best shot. Luna 15’s mission was to land on the moon, scoop up a sample of moon dirt, then blast off and return to Earth. Moon samples would be in Russian science laboratories long before anything came home from Apollo 11. Twice Mishin’s control team sent commands to lower Luna 15’s orbit and it responded. Quiet back-channel communications between the American State Department and its Soviet counterpart brought assurances: Luna 15 in no way intended to interfere with Apollo 11.

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Quiet back-channel communications between the American State Department and its Soviet counterpart brought assurances: Luna 15 in no way intended to interfere with Apollo 11. Its assignment at the moon, though, was obvious. American officials quietly worried that it would land, scoop up some dirt, and bring it back to Earth before Apollo 11 could complete its mission. Moon rocks in Russia next week? The thought was chilling. At midafternoon on July 20, 1969, the command module Columbia and the lunar module Eagle were separately on the back side of the moon. Columbia, with Mike Collins watching his crewmates fall away, was in a stable circular orbit.

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Soyuz was almost certainly aiming for something other than the moon. If they wanted to put up a space station, so be it. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to keep one eye on the Russians while the Americans got ready for the final rush to the lunar surface. Deke Slayton called Neil Armstrong into his office in January and gave him the Apollo 11 mission, the one likely to be first on the moon. His crew was Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins. Armstrong and Aldrin had been backups on Apollo 8. In Deke’s way of doing things, backup crews rotated ahead three missions to become prime crews. Collins was fresh on duty after recovering from his back surgery.

Interplanetary Robots by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Elon Musk, independent contractor, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, X Prize

The increasingly closer images taken in those last few moments revealed that the large craters evident from Soviet probes and from telescopic images taken from Earth simply scaled to smaller and smaller ones as the probe got closer to the moon…there were craters within craters within craters. It was a rougher surface than most had suspected, and this was valuable data for those planning the Apollo lunar landings. There was more to come. In February 1965, Ranger 8 swept across the lunar nearside, crashing near the eventual Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. The 7,000 images returned showed the same general surface as had been seen with Ranger 7—a devastated, densely cratered swath. A month later, Ranger 9, the last flight of the project, sent back 5,800 images of another part of the lunar surface, this time lit at a more extreme angle, with the sun lower in the lunar sky.

…

Upon return to Earth, the camera was analyzed to see what changes had occurred from a couple of years on the moon—they were minor, though it was noted that some bacteria, which had been resident on the camera at launch in 1967, appeared to have survived its time on the moon.2 Surveyor 3 operated for about two weeks. Surveyor 4 failed in flight, but Surveyor 5 landed in Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 would land less than two years later. It returned over 19,000 images and carried the first true scientific instrument to be used on the lunar surface, an alpha-backscatter device that had the ability to do basic chemical analysis of the nearby terrain. This Surveyor also survived a lunar night, operating for another twenty-two hours after the return of the scorching sun.

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My interest in all things space had been sparked by the Gemini and Mariner flights, and I was hooked, so of course I followed the development of the Viking Mars lander program closely. After all, JPL was just up the street from my home…and maybe, if I worked hard enough, I'd snag a job there in a few years. It ended up taking many decades, but not through any fault of my astronomy professors. That warm July night was the seventh anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11, a pleasant conjunction with the landing of Viking 1. This concluded weeks of the lander waiting in orbit—it had arrive a month earlier—while the science teams at JPL fretted over the landscape they saw below. It was far from a welcoming view. The twin Viking spacecraft, the intelligent successors to the confusion of Voyager Mars, were well-designed and highly capable.

pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. . . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”17 Forty-nine years after ripping Goddard, and a day after the launch of Apollo 11, the paper issued a brief correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”18 The apology was too late for Goddard, who died of throat cancer in 1945.

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The five massive engines gulped 15 tons of fuel each second and produced eight million pounds of thrust. The giant rocket was 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty (Figure 10). In July 1969, there were plenty of white knuckles at Mission Control in Houston when Neil Armstrong assumed manual control of the Apollo 11 landing module, after a series of technical glitches, and guided it over a field of rugged boulders to a soft landing on the Moon with less than a minute of fuel left. Back in Houston, Charles Duke radioed him: “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”9 Figure 10. A comparison of the Soviet N1/L3 rocket (left) and the US Saturn V rocket (right).

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However, the Space Shuttle did provide case studies in the importance of having astronauts rather than robots work in space. Robots are not versatile or reliable enough to match a well-trained astronaut. We can all admire the “seat-of-the-pants” problem-solving skills demonstrated by Neil Armstrong as he guided Apollo 11 over a boulder field with hardly any fuel left, and by the Apollo 13 crew as they nursed their crippled spacecraft around the Moon and home to safety. In particular, the five servicing missions of the Hubble Space Telescope defined the state of the art for astronauts, with multiple long space walks, challenging technical jobs, and difficult decisions made under time pressure.

pages: 286 words: 101,129

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Gene Kranz, imposter syndrome, James Webb Space Telescope, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic, Yom Kippur War

Those men became my heroes. They were the epitome of cool. I turned seven in 1969, and there’s something about that age that makes it a formative year in one’s life. Two things happened for me that year: Apollo 11 landed on the moon and—even more improbable than that—the Mets won the 1969 World Series. Space and Major League Baseball became my two greatest passions. The Mets’ ace pitcher, Tom Seaver, was right behind my father and the Apollo 11 astronauts on my list of childhood heroes. But on that night of the moon landing, the World Series was still months away. On that night I said to myself, Nothing else matters. This is it.

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But one of the instructors in my mechanical engineering lab, Professor Kline, started talking to us about how private aerospace contractors—companies like Lockheed, Grumman, McDonnell Douglas, Martin Marietta—were getting big government contracts to work on the space shuttle systems. I thought maybe I could work as an engineer for those contractors, supporting the astronauts as a part of the bigger dream. Back when the Apollo 11 guys landed on the moon, I believed what they were doing was the most important work of our time: exploring space, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge about the universe. I never stopped believing that. If there’s one thing I got from my father and his job, it was understanding the importance of public service.

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People could see my excitement, and with me being a Columbia graduate and an MIT student, they knew I had potential. My dream didn’t feel so crazy anymore, but the reality was sometimes mind-blowing. One afternoon I walked into the cafeteria and Michael Collins was there having lunch; he was in town for a meeting to discuss a possible mission to Mars, where I’d seen him earlier that day. Here was one of the Apollo 11 astronauts, a guy I’d read about and idolized for years, and he was sitting at a table eating by himself. I was beyond intimidated, but I knew if I didn’t approach him I would regret it for the rest of my life. I took a deep breath and walked over and asked if I could join him. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.”

pages: 265 words: 74,807

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

The onboard computer read out a number on an LED-like display, and if Armstrong positioned his head correctly he could look through that angle marked on the window. Directly behind the indicated number, then, he saw the actual spot on the moon that the computer was flying him toward. Computer graphic depiction of Neil Armstrong’s view out the window from a few hundred feet above the moon during the Apollo 11 landing. Armstrong’s right hand is reaching up to turn off the automatic targeting and autoland features to land in a semimanual mode. Note the Apollo Guidance Computer on the lower right, which could indicate an angle for Armstrong to look through the passive HUD inscribed as a reticle on the window.

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The computer would then recalculate the trajectory it would use to guide the landing, and give him a new number for where to look. Armstrong could redesignate the landing zone as many times as he liked in a human/machine collaboration that allowed the two to converge and agree on the ideal landing zone, whence the autoland would bring the craft safely down. But Armstrong never used the autoland. On Apollo 11, he didn’t like the spot the computer had selected for him because there was a crater, and rocks were in the way. Rather than redesignate, a few hundred feet above the moon’s surface he turned off the automated feature and landed in a less automated mode. (His actions were echoed by Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie: he also turned off his computer and relied on The Force to guide his aim to destroy the Death Star.)

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Abbott, Kathy, 75–76 ABE (autonomous benthic explorer), 54, 191–96 acoustic communications and, 195–96 geological mapping by, 192–93, 194 loss of, 191–92 nature of autonomy of, 194–97 original mission of, 192 acoustic communications, and AUVs, 195–96 acoustic transponder networks, for navigation, 29 Afghanistan, 139 Airbus, 86–87 A-310, 82 Flight QF32, 71–72, 77 aircraft/aviation, 69–111, 226–29 adding unmanned automation technology to, 215–18 Automated Labor In-cockpit System (ALIAS), 217–18 drones (See drones) FAA survey of technology and pilot skill, 2013, 75–76 future of, 110–11 heads-up display (HUD) and, 88–108, 225 history of, 77–84 landings and, 84–88 optionally piloted aircraft (OPAs), 213–15 pilots role in flying modern aircraft, 69–72, 75–77 synthetic vision and, 108–9, 225 technological change and increasing automation, effect of, 72–75 unmanned helicopters, 210–13 Air France Flight 447, 1–2, 1–4, 69–70, 72, 73, 81, 162, 196 Akers, Thomas, 170, 171–72 Alaska Airlines, 92 Alvin (deep-sea submersible), 26–30, 33–34, 35, 45–51, 57, 59–66, 176, 194, 197, 225 ABE’s geological mapping and, 192–93, 194 acoustic navigation system of, 29 arguments and justifications for new, 63–65 hydrogen bomb recovery effort using, 27 Jason, differences between and rivalry with, 59–62 plate tectonics evidence gathered by, 28–29 Titanic wreck and, 45–51 Amber, 126 amphoras, 23–24 AMUVS (Advanced Maneuverable Underwater Vehicle System), 43–44 ANGUS (Acoustically Navigated Geologic Underwater Survey System), 30–34 Apollo missions, 225 Apollo 11, 159–61 Apollo 13, 72 Apollo 15, 178 Apollo 17, 177, 179 field geology and, 176–79 Argo (tethered sled), 35–36, 41–43 Armstrong, Neil, 77, 78, 159–61, 221 Asiana Airlines, 106–7 Flight 214, 72, 106 Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), 219 Atlantis II (research vessel), 45 Aurora Flight Sciences, 211, 214, 217 Automated Labor In-cockpit System (ALIAS), 217–18 automatic landing systems (autoland) Apollo landings and, 159–61 in commercial aviation, 86–88, 94, 97 space shuttles and, 161–63 automation, 4–6, 10, 11 automation bias, 74 automation dependency, 74 automation surprise, 74 automobiles, driverless.

pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

If you want to get really depressed about success, look at what happened to the heroic astronauts of the 1960s and ’70s. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, returned home from the historic Apollo 11 mission and became an alcoholic. Severely depressed, his life unraveled. Aldrin burned through three marriages and wrote two memoirs about his misery. Neil Armstrong, the man who stepped out of Apollo 11 just ahead of Aldrin, spent his next few decades figuring out what to do with his life. He briefly taught some small classes at a university, then quit unexpectedly. He consulted a little for NASA and some random companies, and did a commercial for Chrysler, and quit all those things, too.

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Two major magazine profiles of Musk provide further biographical details: Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, November 2013, and Tom Junod, “The Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 2012. 171 “I didn’t think there was anything I could do”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 172 NASA employed about 18,000: NASA’s headcount comes from “Space Organizations Part 1: NASA—Nasa’s Workforce,” Library Index, http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/987/Space-Organizations-Part-1-NASA-NASA-S-WORKFORCE.html, and the catalog of collaborators on the Apollo project is documented by Catherine Thimmesh, Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). 172 “To make life multiplanetary” and the continuation of “human consciousness”: Musk often repeats these phrases in interviews, such as David Pescovitz, “Elon Musk on Making Life Multi-Planetary,” Boing Boing, April 10, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/elon-musk-on-making-life-multi.html (accessed February 15, 2014), and Junod, “The Triumph of His Will.” 174 over-the-top demonstration to create buzz: For more on Lady Gaga, Baumgartner, Alexander the Great, and 10x Storytelling, visit shanesnow.com/10xstorytelling. 175 “We choose to go to the moon”: John F.

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The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business. HarperBusiness, 2012. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency, 2011. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2103.html Thimmesh, Catherine. Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: La lucha por la libertad 1762–1970. Grijalbo, 1973. Thomas, Mike. The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater. Villard, 2009. Thomke, Stefan. “Unlocking Innovation through Business Experimentation.”

pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

.* The moment you leave home, you’re getting bombarded by radiation. The crewed missions to the moon were reasonably safe,* since the trips were very short, and the risks from radiation increase with the amount of exposure. But the asteroid mission will take a lot longer. Apollo 11 took a little over three days to get to the moon. Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is about 1,100 times farther away. Assuming we go just as fast as Apollo 11 (which, as lunar missions go, was quite fast), it’ll take about ten years. That said, for longer-distance missions, you can probably get to a higher speed. For instance, NASA’s uncrewed Dawn mission made the trip to the asteroid belt in about four years.

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This disappointment is not always due to scientists who overpromise the future; often books like this one omit the economic and technical challenges that stand between us and the future as depicted in fiction. We don’t know why these challenges are so often left out of books. Would the story of Apollo 11 be better if getting to the moon were easy? To our way of thinking, part of what makes the idea of a brain-computer interface so exciting is that right now we have almost no clue how to decode thoughts. There is an unlimited frontier of questions to be asked, discoveries to be made, glory to be won, and heroes to be garlanded.

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In short, you have all the stuff for a successful settlement—oxygen to breathe, dirt to grow plants, metal to build, and water to make water balloons. Let’s talk about financing. As discussed in the previous chapter, it currently costs about $10,000 per pound to send something to space. That Big Gulp you’re planning to take with you will run you about $20K. The Apollo 11 spacecraft, which only went as far as the moon, weighed over 100,000 pounds. So, not counting all the engineering, permitting, and staff required to build and operate a spaceship, you’re starting this venture at roughly negative $1 billion. That’s not great, but remember, buying an Airbus A380 costs about $400 million, so we’re not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

pages: 294 words: 87,986

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

Many were so sure of this that the Pierre Guzman Prize, a 100,000-franc prize established in 1889 and awarded by the French Academy of Sciences to one recipient each in the fields of astronomy and medicine, was offered to the first scientist to find a way to communicate with another ‘heavenly body’ … other than Mars. Mars was considered simply too easy a target, and ‘sufficiently well known’. The prize fund was eventually cleared by the Apollo 11 astronauts in 1969 following their landing on the Moon – but if they’d landed on Mars, they wouldn’t have received a cent. Later observations showed bizarre shapes sculpted out of red rock, humanoid faces and structures akin to the ancient Egyptian pyramids, and even the potential ruins of a once-thriving city.

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Many prominent scientists and engineers believe that, all things considered, Mars is simply the best place to go to next. These include Stephen Hawking (‘Mars is the obvious next target’), Bill Nye, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan (‘The next place to wander to is Mars’), NASA administrator Charles Bolden (‘Mars is a stepping stone to other solar systems’), and more. Former NASA Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin even created his own line of ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ T-shirts, based on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line in the 1990 Mars-related film Total Recall. The aforementioned Elon Musk (former PayPal magnate, now of SpaceX and Tesla fame) has been outspoken about how humans need to explore and colonise other worlds, working towards the goal of becoming ‘a multi-planet species’.

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He settled on the latter, and in May 1961 delivered a speech to Congress in which he stated that the US ‘should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. The race was on! The following years saw various achievements – and, sadly, casualties – on both sides. The race came to a head in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, stepped out on to the lunar Sea of Tranquillity, becoming the first human to set foot on not only the Moon, but any rock other than Earth. While the Space Race is often thought of in terms of a desperate battle over the Moon, it also drove a number of missions destined for other targets – most prominently, Mars.

pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

While successful, it almost cost him his life when his space suit ballooned up and he was barely able to reenter the capsule. Image credit: NASA A Saturn V rocket the night before launch. The streak to the left is lightning. Image credit: NASA Gemini 7 in orbit as seen from Gemini 6, during the first rendezvous in space in December 1965. Image credit: NASA Possibly the most memorable image from the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong is reflected in Buzz Aldrin’s visor during their moonwalk. Image credit: NASA A mockup of Viking 1 in a test bay on Earth. Viking was the first spacecraft to successfully land and operate on Mars. Image credit: NASA Skylab, the US’s first space station, orbited in 1973.

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NASA was spared the expense of developing a number of modules for the ISS, at the very least, and ongoing operational costs—such as ground control and astronaut training—are shared by the US, Europe, and Russia. This international effort has also generated much goodwill. After the success of the ISS, many pundits knowledgeable about space, including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin and Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin, noted that internationalization is the only reasonable road ahead for human spaceflight. They cite the ISS as an example of how such cooperation can be effective—not just in cost sharing, but leveraging the expertise of many technologically advanced nations.

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Image credit: NASA •First images of lunar farside—Luna 3, 1959 (robotic) •First Venus flyby—Venera 1, 1961 (robotic) •First human in space and Earth orbit—Vostok 1, 1961(human) •First Mars flyby—Mars 1, 1963 (robotic; spacecraft failed before flyby but managed to pass the planet) •First woman in space—Vostok 6, 1963 (human) •First spacewalk—Voskhod 2, 1965 (human) •First completely automated rendezvous and docking in space, 1967 (robotic) •First circumlunar flight—Zond 5, 1968 (robotic, but carried reptiles and insects) •First successful landing on Venus—Venera 7, 1970 (robotic) •First robotic rover on the moon, Lunokhod 1, in 1970 •First crewed orbital space station—Salyut 1, 1971 (human) •First soft landing on Mars—Mars 3, 1971 (robotic; operated for less than a minute after landing) •First cargo supply missions to a space station, 1978 (robotic) •First long-term, modular space station—Mir, 1986 (human, operated for a decade) •First fully automated flight of a space shuttle—Buran, 1988 (robotic, but human-rated) •Development of multiple large launch systems, a number of which continue to operate today, delivering both Russian and international payloads107 (human and robotic) Russia has had its share of disappointments as well. While its early human spaceflight accomplishments were impressive, its massive attempt to beat the Americans to the moon—either by sending cosmonauts to loop the moon before the US Apollo 8 orbited that body in 1968, or landing a lone cosmonaut there before Apollo 11 arrived in 1969—was plagued by a series of disastrous launch failures. The successes outlined above occurred largely in the Soviet era, which ended before the Mir space station—launched in 1986 while the USSR still existed—ceased operations in 1996. As the country transitioned to the Russian Federation, many space program plans from the Soviet era were carried forward and new ones added, while others were abandoned outright.

pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

More substantively Rand’s patriotism and her reverence for the Founding Fathers were controversial in a movement that considered the Constitution a coercive document (because it claimed jurisdiction over even those who had not signed).41 Rand’s account of the Apollo 11 launch crystallized this difference for many. In the Objectivist she described how she had been invited to a VIP viewing of the rocket launch. Shepherded past the masses to within three miles of the take-off, Rand was awe-struck. Apollo 11 was “the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness,” and as she saw the rocket rise she had “a feeling that was not triumph: but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.”42 It was a masterful piece of writing that became one of Rand’s personal favorites.

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To Tuccille NASA was a bunch of “bandits operating with billions of dollars stolen from the taxpayer—’rational’ bandits, perhaps, achieving a superlative technological feat—but bandits nevertheless.”43 Libertarians might make peace with Rand’s endorsement of limited government, but singing the praises of NASA made Rand’s antistatism seem superficial, a belief to be cast aside when convenient. Nor was the article an isolated incident. Apollo 11 became an encouraging sign of the times for Rand, who referred to the launch repeatedly in the years that followed. What libertarian critics of the “moon jaunt” missed was how Rand’s appreciation of Apollo 11 was tied to her ever-present worry that the United States was going backward, regressing to Petrograd circa 1920. Her fears were stirred anew by the emergence of the environmental movement, which she viewed as a virulent atavism that would drag mankind back to primitive existence.

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Petrograd under the Communists had fallen to nature, regressing from a citadel of European culture to a city stalked by starvation, where survival was a daily struggle. Now environmentalists seemed to be questioning the basic achievements of industrialization and commerce, the discoveries that had lifted man above the beasts. Collectivists, previously focused on inequality and injustice, were “now denouncing capitalism for creating abundance.” In this context Apollo 11 stood out for Rand as a bright sign of hope; it was not the powers of the state that she celebrated, but the wonders of technology and human achievement.45 Rand missed the fact that environmentalism was yet another arena of thought powered by selective appropriation of her work. She focused relentlessly on what historians call conservation environmentalism, which emphasized the dangers of technology and was resolutely anti-growth.

pages: 288 words: 92,175

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

And when Neil Armstrong stood on the surface of the moon and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” the voice transmission back to Earth was received because of tracking stations in California and Australia, part of the Deep Space Network that the computers had worked on so faithfully. Apollo 11 was the culmination of a thousand successes, each one building on the next, stretching up into the beyond. The women watched the first steps on the moon with the same mixture of awe and wonder as millions of other Americans. Yet modestly, they didn’t think about their own handiwork in making it happen.

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The famous photograph, The Blue Marble, was taken during Apollo 17, the last manned lunar mission, in 1972. Despite Apollo’s accomplishments, public support for it had never been particularly strong. During the 1960s, most Americans didn’t believe the manned lunar program was worth the cost, with the exception of one poll taken immediately after Apollo 11. In 1965, only 39 percent of Americans thought that the United States should do whatever necessary, regardless of cost, to be the first nation on the moon. Now, with victory behind them, support waned further. The Apollo program was seen as expensive and unnecessary, especially with the country plunging deep into debt from the ongoing Vietnam War.

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The Atlas-Agena rocket is described in Lewis Research Center, ed., Flight Performance of Atlas-Agena Launch Vehicles in Support of the Lunar Orbiter Missions III, IV, and V (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1969). The Ranger failures are detailed in David M. Harland, NASA’s Moon Program: Paving the Way for Apollo 11 (New York: Springer, 2009); Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program; and R. Cargill Hall, Project Ranger: A Chronology (Pasadena, CA: JPL/California Institute of Technology, 1971). The thrilling 1960 World Series is chronicled in Michael Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).

pages: 301 words: 96,359

Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in Histroy by Ben Mezrich

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, dark matter, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley

One of the brightest stars in the astromaterials research office, he was the epitome of the old-school NASA scientist. After attaining a master’s in physical chemistry and a Ph.D. in geochemistry, he had gone to work for the JSC—or, as it was called at the time, the Manned Spacecraft Center—in July of 1969, just as the Apollo 11 capsule first returned from space. Thad was already in awe of the man. Gibson wasn’t an astronaut, but he was the closest thing a laboratory scientist could ever dream of becoming. It was fitting that he would be giving his lecture in the life sciences building, where Thad worked. Gibson had spent almost all of his thirty-plus years at NASA stationed in that building because—as Thad had learned only the day before, during a bull session with Helms and a couple of other co-ops—Building 31 had once housed the lunar receiving laboratory.

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But it was still amazing to see this gray-haired, slightly balding, bespectacled scientist—a genius who had taken part in the greatest adventure in modern human history—so enthusiastically involved in something new, something that would take at least a quarter of a century to become real. At the beginning of the speech, Gibson talked about the first samples he’d ever seen when he started at NASA—the Apollo 11 samples, which were collected by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Gibson went on to describe how different the samples were from each successive moon mission, how each of the six landing spots had been chosen to study different areas of the moon’s topography. The results were startlingly different types of rock, from the very fine-grained materials brought back from the valley of Taurus Littrow, a deep mountain valley in the northeastern part of the moon—a material that was made up of little tiny beads commonly known as “orange glass,” to the gray, almost black Apollo 17 samples—the very last samples ever collected by human beings, from the dark portion of the moon.

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“It’s like stepping into a submarine,” Cooper said as she led them into a stairwell with cement walls. She was carrying a sheaf of computer printouts, which contained the list of random lunar samples that they would have to check and inventory. The samples were cataloged by mission; samples brought back by Apollo 11 began with the number 11, followed by the catalog number—the first Apollo sample was therefore 110001. The second, 110002. And so on. “And I don’t just mean the decor,” Cooper continued, taking them up the flight of stairs. “The place was designed to be an entirely self-contained, atmosphere-regulated building.

pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

broadcast pitted man against machine just as publicly, and with a renewed, healthy dose of bravado. A national audience of Jeopardy! viewers awaited on the horizon. As with all grand challenges, success was not a certainty. No precedent or principle had ensured it would be possible to fly across the Atlantic (Charles Lindbergh did so to win $25,000 in 1927); walk on the moon (NASA’s Apollo 11 brought people there in 1969, achieving the goal John F. Kennedy’s set for that decade); beat a chess grandmaster with a computer (IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997); or even improve Netflix’s movie recommendation system by 10 percent (2009, as detailed in the previous chapter). Reproduced with permission.

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producers for do-overs in the case of a hardware crash (the show was taped, not broadcast live, and, like any computer, sometimes you need to turn off Watson and then start it back up again), if Watson spat out an embarrassing answer due to a software bug without crashing, nothing could be done to take it back. This was going to national television. Groundbreaking deployments of new technology—whether destined to be in orbit or intelligent—risk life and limb, not only because they boldly go where no one has gone before, but because they launch a prototype. Moon-bound Apollo 11 didn’t roll off the assembly line. It was the first of its kind. The Watson system deployed on Jeopardy! was beta. Rather than conducting the established, sound process of “productizing” a piece of software for mass distribution, this high-speed, real-time behemoth was constructed not by software engineers who build things, but by the same scientific researchers who designed and developed its analytical capabilities.

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See black box trading Allen, Woody Allstate AlphaGenius Amazon.com employee security access needs machine learning and predictive models Mechanical Turk personalized recommendations sarcasm in reviews American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) American Public University System Ansari X Prize Anxiety Index calculating as ensemble model measuring in blogs Apollo 11 Apple, Inc. Apple Mac Apple Siri Argonne National Laboratory Arizona Petrified Forest National Park Arizona State University artificial intelligence (AI) about Amazon.com Mechanical Turk mind-reading technology possibility of, the Watson computer and Asimov, Isaac astronomy AT&T Research BellKor Netflix Prize teams Australia Austria automobile insurance crashes, predicting credit scores and accidents driver inatentiveness, predicting fraud predictions for Averitt aviation incidents Aviva Insurance (UK) AWK computer language B backtesting.

pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Somewhere between five and ten N600-ESs were fired into space, with one or two examples flying on each of the first five Apollo missions as backups for the electronic computers that guided and controlled the spacecraft.89 “No modifications were needed for use in space,” the Smithsonian notes drily of the space-flown N600 in its collection, because, let us not forget, the twenty-two scale, double-sided, trigonometric Pickett N600-ES was scarcely more complex than an elementary school ruler.90 It is not known whether Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin ever had to break out their slide rules while aboard Apollo 11 (Pickett Corporation, who crowed mightily about their lunar rules, would certainly have let their customers know about it), but that did not stop Aldrin’s rule from fetching $77,675 at auction in 2007.91 From such dizzying heights, the slide rule had plenty of time to watch the ground rush up to meet it.

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They looked for a cable connecting it to the computer they assumed must be hidden elsewhere, but they did not find one.75 The Programma 101 was also the first Olivetti product launched not in its home country but rather in the computer-hungry United States.76 The decision was amply rewarded: the P101 would go on to sell 44,000 units during its lifetime, with 9 out of every 10 going to American customers.77 Olivetti had imagined the P101 being used in business, engineering, banking, and science—and to be sure, it found customers in all of those industries—but its inherent power and flexibility also led to roles in two of the most consequential American projects of the decade.78 First, the Programma 101 joined the race to the moon. NASA’s engineers found the P101 to be perfect for one very specific job, as related in a 2006 interview with David W. Whittle, the flight controller in charge of the communications equipment installed aboard the Apollo 11 lunar module: [T]he Lunar Module high-gain antenna was not very smart. It didn’t know where Earth was. So you would have to call up and give the astronauts some—we had two knobs, a pitch and yaw knob, but you have to give him some angles to put it at. [ . . . ] We would have to run four separate programs on this Programma 101, and then in between those programs, we’d have to get out our manuals [ . . . ] we’d have to look up trigonometric functions and input the data, which today your calculator does that. [ . . . ] Then we would read out the angles that we came up with to the crew, and they would dial them in, look at the signal strength, the signal strength there.79 Olivetti’s “supercalculator,” as Whittle called it, was a vital cog in the effort to keep Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in touch with their home planet.

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., “Mathematics on the Moon.” 90 “Slide Rule, 5-Inch, Pickett N600-ES, Apollo 13,” National Air and Space Museum, accessed August 17, 2020, https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/slide-rule-5-inch-pickett-n600-es-apollo-13/nasm_A19840160000. 91 “Pickett N600-ES”; Peter D. Kramer, “Moon Landing: No Small Step, No Giant Leap Without NJ Slide Rules,” NorthJersey, December 10, 2019, https://eu.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/07/19/apollo-11-slide-rules/1742820001/. 92 Cliff Stoll, “When Slide Rules Ruled,” Scientific American 294, no. 5 (2006): 80–87. 93 James, “Deaths of the Slide Rule.” 4. the clockwork age 1 Elizabeth King, “Clockwork Prayer: A Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk,” Blackbird 1, no. 1 (2002), https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v1n1/nonfiction/king_e/prayer_introduction.htm; Clare Vincent and J.

pages: 572 words: 179,024

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

Chapter Nineteen: The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51 Interviews: Buzz Aldrin, Colonel Slater, Ernie Williams, Richard Mingus, Michael Schratt, Bill Irvine, James Oberg 1. July 20, 1969: For details regarding Apollo 11, “Humankind’s first steps on the lunar surface,” http://nasa.gov; for transcripts of the first lunar landing, visit “Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,” by Eric M. Jones, http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.landing.html. 2. Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying: Jenkins, Hypersonics before the Shuttle, appendix 9. 3. astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site: NASA, Appendix E.

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Practice makes perfect, and no doubt Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying experimental aircraft like the X-15 rocket ship—in dangerous and often death-defying scenarios—helped prepare him for piloting a safe landing on the moon. As with most seminal U.S. government accomplishments, particularly those involving science, it took thousands of men working hundreds of thousands of hours inside scores of research centers and test facilities—not to mention a number of chemical rockets designed by Wernher Von Braun—to get the Apollo 11 astronauts and five additional crews (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the moon and back home. A little-known fact is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site. There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain.

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For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks—everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon. Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned home, a UFO-on-the-moon conspiracy was born. On September 29, 1969, in New York City, the newest installment of National Bulletin magazine rolled off the printing press with a shocking headline: “Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11 Discovery. Moon Is a UFO Base,” it read. The author of the article, Sam Pepper, said he’d been leaked a transcript of what NASA had allegedly edited out of the live broadcast back from the moon, namely, that there were UFOs there. Various UFO groups pressed their congressmen to take action, several of whom wrote to NASA requesting a response.

pages: 647 words: 161,908

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis O. French, Colin Burgess, Paul Haney

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, card file, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, Neil Armstrong, out of africa

The Eisenhower administration, like so many real-life fathers, wasn't sure what it had sired, so it was understandably reluctant to take too much credit. In 1961 when Houston was selected as the home of what is now the Johnson Space Center, it was the last time in the modern era that cities bid for the right to be home to a new national facility. Houston's psychic payoff for volunteering came when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong's first words back to mother earth were: "Houston . . . the Eagle has landed." In the course of 1961-63, everyone eventually "transitioned" to Houston and the new home the human spaceflight program was building on a swampflood plain twenty miles south of the city.

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No answer. So I had an option: I quit. The following day, I went to London at the invitation of the bbc. After a week of negotiation, I went to work for 1tn, the commercial network in England, as commentator for manned spaceflights. As I commuted between London and Houston, Apollo 10 flowed into Apollo 11. The whole world stood still listening to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the lunar surface on 20 July 1969. In time for Apollo 12, 1tn opened a new broadcast center in downtown London. Queen Elizabeth herself showed up to dedicate the new facilities. During a break, the queen walked up to me and asked: "Mr.

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That was the entire conversation. Several weeks later, back in Houston, I ran into Armstrong at lunch. "A lady in London was asking about your health during Apollo 12" I told him. His face went whiter than usual as he said, "That must have been the queen!" I felt like I was being caught, but I couldn't tell by whom. After Apollo 11, Armstrong explained, he and his crew started a one hundred-day tour of all the world's capitals. By the time they got to London, about the fifth stop, Armstrong had an old-fashioned cold, so thick he couldn't talk. He thought about canceling a visit to Buckingham Palace to load up on cold medicine and sleep, but his wife Jan had other ideas.

pages: 265 words: 79,896

Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, From Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens

Apollo 11, computer age, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Skype

The window-shade experiment, as it was dubbed, was flown on all but one of the Apollo missions to the lunar surface. It was one of the first experiments to be deployed by each pair of astronauts on the Moon, and its removal was one of the last things they did at the end of their stay. The first such experiment was deployed for only about two hours by the Apollo 11 astronauts. By the time of Apollo 16, the astronauts stayed on the surface long enough to expose the foil for forty-four hours. Because the solar wind is so diffuse, less than a billionth of a gram embedded itself in a square inch of exposed material on the Apollo foils. Thus, even by using the dedicated collectors, only the most abundant elements could be analyzed.

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The laser altimeter accurately measures distances using the speed of light. Modern electronics can time signals with an accuracy of better than a billionth of a second, which is the time it takes light to travel about 1 foot. An accurately timed laser pulse can be bounced off of a surface to determine the distance between the origin and the surface. The Apollo 11 astronauts had placed a reflector on the Moon, allowing Earth-based laser systems to study the Moon’s precise orbit by accurately timing the reflected light. Later Apollo missions had been equipped with laser altimeters on board the spacecraft, permitting them to map the topography of parts of the Moon.

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Accelerometers, 60 Aerogel collectors, 87 Aerogel, described, 86 Alpha-particle x-ray spectrometer (APXS), 109–110, 160, 171, 212 Aluminum, 17, 162, 174 American Association of Variable Star Observers, 9 Ames Research Center, 76, 77, 101, 169 Anders, William, 7–8 Antenna motor, 146 Apollo 7 mission, 6 Apollo 8 mission, 6, 7–8 Apollo 11 mission, 17, 71–72 Apollo 16 mission, 17 Apollo missions, 4 aim of, 6 capsules used for, 144 cost of, 20 costs since, 15 and Earth-based laser systems, 71–72 first of, to the moon, as a manned mission, 7–8 first planned return of a capsule since, 30, 47 laser altimeters on, 72 lunar soil from, 17 next logical step following, 87 as sample-return missions, 18, 20 and XRD instruments, 169 Apollo-Soyuz project, 95–96 Argonne National Laboratory, 27, 71 Arizona State University, 85 Arm motors, 145–146 Arm, rover unit, 75, 98, 99, 107, 109, 110, (ins. img. 15), 127, 142, 145, 162, 164, 171, 175, 195, 196, 212, 214 Arvidson, Ray, 77, 177 Assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) phase, 139–140, 146–147 Asteroids, 14 Atlantis, space shuttle, 188 Atlas rockets, 187–188 Atlas V, 187, 188, 191, 201 Baldonado, Juan, (ins. img. 3) Balloon tanks, 187 Barefield, James, 174 Barraclough, Bruce, 35–36, 38, (ins. img. 6), 130, 134, 186, 206 Basalts, 173–174, 213, 214 Baumgartner, Eric, 75 Bender, Steve, 153, 157–158, 162 Bernardin, John, 126 Beryllium, 126, 138 Bibring, Jean-Pierre, 180–183 Blake, Dave, 133, 169–170 Blaney, Diana, 106, 141 Boeing, 24, 96 Bolden, Charles, 209 Borman, Frank, 8 Bradbury Landing Station, (ins. img. 16), 211 Bridges, Nathan, 101 Burnett, Don, 4, 16–17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33, 35, 47, 49, 57, 59 Calcium, 174, 175 California Institute of Technology (Caltech), 3, 12, 13, 18, 26, 73, 85, 182 Caltech Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences, 26, 27, 172 Canada, 107, 171, 204 Cape Canaveral celestial mechanics involved in launching from, 41 first major launch at, since last shuttle launch, 188 launch of Genesis at, 185 space shuttle at, 45 Capsule Curiosity, (ins. img. 12), 161, 164, 188, 189, 193, 194, 203, 206, 208, 210, 217 Genesis, 30, 35, 39, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52–53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, (ins. img. 1, 2), 193 Mars Science Laboratory, 144, 145 SCIM, 93 Stardust, 60 Capsules on the Apollo missions, 6, 18, 30, 144 for Mars Exploration Rovers, 145 reentry, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 47, 51, 52, 53 Carbon, 47, 64, 73, 175 Carbon dioxide, 146 Carbonates, 174, 175, 176 Cassini, mission to Saturn, 14, 160 Challenger disaster, 13, 92 Charge-coupled devices (CCDs), issues with, as detectors, 117–120, 137–138, 151, 152–153, 154, 155 ChemCam advantage held by, 106 ATLO phase and, 139–140 box protecting, on the Curiosity rover, (ins. img. 15) and budget issues, 110, 126, 130 cancellation of, 130–134, 135, 160, 172, 191, 192 CCD detectors for, issues with, 117–120, 137–138, 151, 152–153, 154, 155 challenge of interfacing, with the rover, 112–113 cold-temperature communication problem, 151 continued funding of, 135 cost review, 140–141 cost-cutting actions to stop cancellation of, 133, 135, 138, 152 deciding on naming LIBS instrument project as, 102 delivery date to JPL, 138, 139, 140 delivery review and performance of, 159–160 design review, 116 electrical cable damaging parts in, effect of, 134–135 French collaboration on, 102, 103, 108, 116–117, 122–123, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 139, 159, 160, 161 halfway into developing, euphoria wearing off during, 121–122 initial turn-on and electrical checkout after landing, 210 installation of, on Curiosity, 158, 161 instruments complementing, 109–110 laser accident and work on, 106 laser instrument testing, (ins. img. 6), 129 letter-writing campaign to save, 132, 135 likelihood of success of, presentations on, 191–193 Mars landing-site meetings and, 177, 181 mast and voltage issues, 126 and the MSL launch delay, 148 and the MSLICE program, 195 nearly finishing the prototype for, 124 new detectors for, 120, 153, 155, 156 optical fiber issues, 113–116, 120–121, 122, 126, 138 optical lens design and, 156, 157–158 potential disaster scenarios involving, and impact, 193–194 projected performance of, review of, 115–116 proposal for, submission of, 102–103 radiation and, 154 rebuilt demux for, 156, 157 restoring full funding of, 141 selection of, as a MSL rover instrument, 108–109 as a sentry, 109 “shake and bake” tests involving, 138, 156, 163–164 and simulations using a mirror, 123, (ins. img. 7) Slow Motion Field Test and, 173, 174 spark produced by the laser from, (ins. img. 8) team members of, gathering to watch Curiosity’s landing, 206 temperature issues facing, 151, 154, 155–156 testing, after installation on Curiosity, 161–164 total cost of, 160 turn-on and testing after landing, 212–213 weight issue involving, 126 whole team for operating, 196, 205 See also Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) CheMin XRD instrument, 133, 169, 170, 212 Chen, Allen, 207 China, 96 “Christmas tree” spacecraft, 15, 18, 20 Clark, Ben, 101 Clegg, Sam, 130, 173, 174, 175, 197, 204 Cold War, 28, 30, 188 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, 55, 92, 93, 94, 185, 193 Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby (CRAF) mission, 14 Comets, 14, 19, 20 See also Stardust Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), 179 Contamination from an aeroshell, 89, 90 on Apollo missions, 17 from Earth, 19 Genesis mission and, 47, 52, 61 incoming, checking for, 139 COTS (commercial, off-the-shelf) parts, 78, 113 Cremers, Dave, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 102 Cronkite, Walter, 7 Curiosity anomalies present during the landing rehearsal for, 198–199 answering old and new questions with, 214 box protecting ChemCam on, (ins. img. 15) communications with, during landing, 203–204 complicated operating procedure for, 195–196 countdown to launch of, 188 delayed launch of, effect of, 160, 179 EDL stage of, 161–162, 164, 203, 208 electrical motors for, 154–155 firing on a Mars rock outcrop, (ins. img. 5) first images of Mars from, 208–209 gravel damage to, 213–214 heat source for, 154, 178 imagining potential disaster scenarios involving, 193–194 impending launch of, 187 installation of ChemCam on, 158, 161 instrument turn-on and testing after landing of, 211–212 kickoff meeting for, 167–172 and the landing ellipse, (ins. img. 11), 202 landing of, 191, 193, 208 landing publicity for, 205 landing risk for, 192 landing site selected for, (ins. img. 11, 12, 16), 183, 201, 202 landing time for, by time zone, 203 landing trajectory for, 202, 203, 204 landing window for, 201 and landing-site meetings, 177–183 latest batch of images and spectra from, analyzing and discussing, 211 launch of, 188–189 launch rocket for, 187, 188, 191 launch stages for, 188 launch window for, 188, 201 lifespan of, 213 lowering of, by Sky Crane, (ins. img. 13), 162 naming MSL as, 148 and new questions arising from Glenelg site, 214 news about the landing of, 203 next set of Mars images from, 209–210 operating temperatures for, 154–155 operational readiness tests for, 194–195, 194–195, 196–199 parachute for, (ins. img. 12), 194, 204, 207, 210 at Paris air show, (ins. img. 9) press conference after landing of, 209 program for operating, 195 reinstalling RTG on, 164 remote operations of, preparing for, 213 revelations from first few sols of driving, 213 route for, 201–202 RTG-powered, 164, 178 “shake and bake” tests for, 163–164 simulated view of, as it approached Mars, 206, 207 Slow Motion Field Test for, 172–176 team leadership of, 167–172 testing ChemCam after installation on, 161–164 thermal mismatch in design of, addressing, 153–156 total cost of, 160 view of Mount Sharp from, (ins. img. 14) weight of, (ins. img. 10) See also Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Delapp, Dot, 212 Delta II rocket, 45 Descopes, 125–126, 128, 129, 132 Discovery missions approach to, 15, 16 competing for, 20–22, 27, 31, 34, 35, 85–86, 91 cost cap for, 20 fitting a sample-return mission into, 18 See also Genesis Disney, 148 Doppler tone, 198 Downlink leads, 195, 196, 197 Dugway Proving Ground, 52, 53 Dust-collection concept, 86, 87 See also Sample Collection for Investigation of Mars (SCIM) Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN), 212 Earth close approach of Mars to, 8, 9, 94, 147, 149 dominant rock types on, 174 gravity of, 19 half-ellipse configuration involving Mars and, 201 land area equal to, 177 magnetic fields surrounding, 19 nitrogen isotopes of, 64 orbiting the Sun, 8, 147 oxygen isotopes of, 62, 63 passing Mars, cycle of, 87, 147, 149 rock under the oceans of, 173 tilt of, for launching missions, 41, 45 Earth-to-Mars communications, simulating, 78 Eberswalde site, 181, 182 Edgett, Ken, 168 Elachi, Charles, 132 Electrical leads, 118–119 Engineering models, 111–112, 122, 124, (ins. img. 7), 125, 129, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142 Engineering teams, 112 England, London, 205 Entry, descent, and landing (EDL) stage activation of, 208 command for, 203 described, 161–162 rover mated with, 164 team involved with, 203, 205, 207–208, 209, 210 European Space Agency, 191 European spacecraft, Halley and, 14 Ferris, Monty, 78, 79, 80, 83, 98 FIDO (Field-Integrated Design and Operations) rover, 77 First Lagrangian (L1) point, 19 Fleming, Cliff, 52–53 Foehlinger, Chuck, (ins. img. 3) France proposals from, for the mobile laboratory, 107 Toulouse, people in, watching Curiosity’s landing, 205 French scientists, collaboration with, 98, 100–101, 102, 103, 106, 108, 116–117, 122–123, 126, 129, 130–131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 139, 159, 160, 161, 179, 180, 212, 213 See also specific scientists Gale Crater, (ins. img. 11, 12, 14), 179, 181, 182, 183, 202, 207, 210, 211, 213, 214 Galileo probe, 14 Gamma-ray detectors, 141 Gamma-ray spectrometers, 107 Gellert, Ralf, 171 Genesis, 8, 74, 79, 86, 87, 90, 93, 95, 118, 206 analysis of the samples from, 62, 63 attachment points of the capsule for, 53–54 building the prototype for, 27 contamination of samples from, 61 contingency measures for, 57, 59 crash landing of, and impact of the capsule, 55–56, (ins. img. 2), 193 delayed launch of, 42–43, 45, 46 designing improvements to the model for, 27–28 dry run presentations on, 28–29 and extraction of the solar sample canister, 57–58 failing final selection for first Discovery mission, 31–32 finessing the concept for, period of, 33, 35 first long-term countdown to the launching of, 45–46 full deployment of, (ins. img. 1) giving pre-launch interviews on, 41–43 good solar-wind samples from, obtaining, 58, 59 as a historic mission, 45 and the instrument used to collect oxygen and nitrogen, (ins. img. 3) launch of, 46, 98, 185, 188 launch readiness review of, 44 launch window of, 41 and locating the concentrator target, 58 main goal of, 62 measurement of solar-wind oxygen from, 63, 64 midair capture of reentry capsule planned for, 30, 51, 52–53, 54 month after launch of, 47–48 negative chute for, 55 nitrogen studies from, 64 opening of the capsule for, 47 overheating problem facing, 47–48 picked for the next Discovery mission, 35 planned trajectory of, and reentry sequence, presenting, 29–31 possible disaster scenarios considered in planning, 55–56 potential reentry wind issue and, 30–31, 35 presentation of, before NASA review board, 29–31 press conferences on, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58–59 proposal submitted for, as finalist selection, 27 purpose of, 42 reason for the crash of, 59, 60 and recovering the samples from the sample canister, 59, 61 and recovery of the capsule pieces, 56–59 representing, before a different NASA review board, 35 resonance ionization mass spectrometry and, 27, 71 resubmitting a proposal of, for the next Discovery mission, 34 results from, 63, 64 reviews of, prior to launch date, 44 sample canister lid from, (ins. img. 1) selected by NASA again as a mission finalist, 34 solar-wind concentrator for, 27, 35, 36, 37–38, 39, 58, 63, (ins. img. 1) as a success, 64–65 testing the prototype for, 28 time period to fully develop and test instruments for, 35 two years leading up to the launch of, 43–44 See also Solar-wind sample-return mission Geomorphologists, perspective of, 179–180 Germany, 107, 171 Getting-acquainted process, 112 Gibson, Bill, 140, 141 Glenelg, 211, 214 Goddard Space Flight Systems, 122, 168 Goldin, Daniel, 14–15, 20, 87 Grotzinger, John, 172, 181, 182, 206, 207 Gusev Crater, 214 Gypsum, 175, 176 Halley, comet, 14 Hassler, Don, 171 Hazcams (Hazard Avoidance Cameras), 204, 209 Heat shield, 53, 57, 145, 193, 208, 210 Herkenhoff, Ken, 101 HiRISE instrument, images captured by, (ins. img. 12), 199 Hohmann transfer, 201–202 Horz, Fred, 37 Hubble Space Telescope (HST), 14 Hughes, 96 Imagers, 102, 109, (ins. img. 14, 16), 160, 168, 212, 214 Infrared spectroscopy, 106, 110, 154, 179, 180 Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), 28, 96, 187, 188 Iron, 173 Isotope ratios, 62, 63, 64, 87, 99, 109 James Webb Space Telescope, 127–128 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 26, 37, 41, 47, 59, 101 assisting in planning solar-wind sample-return mission, 20, 23–24, 25 ChemCam and, 114, 116, 119, 120, 122, 126, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 153, 155–156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 dry run presentations by, involving Genesis, 28–29 first woman scientist at, 18 infrared spectrometers and, 106 and the landing of Curiosity, 191, 206 landing publicity videos released by, 205 and the launch of Curiosity, 189 Mars yard at, (ins. img. 10), 212 media relations at, 56 and the MSL engineering model, 112, 142 operational readiness tests at, 194–195, 196, 197, 198 operations hub at, 203 origins of, 74 payload managers at, 108, 120, 130, 137, 140, 156 press area at, 209 rovers and, 74, 75, 76, 77, 146, 147, 148, 167, 170, 173, 202 satellites and, 74 Slow Motion Field Test and, 174 thermal chamber at, 163 wooing scientists as possible leaders at, 18 See also specific JPL projects and personnel Johnson Space Center, 11, 37, 39, 92 Juno spacecraft, 188 Jupiter, 14, 20, 149, 168, 188 K-9 rover, 77, 113 Kennedy, John F., 6 Kennedy Space Center.

pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Osawa, “As Sony Counts Hacking Costs, Analysts See Billion-Dollar Repair Bill,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2011. 14 In that incident, data: “Target Now Says up to 110 Million Customers Victimized in Breach,” MercuryNews.com, Feb. 5, 2014; “Pictured: Russian Teen Behind Target Hacking Attack,” Mail Online, Feb. 5, 2014. 15 As incredible as the Target hack: Nicole Perlroth and David Gelles, “Russian Hackers Amass over a Billion Internet Passwords,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 2014. 16 Physicians can even perform: Jacques Marescaux et al., “Transatlantic Robot-Assisted Telesurgery,” Nature, May 29, 2001. 17 For example, the 1969 Apollo 11: Phil Johnson, “Curiosity About Lines of Code,” IT World, Aug. 8, 2012; Saran, “Apollo 11.” 18 By the early 1980s: Steven Siceloff, “Shuttle Computers Navigate Record of Reliability,” NASA, Jan. 20, 2011. 19 Today, the software required: David McCandless, “Codebases,” Information Is Beautiful, Oct. 30, 2013; “KIB—Lines of Code (Public),” Google.doc, https://docs.google.com/; Pollwatcher, “Healthcare.gov: 500 Million Lines of Code!

…

As information technologies continue to double in their price performance, capacity, and bandwidth, amazing things become possible. Take, for example, the iPhone that hundreds of millions of users carry in their pockets today. Incredibly, it literally has more computer processing power than that which was available to all of NASA during the Apollo 11 moon landing forty years ago. The modern smart phone is more than “a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the ’70s.” As a result of mathematical repercussions of exponentials and Moore’s law, “we won’t experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; it will be more like twenty thousand years of progress (at today’s rate).”

…

While there are obvious cost, efficiency, and capability advantages to these transformations, they add tremendous complexity to our world. One very rough approximation by which to examine these complexities is by considering the number of lines of computer code (LOC) required to make a particular piece of software or system function. For example, the 1969 Apollo 11 Guidance Computer that safely guided astronauts the 356,000 kilometers from earth to the moon and back only contained 145,000 LOC, a ridiculously paltry sum and a remarkable achievement by today’s standards. By the early 1980s, when the space shuttle became operational, its primary flight software had grown to a relatively slim 400,000 LOC.

pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

The most famous flag on the Moon – the one carried by Apollo 11 and erected during the first Moon landing – is the only one not standing. Buzz Aldrin saw it being blown over by the rocket blast as he and Neil Armstrong left for home. Given the extremes of heat, cold and radiation it will have been subjected to, it’s very likely to have disintegrated. Dennis Lacarrubba, whose New Jersey-based company made the flag, has been quoted as saying, ‘I can’t believe there would be anything left.’ Conspiracy theorists who believe the Moon landings were a hoax often cite the flag in the Apollo 11 photographs and ask how it could be waving when there is no wind on the Moon.

…

INDEX Abbotsbury Swannery 1 abductive reasoning 1, 2 Abyss of Ophir 1 acacia trees 1 Accession Council 1 Adams, John 1 Addis, William 1 Addis Brush Company 1 Addison, Joseph 1 Adonis 1 Advent 1, 2, 3 Africa 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 African Queen, The (film) 1 Afrikaans language 1 Agnes of Assisi, St 1 Aitken, John 1 Alaric the Goth 1 albatrosses 1, 2 Albert, Prince 1, 2, 3, 4 Alcatraz 1 alcohol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Aldrin, Buzz 1, 2 Alexander, Jason Allen 1 Alexander the Great 1 Alexandra, Princess 1 algae 1, 2, 3 Allahakbarries 1 allergies 1 al-Qaeda 1 Altamura 1 aluminium 1 Amazon, River 1, 2 Amazon rainforest 1, 2 America 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 American Civil War 1, 2 American Declaration of Independence 1, 2 American War of Independence 1 amoebas 1 Anaya, Ignacio 1 ANCONA, RONNIE 1 ANDERSON, CLIVE 1, 2 Anderson shelters 1 Andes 1, 2 Andrew, St 1 Angel, Jimmie 1 Angel Falls 1 Angel of the North 1 Anglo-Saxon period 1, 2 Antarctica 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Antonine Wall 1 ants 1, 2, 3 Aphrodite 1, 2 Apollo 11 1 Apollo 17 1 apples 1, 2 apriums 1 aquifers 1 Arabic language 1, 2 Aramaic language 1 Arctic 1, 2, 3, 4 Argentina 1 Arles 1 arm wrestling 1 arms 1, 2 Armstrong, Neil 1, 2 Asher, Jane 1 Asia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Asquith, Herbert 1 Assal, Bahr al, Lake 1 Assissi 1 asteroids 1, 2, 3 Astor, Nancy 1 astronauts 1, 2, 3 Athena 1 Atlantic Ocean 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 atmospheric rivers 1 Aubers Ridge, Battle of 1 Augustus, Emperor 1 Australia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 avalanches 1 Avicenna 1 Aztecs 1, 2 B & Bs 1 ba birds 1 Baal 1 Babylon 1, 2 backbones 1 Bacon, Francis 1 bacteria 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Badger Day 1 bagpipes 1 bags for life 1 baguettes 1 BAILEY, BILL 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Baja 1000 Rally 1 Bak 1 Baldur 1 baleen 1 Balmoral 1 Bamiyam 1 bananas 1, 2 Barbados 1 Barber, David 1 Barclay Allardice, Capt.

pages: 437 words: 126,860

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

If Mars is to be made to give up its secrets, “people who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space” will have to go there themselves. 3: FINDING A PLAN MARS THE HARD WAY On July 20, 1989, President George Bush stood on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Behind him, within the cool halls of the museum, rested artifacts from America’s greatest space explorations, among them a gumdrop-shaped spacecraft named Columbia, the Apollo 11 command module. The men who rode the Columbia home from lunar orbit—Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 crew—now flanked Bush as the president prepared to announce a bold new venture in space on this the twentieth anniversary of humanity’s first landing on the Moon. Bush spoke of the challenges and allure of space exploration, of committing the nation to a sustained program of human exploration of the solar system and even of the permanent settlement of space.

…

If we then assume total system operation cost is seven times propellant costs (roughly double the total cost/fuel cost ratio of airlines), then the cost of delivery to LEO could be about $100 per kilogram. Let’s assume that there is operating between Earth and Mars a spacecraft in a permanent cycling orbit which has the ability to recycle water and oxygen with 95 percent efficiency. Such interplanetary “cyclers,” proposed by Apollo 11 pilot Buzz Aldrin as the basis of a permanent Earth—Mars transportation system, could efficiently provide ample quarters for many immigrants, as they only have to be launched once but keep flying a 2.2-year round-trip journey between Earth and Mars virtually forever. Taking passage on such cyclers, each passenger (100 kilograms with personal effects) will have to bring about 400 kilograms of supplie to provide him or herself with food, water, and oxygen during a two-hundred-day outbound trip to Mars.

…

You can oin the Planetary Society by sending a check for $35 to: The Planetary Society, 65 North Catalina Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91106. The National Space Society is the second largest, with 25,000 members. Founded by Wernher von Braun and Princeton space visionary Professor Gerard O’Neill, it is led today by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronaut Dan Brandenstein, and Executive Director Pat Dasch. The primary interest of the National Space Society (NSS) is to promote the human settlement of space, including the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, and free-floating space colonies. The NSS would be equally happy supporting a Mars (or Moon) program based on any of the J.F.K., Sagan, or Gingrich models.

pages: 521 words: 125,749

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon by Colin Burgess, Kate Doolan

Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh, Ferguson, Missouri, Gene Kranz, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, profit motive, Ronald Reagan

There were gyration problems, and Stafford had to fly the Lm through some difficult maneuvers, but they finally docked, and after the crew had transferred, the Lm's ascent stage was jettisoned. The three astronauts completed a final lunar orbit, and then began the long flight home. Apollo 10 had blazed a trail to the moon, and it was confirmed that Apollo 11 would follow as the first lunar landing. The flight of Apollo 11 stands as one of the greatest achievements in human history and fulfilled the pledge made by President Kennedy back in 1961 to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. Launched on 16 July 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins flew to the moon aboard Command Module Columbia.

…

Most Naa officials successfully kept their jobs when they agreed under pressure with the findings and recommendations of the review board, although some privately disagreed that their company should shoulder the entire blame for the fire. It would be some twenty-two months after the fire that another manned American spacecraft, Apollo 7, was launched into orbit. Barely ten months later Apollo 11, commanded by Neil Armstrong, landed on the moon. Left behind on the lunar surface was an Apollo i patch belonging to Scott Grissom, in recognition of the crew members who had given their lives to make a safe program possible. The aftermath of the Apollo i fire had left Nasa emphasizing crew safety before everything else, and this remained the policy until the mid-1980s, when Nasa was once again inflicted with a spaceflight accident that nearly saw the end of the space agency and all human spaceflight activity by the United States.

…

Maneuvering exercises, rendezvous, and docking were carried out in orbit in a vital test of the craft that was intended to land men on the moon later that year. The flight was a complete success. Now just one more mission remained—a final bold test flight, a precursor to the actual moon landing. Apollo 10 was designated as a full dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing. Its goal was to duplicate every step of the upcoming Apollo 11 flight, with one exception—the astronauts would not touch down on the lunar surface. On 18 May 1969 a Saturn rocket rose slowly off the pad and lifted the Apollo 10 spacecraft into earth orbit at the beginning of its eight-day mission. Once all the systems had been checked, the S-ivb third stage rocket was reignited, and Apollo 10 was propelled away from Earth.

pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

As mentioned earlier, there is also firm evidence for regular sea trade between some of these islands, such as New Ireland and New Britain.1 The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus’ journey to America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the moon. It was the first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian ecological system – indeed, the first time any large terrestrial mammal had managed to cross from Afro-Asia to Australia. Of even greater importance was what the human pioneers did in this new world. The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.

…

The captain spent his time on the voyage drawing military maps while Darwin collected the empirical data and formulated the insights that would eventually become the theory of evolution. On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11 astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story – or legend – describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals. One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American.

…

The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation. For thousands of years, not only the greatest thinkers and scholars but also the infallible Scriptures had known only Europe, Africa and Asia. Could they all have been wrong? Could the Bible have missed half the world? It would be as if in 1969, on its way to the moon, Apollo 11 had crashed into a hitherto unknown moon circling the earth, which all previous observations had somehow failed to spot. In his refusal to admit ignorance, Columbus was still a medieval man. He was convinced he knew the whole world, and even his momentous discovery failed to convince him otherwise. 36.

pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

* * * When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on another world, in July 1969, Malin, then a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, was allowed into the inner sanctum of Mission Control in Houston to witness the events firsthand. It was a unique experience for anyone, let alone a Berkeley physics student. He had also been invited to witness the launch, and then a week later, the splashdown of Apollo 11 in the Pacific Ocean aboard the recovery ship. The young Michael Malin was granted this extraordinary privilege because of his abiding interest in space and a certain naive chutzpah. “I was a true child of the Space Age,” Malin reflects, “and I had bombarded NASA with letters to let me witness this astounding event in history.”

…

Unfortunately, Malin had the misfortune to develop pneumonia. Not wanting to miss a true chance of a lifetime, Malin later wrote to Paine asking to attend the launch of the first attempted Moon landing. By that time Paine had taken over as NASA administrator. Malin was amazed to find himself invited out to the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969. The Berkeley undergraduate gamely caught the cheapest flight he could find down to Florida. When he checked in to register at Cape Canaveral, Malin was momentarily scared. His name did not appear on the official invitees list. To his and the protocol people’s mutual astonishment, he was listed with the Very Very Important Personnel.

…

In the way of all space agencies, the Mars Rover program, which Shirley joined in 1987, grew very fast. Two years later, the Red Planet briefly flowered as a grand national goal after President George H. W. Bush made an ill-starred attempt to invoke Kennedyesque rhetoric. On July 20, 1989, the twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon, Bush vowed to return astronauts there and also to Mars. Within two years, the initiative was dead, as were various options for supporting it by means of roving vehicles and robotic precursors. The eventual cost of JPL’s contribution alone was estimated at $6 billion (two billion for its orbiters, another couple for the rovers, and a further two for the sample return).

pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

And yet we could mirror it with ones and zeros inside a tiny processor. This suggests a profound truth, that anything that can be modeled in a computer is occurring via computation in the real world as well. In other words, Apollo 11’s launch was computational. It didn’t merely involve computation, its launch was computation. Its entire mission was computation. Where it gets interesting are the edge cases. Are we computation? Are our minds giant clockworks that follow the same basic rules as Apollo 11 did? Those are the questions that we need to answer in order to understand the limits, if there are any, of computers. This is why I say that computers are philosophically significant devices.

…

The point of the Turing machine was not “Here’s how you build a computer” but rather, “This simple imaginary device can solve an enormous range of computational problems. Almost all of them.” In fact, anything a computer can do today, you could theoretically do on a Turing machine. And Turing not only conceived of the machine but figured all this out. Consider that simple machine, that thought experiment with just a handful of parts: Everything Apollo 11 needed to do to make it to the moon and back could be programmed on a Turing Machine. Everything your smartphone can do can be programmed on a Turing machine, and everything IBM Watson can do can be programmed on a Turing machine. Who could have guessed that such a humble little device could do all that?

pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

“The sun was setting, so I went out to the beach,” Buzza said. “I lay down and fell asleep for hours, and woke up in the dark and salty chill.” When Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first step on another world in 1969, Anne Chinnery’s parents woke the sleeping three-year-old to experience the moment. The only conscious memory she retains of the Apollo 11 Moon landing is confusion, but it might nonetheless have proven formative. Throughout her childhood, she maintained an interest in space, and aspired to fly there one day. It became more than a theoretical idea in the early 1980s; as Chinnery neared high school graduation, NASA sent Sally Ride into space.

…

“Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday,” Ride said. “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Shotwell had a similar experience with engineering. In 1969, her father gathered five-year-old Gwynne and her siblings around the TV to watch the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. She has fuzzy memories of the experience, recalling it as rather boring, and not as “good looking” as the childrens’ shows she was familiar with. The rest of the Apollo program passed her by unheeded, never really sparking an interest in science. Growing up in Libertyville, a smallish town north of Chicago near the border with Wisconsin, Shotwell’s life revolved around extracurricular activities as well as work in the classroom.

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., 50, 90, 99, 164 Air Force One, 186 Air Force Research Laboratory, 79 AirLaunch, 99 Allen, Joe, 45–46, 143, 144, 262 Altan, Bulent, 242–43, 262 background of, 21–22 Falcon 9 launch, 225–26 Flight One, 76, 77, 86, 118–19 capacitors, 82–85 Flight Three, 178–79 Flight Four first-stage C-17 transport, 185, 187–89 hiring of, 21–22, 23 Turkish goulash, 168, 197, 242 Amador, Ray, 184 American Airlines Flight 77, 98 American Rocket Company (Amroc), 62–64, 142 Anderson, Chad, 113 Antitrust law, 111 Antonio’s Nut House, 129 Apocalypse Now (movie), 57 Apollo program, 7, 108–9 Apollo 11, 49–50, 99–100, 234 Ariane, 93 Armstrong, Neil, 45, 49–50 Army Space and Missile Defense Command, U.S. (USASMDC), 55–57 Astra, 242 ATK Aerospace, 228 Atlas rockets, 48, 65, 93, 111, 112, 229, 236 Atomic weapons tests, 55, 70 Aviation Week, 227–28 Aykroyd, Dan, 63 Barber-Nichols, 38 Barn owls, 60 Bassett, George “Chip,” 53, 262 Battle of Guam, 55 Beal, Andy, 142–43, 218 Beal Aerospace, 44–46, 142–43 Beck, Peter, 236 Bezos, Jeff, 35, 36, 154 Bigej Island, 79 Bismarck, HMS, 70 Bjelde, Brian, 253–54, 262 background of, 6, 7 Flight Four, 207 first-stage C-17 transport, 185, 190–91 hiring of, 5–9, 15–16, 17–18 Musk management style and, 108 at NASA, 6, 8, 15 Omelek site, 73 everyday life, 165–66 Black widow spiders, 145 Blue Engine 4 (BE-4), 35, 36 Blue Origin, 35, 154, 241, 245 Blue Planet (movie), 129 Blues Brothers, The (movie), 63 B-nut, 119–20, 121–22 Boeing, 12, 26, 43 Delta IV rocket, 33, 39, 41, 48, 65, 66, 111, 236 United Launch Alliance, 110–11, 112, 228 Boeing C-17 Globemaster, transport of Falcon 1 first-stage, 185–92 Bolden, Charles, 71 Borescope, 192 BremSat, 70–71 Brown, Mary Beth, 8, 17, 18, 27, 41, 117, 120, 261 Bruno, Tory, 255 Bush, George W., 145, 220 Buzza, Tim, 246–48, 262 Falcon 1, 28–29, 247 first-stage C-17 transport, 191 static fire test, 49, 59, 66 Washington, D.C. debut, 106 Falcon 9, 225–26, 247 family life and children, 149–50 fifth and final flight of Falcon 1, 222–23 Flight One, 77, 85, 87, 123, 124 Flight Two, 134–37 aborted January launch date, 131–32 countdown and launch, 135–37 LOX machine, 132–33 Flight Three, 162, 163, 175 Flight Four, 199–200 Falcon 1 refurbishment after transport, 193, 194–95, 196 launch, 201–2, 204–5 success, 212–13 highway incident, 28–29 McGregor test site, 44, 45–46, 143 Merlin engine, 131, 150–51 Mojave test site, 39–40, 44 Omelek site, 67, 222–23 everyday life, 170–71 Vandenburg site, 52–53, 67 Cameron, Steve, 186–87 Cantrell, Jim, 11, 13, 96 Capacitors, 83–85 Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 224–26, 233 Cargo Dragon.

pages: 141 words: 49,239

Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed by Henry S. F. Cooper

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, pneumatic tube

However, as spacecraft began going all the way to the moon the number of ships had been reduced, on the theory that in the event of trouble there was more chance to guide a spacecraft to a specific landing site, fewer degrees of latitude on which to spread out the ships, and more time to dispatch a recovery force to meet it; airplanes could drop frogmen to open the capsule’s hatch at any point on earth in a matter of hours. No one seriously believed that a crippled spacecraft falling from the moon might need more than frogmen to meet it. By the time Apollo 11 made the first landing on the moon, the number of recovery sites had been cut down to four—what Recovery Officers called the Mid-Pacific Line, the West-Pacific Line, the Atlantic Ocean Line, and the Indian Ocean Line. By the time of Apollo 13, all four of these stations still existed in the minds of Recovery Officers, but only one of them, the Mid-Pacific Line, had any ships at it.

…

At the moment, it was moving so quickly that Haise felt as if he were in a jet plane taking off from a short runway; when he stole a glance out the window, the spacecraft seemed to be rising straight up from the moon. Immediately below, he could see Censorinus, a crater so sharp that it seemed the spacecraft might have just been ejected from it. To the west of Censorinus he could make out Tranquillity Base, where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed nine months before. He couldn’t see the Fra Mauro hills, where he and Lovell had been supposed to land the next day, nor was he ever able to see the crater that Lovell and the other Apollo 8 astronauts had named for him. Brand’s voice came in over the crackling radio to report that the booster had hit the moon and made a crater that (on the basis of seismic data) was probably a hundred and twenty feet in diameter, but Haise couldn’t see that, either.

pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

It was a Hasselblad Electric Data Camera, specially adapted from the motorized Hasselblad 500 EL.2 It used seventy-millimeter film and a polarizing filter. The astronauts carried the camera mounted on their chest. It had no viewfinder, and they had to guess what was visible through the lens. Before the Apollo 11 moon mission, Armstrong and Aldrin had each been given a camera to practice with at home. Nevertheless, the surface of the moon poses unique challenges for photography. Whereas on Earth sunlight is scattered by air molecules, softening its harshness and spreading it even into the shadows so they are not completely black, there is of course no air on the moon.

…

So, if the time of a flight of light from the earth to the moon is known, it is possible to deduce the distance of the moon by knowing the speed of light. The corner-cubes left on the lunar surface fly in the face of the conspiracy theorists’ claim that humans have never visited the moon. They were left by the manned American spacecraft Apollo 11, 14, and 15 and the unmanned Russian rovers Lunokhod 1 and 2. The Lunokhod 2 reflector works occasionally but the one on Lunokhod 1 was lost for almost forty years. However, relatively recently its landing site was imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Observer. The coordinates were then passed to scientists in New Mexico.

pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“It is not coercion, not the physical force”: Rand seems to have forgotten, or overlooked, the fact that NASA had been formed by an act of Congress in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s successful, and, to Americans, shocking, launching of Sputnik I and II into space and the consequent fear that America had fallen behind in its technological battle with Russia. In 1960, NASA appointed former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to lead the American effort to reach the Moon (Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Objectivist, September 1969, p. 709). a new diamond-and-ruby ring: 100 Voices, the Vaught family, pp. 414–21. On Rand’s return to New York: Taped, unpublished interview with Barbara Weiss, conducted by BB, September 23, 1983. “Those who suggest we substitute”: “Apollo 11,” p. 717. She spoke at the invitation of Colonel Herman Ivey: 100 Voices, Brigadier General Jack Capps, p. 496. The speech she gave: Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982).

…

She almost surely encountered their work, both published and unpublished, in an underground network connected to one of her writers’ clubs. Aircraft always fascinated Rand, although until late in her life she was too fearful to fly in a plane. In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart and John Galt both fly solo through Colorado. In a 1969 essay, Rand described watching in “exaltation” as Apollo 11 streaked skyward from Cape Kennedy. And in “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” her famous speech to the 1974 senior class of West Point, she narrates a parable of an astronaut whose spaceship veers off course and crashes on a strange planet. The astronaut, who doesn’t understand his craft or its instruments, merely waits passively, hoping that something will intercede to save him, as aliens approach.

…

She continued to present her popular annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston but accepted few other public engagements. There were memorable exceptions. In July 1969, Alan Greenspan, then a member of President Nixon’s Gates Commission on the draft, arranged for her to be present for NASA’s launch of Apollo 11 at Cape Kennedy, Florida, an event that for the first time placed men on the surface of the moon. She was thrilled by the sight of the powerful rocket lifting into the sky. “What we had seen, in naked essentials, was the concentrated abstraction of man’s greatness,” she wrote in The Objectivist.

pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

The name comes from the recognition that certain stories serve as “hieroglyphs” or symbols—like Isaac Asimov’s robot—that activate the minds of engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists around how an innovation can come to be. In other words, the platform fosters an appetite among innovators to bring science fiction “hieroglyphs” into reality. When astronaut Neil Armstrong returned from the moon as part of the Apollo 11 expedition, he referenced Verne’s novel in a television broadcast before reflecting on his own time in space. Without Poe and Verne creating the imaginative possibility of traveling to the moon, Armstrong might never have gone. In this way, art is a powerful tool in opening up our consciousness to new possibilities.

…

., 200 Airbnb, 65, 83, 124 airline industry, copying in, 84–85 Alando, 84 alien abduction, 187–92 Allen, Robert C., 88–89 Almighty Latin King Nation (ALKN), 170, 171 Al Qaeda, 124 Amazon Basin, 180–84, 200, 209 American Express, 85 Amish, 3–4, 6, 9, 74 Anderson, Sherwood, 212 Anonymous, 111, 112 Anti Hacker Toolkit, The, 109 Apollo 11, 149 Apple, 30, 64, 81 Apte, Mandar, 204–5, 206 Ariel School, 188 Armstrong, Neil, 149 Arreguín-Toft, Ivan, 123 Asimov, Isaac, 149 ASOS, 85 Asperger’s syndrome, 36 attention deficit disorder (ADD), 36 Austen, Jane, 143 autism, 36 camel milk and, 5, 74 automobile industry, 39, 40–43 copying in, 78–79 hacking of, 124 success of, 39, 41–42 Bachmann, Michel, 184 Bahadur, Jay, 28–29 Bali, 184 Balkans, 162, 165, 168, 169 bartering, 65 Battle of the Overpass, 40 Battlestar Galactica, 147 Beach, Sylvia, 212, 213 Beck Hansen’s Song Reader, 98 Beijing, China, 81 Ben & Jerry’s, 200, 201 Ben-Atar, Doron S., 79 Berdish, David, 40–43, 202, 205–6 Berlin, Germany, 83, 221 Bichlbaum, Andy, 153–55 Black Panthers, 173 Black Rock City, Nev., 156 blast furnace industry, 88 Bloomberg, Michael, 63 Body Shop, 201 Bonanno, Mike, 153, 154–55 Borderland, 156 Borenstein, Nathaniel, 92 Boston, Mass., 62, 80–81 Boston Globe, 80–81 Botsman, Rachel, 65 Boulevard Raspail, 213 Boulton, Matthew, 89 Bountra, Chas, 101–2, 204 Brand, Stewart, 141 Branson, Richard, 30, 31–32, 34 Brazil, 94, 95–96, 99, 181, 199–200, 215–16 Brazil House of Representatives, 95 Brooklyn Joe Painters, 61 Brown University, 180, 181 buccaneers, 118 Bulloch, Gib, 161–69, 179, 184, 192, 202, 214 Burning Man, 149, 156 BYD, 78, 79 Callimanopulos, Dominique, 188, 191 camel milk, 4–10 health benefits of, 5, 73–74 Middle East and, 5, 7–8 raw form of, 5, 6, 7, 9 retail business of, 7, 9 selling of, 6–7, 9 U.S. industry of, 5–7, 8, 9, 72, 74–75 camels, 4–5, 6 milking of, 3, 4, 6, 8 in United States, 7, 72–73 Camp Grounded, 185 Canada, 80 Cannes Film Festival, 152 capitalism, 56–57 Cartegena, William (“Lil Man”), 171 Carter, Troy, 90 Chanel, Coco, 143 Chicago, Ill., 131–33, 170 China, 77–79, 81–82, 102–3 cholera, 128 Chongqing, China, 81 Chungking Mansions, 82, 83 Church of Scientology, 111 “Cinco de Mayo” competition, 56 civic consciousness, 173–78 civil rights, 115, 176 Civil War, U.S., 73 Clay, Alexa, 197, 220 Clay, Jason, 197–203, 204, 210 Coachella, 156 Coca-Cola, 91, 198 Coffin, Alice, 152–53 Cohen, Ben, 200 Coleman, Gabriella, 111 collaborative consumption, 65 collaborative innovation, 86, 88–91, 93, 98–102, 105 Colton, Charles Caleb, 80 common councils, 119 community building, 67–72 Community Links, 66 Congress, U.S., 73, 113 contraception, 21 Coppola, Francis, 32 Copycats (Shenkar), 83–84 copying, 77–106 in airline industry, 84–85 in automobile industry, 78–79 benefits of, 85–87, 94, 98–102 of business models, 83–85 in China, 77–79, 81–82, 102–3 collaborative innovation and, 86, 98–102, 105 collective invention and, 88–91 downloading and, 96–98 etiquette of, 103, 105 innovation fostered by, 85, 94, 96–98, 105 intellectual property law and, 79, 80 intellectual property theft and, 77, 85, 93, 105 in music industry, 90 open-source and, 99, 102–3 patents and, 91–93 in pharmaceutical industry, 94–95 research and development and, 88–89, 91, 101–2 timing and, 102–5 see also counterfeit goods; shanzhai Copyleft, 100 Cornell University, 199 Cornwall, England, 89 corporate sabotage, 154 corporations, 39 innovation in, 167 patents and, 92, 93 Costa Rica, 180 counterfeit goods, 82 food as, 80–81 global trade of, 81 Coursera, 23 Cowan, Matt, 84 Creative Commons, 113 Crick, Francis, 86 Cruise, Tom, 111 Cuban, Mark, 91 Cultural Survival, 200, 201 Culture Club, 31 Cure Violence, 131–35, 207 Dallas Buyers Club, 8 Darwin, Charles, 86–87 Davis, Jefferson, 73 Defy Ventures, 55–56, 58, 60–62, 64, 207–8, 209 Demand Progress, 113 DemoHour, 102 de Pree, Maggie, 220 Dershowitz, Alan, 190 Desert Farms, 7, 9, 72, 74 development industry, 161–69 DHL, 67, 69 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital photography, 104–5 Diners Club, 85 Disney, 97 Doctorow, Cory, 149 “Does Entrepreneurship Pay?

pages: 292 words: 62,575

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know by Kevlin Henney

A Pattern Language, active measures, Apollo 11, business intelligence, business logic, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, database schema, deliberate practice, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fixed income, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Grace Hopper, index card, inventory management, job satisfaction, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, The Wisdom of Crowds

Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) Allan Kelly CODE NEVER LIES, BUT IT CAN CONTRADICT ITSELF. Some contradictions lead to those "How can that possibly work?" moments. In an interview,[12] the principal designer of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module software, Allan Klumpp, disclosed that the software controlling the engines contained a bug that should have made the lander unstable. However, another bug compensated for the first, and the software was used for both Apollo 11 and 12 Moon landings before either bug was found or fixed. Consider a function that returns a completion status. Imagine that it returns false when it should return true. Now imagine that the calling function neglects to check the return value.

pages: 219 words: 61,720

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Bankrupting America, September 28, 2010, http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/public-pulse-does-your-opinion-match-the-publics/#.VBM6TktFYpE. 4. “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Recovery.gov, http://www.recovery.gov/arra/Pages/default.aspx; “Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Ten Facts about Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins’ mission,” Telegraph, July 18, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5852237/Apollo-11-Moon-landing-ten-facts-about-Armstrong-Aldrin-and-Collins-mission.html. 5. David Barboza, “Bridge Comes to San Francisco With a Made-in-China Label,” New York Times, June 25, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/business/global/26bridge.html?

pages: 415 words: 123,373

Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles

air gap, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alignment Problem, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, crew resource management, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, flying shuttle, Gene Kranz, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ted Sorensen, time dilation

America had promised to put a man on the moon before 1970. The first flight put two men there months before the deadline, with no apparent difficulty. America recovered so quickly from its moon fever that just a week after the Apollo 11 landing, an opinion poll showed a solid majority of Americans believing that NASA was getting too much money. At the time of the Apollo 11, a presidential panel headed by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was finishing up work on a post-Apollo plan. The report came in September 1969: Given a reusable space shuttle and a space station, NASA could launch an atomic-powered Mars mission before 1986, maybe as soon as 1981.

…

Aberdeen Testing Center, 247 AeroPeru 757 Flight 603 airliner, crash of, 56, 310 Aerospatiale ATR-42 transport airplane, crash of, 254–55 Airbus airliners, 3, 255 Air France Concorde, crash of, 4–5, 312 Airship Guarantee Company, 69–70 Albin, Fred, 191–92 Alexander, Dick, 194–95 Aloha Airlines 737 airliner, blowout of upper fuselage skin of, 7, 307 Altair Engineering, 184–85 American Airlines, 120–21, 124 American Airlines DC-10 Flight 96 airliner, cargo-door blowout of, 117–18, 123, 125–28, 134, 248, 253, 286, 302 American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Boiler Code of the, 60 American Trans Air DC-10 airliner, oxygen canister fire on, 153 ammonium nitrate, 208, 215–22 in BASF factory explosion, 218–19, 298 in Texas City docks explosions, 216–17, 219–21, 299 ammonium perchlorate (AP), 136, 308 Anderson, Warren M., 260–61 Andersonville, prison at, 271 Ansoff, Igor, 4 Apollo 1, 142–50 casualties of, 142–43, 149, 301 construction of, 146–47 oxygen-enriched fire in command module of, 91, 111, 142–45, 147, 149–50, 188, 286, 288–89, 301 testing of, 147–49, 301 Apollo 7, 278 Apollo 10, 186 Apollo 11, 70 Apollo 12, 183 Apollo 13, 108, 179 fire in command module of, 188–89 liquid oxygen tank problem of, 143, 181–83, 185–90 overheating of oxygen tank in service module external bay of, 70, 143, 183, 187, 189, 302 thermostat problem of, 186–89, 302 training for near disasters on, 119–20 Apollo program, 92, 230 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 43–44, 101 AT-6 trainer airplanes, communication errors in, 243–44 Audi 5000 sedan, alleged sudden-acceleration problem of, 237–39 Aviation Safety Reporting System, 292 Babcock & Wilcox, 52, 54–55, 61, 119 Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF), explosion at, 218–19, 298 Baldwin Hills Dam, collapse of, 190–91, 301 “Ballad of Casey Jones,” 257, 296 Banqiao and Shimantan Dams, failure of, 13, 277, 303 Barber, Jonathan, 275–76 barrage-balloons, flying airplanes into cables hung from, 208 Beauvais Cathedral, collapse of choir vaults of, 89 Beech Aircraft, 186 Bell, Arthur, 89–90 Belle Memphis, 270 Bell JetRanger helicopters, 223–24 Bell 206 medevac helicopter, crash of, 144 Benet, Stephen Vincent, 176 Berkun, Mitchell, 177–78 Bhopal disaster: casualties in, 259, 261, 263, 266–67, 306 cause of, 259–60, 263–68, 274, 306 release of toxic chemicals in, 166, 259–68, 274, 281, 286, 306 BHP Port Kembla Steelworks, damage caused by short circuit at, 141–42 Binks, Joe, 89–90 Black, Ken, 225–26 Black Sea port, explosion of fertilizer-carrying ship at, 221 Blandy, W.

pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

But could this phase transition have been predicted as growing out of some underlying regular change? Yes. There were underlying quantifiable patterns occurring over the previous decade that would have allowed the prediction of this phase transition in humanity’s place in the solar system. Prior to Apollo 11, multiple unmanned and manned Apollo missions had been launched. Apollo 10 actually did everything but land on the Moon—it left the earth’s orbit, circled the moon, and returned home. It even came within fifteen kilometers of the moon’s surface. Despite what appears to be an abrupt transition in what we know, there was a steady progression of underlying changes that can explain the jump.

…

Nonetheless, the Gray Lady argued in an editorial that thinking that any sort of rocket could ever work in the vacuum of space is essentially foolishness and a blatant disregard for a high school understanding of physics. The editors even went into reasonable detail in order to debunk Goddard. Luckily, the Times was willing to print a correction. The only hitch: They printed it the day after Apollo 11’s launch in 1969. Three days before humans first walked on the moon, they recanted their editorial with this bit of understatement: Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.

pages: 261 words: 72,277

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

More than one hundred thousand attendees come to view the industry’s latest and greatest innovations, from the newest Rolexes to breakthroughs in multifunction operability. In 2008, Baselworld visitors were treated to a special announcement. Renowned Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome was releasing something unique. As part of its DNA of Famous Legends collection, Jerome had previously offered a Moon Dust–DNA watch made from fragments of the Apollo 11 and Soyuz space shuttles. Each watch dial featured tiny craters, filled with dust from actual moon rocks and the watch straps were made of fibers from spacesuits worn on the international space station. At more than $15,000, the Moon Dust watches were not cheap. But Romain Jerome’s new watch topped that by a hefty margin.

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Abacus watch, 124 Abercrombie & Fitch, 101, 107, 108, 110 Academic performance birth order and, 66 race and, 16, 117–20, 141–42 “Acting white,” 117–20, 121, 141–42 Adoption studies, 68 Advertising signaling used in, 140 social class and, 94–95 African Americans, 117–20, 121, 141–42 Afunctionality, 124–27 Aguilera, Christina, 44 Ahrendts, Angela, 143–44 AIDS/HIV transmission, signaling and, 121 Allen, Ray, 207 Ants, social facilitation and, 189 Apollo 11 space shuttle (watches made from fragments of), 123 Apple, 97, 103, 184n, 185 Arpa, Yvan, 128 Art preferences, 16, 70–71, 72, 73 Asch, Solomon, 20, 22–24, 29, 58 Assortive mating, 31 Athletics. See Sports/athletics Audience effects, 189n Autokinetic effect, 21 Automobiles, 2–4, 15, 16 differentiation of, 83 introduction of, 182–83 logos on, 133 optimal distinction in, 177–79 signals conveyed by, 107–8, 122, 123, 144 similarity of, 156–57 social class and preferences in, 86–87, 90–91 Avis, 220 Babies mimicry in, 33 naming (see Names) perceived differences in, 16, 85 Baby One More Time (album), 43 Babysitters, ice cream preferences in, 103–4 Baseball, 204 Baselworld, 123–24 Basketball, 17, 204, 207–8, 214 Beckham, David, 127 Beer preferences, 71–72, 73 Beetle (Volkswagen), 157 Berra, Yogi, 73 Bicycles, single-speed or fixed gear, 125 Binge drinking, discouraging, 140–41 Birth order, 16, 64–70 Blockbusters, 42–55 music website experiment, 46–49, 52–53 parking preference experiment, 49–52, 53 quality and, 53–54 BMWs, 2–4, 83, 180 Bon Appétit, 94 Boredom, 167–69 Bottega Veneta, 134, 135 Bradlow, Eric, 150 Branding.

pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

And then they got smaller and smaller and smaller, like something out of the genie world. So small that your iPhone 12 has 11.8 billion of them. * * * I think that needs a pause. 6 transistors on the 1957 Sony portable TR-63. 11.8 billion in your hand right now. * * * But in between then and now, quite a bit has happened – including the moon landing. In 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and author, put it like this: ‘Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon.’ That doesn’t mean your phone can fly you to the moon – but it is a useful comparison when thinking about the exponential increase in computing capacity in such a small amount of time

…

It was Grace Hopper who pulled a moth out of Harvard’s malfunctioning room-sized computer back in 1947 and who wrote in her notes, ‘First actual case of bug being found.’ And the first time a computer glitch was called a bug. The term ‘debugging’ soon followed. Women have a way with words. Margaret Hamilton, who headed the 350-person team that developed the software system for the Apollo 11 project, coined the term ‘software engineer’ to describe her work role. It hadn’t been described before because it hadn’t been done before. * * * Thanks to movies like Hidden Figures, the world is now more aware of the role played by women in the early years of computing, and crucially in the Space Programme.

pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The Peanuts comic strip character Snoopy, a beagle, wore a spacesuit on the popular Snoopy the Astronaut pins and was the most popular cartoon character of the day—so much so that it became the symbol of the Apollo Program. The journey of Apollo 8 set up the nation for the incredible dramatic climax of Apollo 11 less than seven months later, when American astronauts would actually land and walk on the Moon, fulfilling Kennedy’s goal before the decade was out. But in the months leading up to the grandest of all human adventures, voices of concern began to be heard anew. Despite the incredible successes of the Apollo Program and the spiritual sense of wonder and moment its narrative generated, the growing distrust of the quasi-military organization and culture that NASA had adopted to get the job done recalled Eisenhower’s warning of eight years before.

…

The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who had cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., carried on with King’s new focus on economic justice for the poor of all races after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. In 1969, Aber-nathy led a national march against the Apollo 11 Moon launch, criticizing the incredible spending as an “inhuman priority”17 at a time when so much suffering existed in the nation. “One fifth of the population lacks adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care,”18 he argued. A society that can resolve to conquer space; to put man in a place where in ages past it was considered only God could reach; to appropriate vast billions; to systematically set about to discover the necessary scientific knowledge; that society deserves both acclaim and our contempt … acclaim for achievement and contempt for bizarre social values.

…

For though it has the capacity to meet extraordinary challenges, it has failed to use its ability to rid itself of the scourges of racism, poverty and war, all of which were brutally scarring the nation even as it mobilized for the assault on the solar system.19 NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine met with Abernathy on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch and eloquently said that if he could alleviate the suffering by not pressing the launch button he would, but that sending three men to the Moon was “child’s play” compared to “the tremendously difficult human problems” Abernathy and his people were concerned with.20 Incredibly, the exchange ended agreeably, with Abernathy agreeing to pray for the lives of the astronauts.

pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Take computer processing speeds, for example: they are doubling every 18 months or so. The iPhone 6s, which came out in 2015, processes information about 120 million times faster than the mainframe computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon in 1969. That is amazing. But it gets more amazing. The iPhone X, which came out in 2017, is about three times faster than the iPhone 6s. That means the increment in processing speed between 2015 and 2017 was 240 million times the speed of the Apollo 11 computer. Think about that. The increment in power in the two years after 2015 was twice as large as all the progress between 1969 and 2015. Twice as much progress in two years as there was in the 46 previous years.

pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Society has always been hobbled by the limitations of the tools we use to measure and know reality, from compass and sextant to telescope and radar to today’s GPS. Our tools may be twice or ten times or a thousand times as powerful tomorrow as they are today, making what we know now seem minuscule then. Our current big-data world will, before long, look as quaint as the four kilobytes of writeable memory in Apollo 11’s guidance control computer does now. What we are able to collect and process will always be just a tiny fraction of the information that exists in the world. It can only be a simulacrum of reality, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Because we can never have perfect information, our predictions are inherently fallible.

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.” [>] Big data’s use in slums and in modeling refugee movements—Nathan Eagle, “Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Systems,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaivtqlu7iM. Perception of time—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 2006). [>] “What’s past is prologue”—William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” Act 2, Scene I. [>] CERN experiment and data storage—Cukier email exchange with CERN researchers, November 2012. Apollo 11’s computer system—David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (MIT Press, 2008). Bibliography Alter, Alexandra. “Your E-Book Is Reading You.” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2012 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304.html). Anderson, Benedict.

pages: 485 words: 149,337

The Last Dance by Martin L. Shoemaker

Apollo 11, gravity well, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, RFID, stem cell

This prototype will only make one loop before it goes in for redesign; but they’re already working on her sister ship, the Aldrin, and that one will be a giant express train from nowhere to nowhere, never stopping. What kind of captain worthy of the title would want duty like that when there are worlds to explore? —Captain Nicolau Aames THE ALDRIN CYCLER FOREWORD BY MARIANNE J. DYSON The Aldrin Express derives its name from Buzz Aldrin, whom most people know as the Apollo 11 astronaut who walked on the moon alongside Neil Armstrong in 1969. Not as many people know that Aldrin was the first astronaut with a PhD (from MIT), and his doctoral thesis was “Guidance for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” NASA selected him because of this expertise. The other astronauts soon nicknamed him “Dr.

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I expect our five-month trip to Mars will literally fly by as we continue to discuss and explore a wondrous future in space. Marianne Dyson is an award-winning author and a former NASA flight controller (the topic of her memoir, A Passion for Space). Her recent children’s books include Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet and To the Moon and Back: My Apollo 11 Adventure coauthored with Buzz Aldrin. See www.mdyson.com for more information. A NOTE ON RANKS IN THE SYSTEM INITIATIVE Many of the characters in this book serve in different branches of the International Space Corps chartered under the System Initiative, a future international space program built from the preexisting programs of the member nations.

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Johnson, couldn’t make the trip from Australia to accept his award at the International Space Development Conference; so he asked if I would attend in his place and read his speech. I eagerly accepted, of course. That is how I found myself having lunch with a number of professionals in the space business, including Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. I managed not to embarrass myself during lunch, and later I went to Colonel Aldrin’s talk about his unique plan for Mars exploration. I still remember the brief story note I wrote that day: “Something aboard a Mars cycler.” So without Bill and Michelle and the Baen Memorial and Rich Johnson, and especially without Buzz Aldrin, this book would not exist.

pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Also unlike China and India, their military expenditures, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, constitute less than 3 percent of government spending, compared with China’s 6 percent and India’s 9 percent—not to mention the even greater military expenditures by the two traditional space superpowers, the United States (more than 9 percent of government spending, but 36 percent of global military spending) and Russia (15 percent of government spending).55 For decades before the Canadian Space Agency was established in 1990, Canada had partnered with other countries on space initiatives, especially with the United States. Among the many early partnerships were an Ontario-built storable communications antenna used during the pioneering US manned flights in 1961–62 and Québec-built landing legs for Apollo 11’s lunar module, the vessel that safely landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Canada was the third country to build its own satellite and the first country to have its own communications satellite in geostationary orbit. More recently, Canada has made high-profile robotics contributions to the US space shuttle and the International Space Station.

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A similar dissatisfaction with the back-burnering of science is evident in an impassioned, frustrated resignation letter from Donald U. Wise, chief scientist and deputy director of the Apollo Lunar Exploration Office, sent to NASA Associate Administrator Homer Newell in August 1969, just one month after Apollo 11 returned safely to Earth: I came to the Agency because the scientific advisory boards to NASA on which I sat seemed to have little influence on the manned lunar program. After working inside the system to give science a more effective voice, I became convinced that the system was equally refractory to internal scientific advice. . . .

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., 250, 251 accelerators, 28–29 accretion, 384 ACES (Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space), 339 ACES (Atomic Clock with Enhanced Stability), 339 achromatic lens, 130, 132 Active Denial/Silent Guardian System, 201, 470–71n Adams, Evangeline, 55 adaptive optics, 154–56, 300, 457n Adaptive Optics for Astronomical Telescopes (Hardy), 156 Advanced KH-11 satellites, 205–6, 343 Advanced LIGO, 461n Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 181, 216, 222, 270, 490–91n AEHF (Advanced Extremely High Frequency), 354 aerospace industry consolidation after end of Cold War, 11, 411n contracts with NASA, 21 military-space-industrial complex, 161 missile defense–related campaign contributions, 12, 411–12n prosperity after September 11, 2001, 11 aerospace workforce, 21, 22, 27 AFCRL Infrared Sky Survey, 221–22 Africa circumnavigation by ancient sailors, 72–73, 78, 434n early migrations of humans from, 64, 430n travels of the Portuguese, 81 agonic line, 94 Airborne Laser Laboratory, 156 Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs, 16, 341 contracts with aerospace corporations, 21 control of GPS system, 158, 337 space systems in Gulf War, 331 space war and cyberwar, 235–36, 274, 324–25 Alaska, and harbor creation by H-bombs, 285, 499n albedo, 196–97, 207 Aldebaran, 73 Aldrin, Buzz, 353 Alexander, Edward Porter, 123, 124, 127, 447–48n Alexander the Great, 78 All Quiet on the Western Front, 387 al-Ma’arri, 434n Almagest (Ptolemy), 50 Alnilam, 67 aluminum, 194, 195, 469n, 528n Alvan Clark & Sons, 130, 450n see also Clark, Alvan Amalfi, Italy, 76 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 112, 247 American Astronomical Society, 7, 149, 155, 378, 463n American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, 13, 413n American empire, 34–36 American Philosophical Society, 112 American Science and Engineering (AS&E), 225–27 American Security Council, 304, 505n American Security Project, 13 American Sign Language, 446–47n America Retectio, 436n Ampère, André-Marie, 220 Anaximander, 70 ancient astronomy constellations and zodiac, 41 development of, 38–39 eclipses, 44–49 monuments and stoneworks, 41–42 records and predictions of events, 42–45 time measurement units, 39–41 see also astrology Andromeda galaxy, 234 Andropov, Yuri, 258 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), 12, 250, 287, 293, 502n antibiotic resistance, 14 Antikythera Mechanism, 44–45, 422–23n antiwar movements, 8, 10, 410n Apache helicopters, 332 apochromatic lens, 132 Apollo 1 disaster, 291 Apollo 8 mission, 289 Apollo 11 mission, 353, 369 Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, 357, 521n Arago, François, 142–43, 456n Archimedes, 45, 46, 47, 423n Area 51, 197 Arecibo Observatory, 181–82 Arianespace, 363 Aristarchus, 440n Aristotle, 101, 169 Arkhipov, Vasili, 497n Armageddon (movie), 255 armillary spheres, 44, 80, 101, 436n Armstrong, Neil, 353 Arte de Navegar, 80 Art of War (Sun Tzu), 238 ASATs (antisatellite weapons), 257–59, 283, 291, 294, 356, 485n Ashurnasirpal II, 33–34, 420n Assyrian empire, 33–34 asteroids deflection of, 253–55, 256, 484n formation, 384, 385 impacts on Earth, 234, 253, 483n mining of, 385–86 near-Earth objects (NEOs), 253–54, 255, 256 potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), 190, 253 radar tracking of, 184, 190 rare earth metals in, 385 astrolabes, 38, 74, 80, 82, 84, 339 astrology about, 49–51, 424–25nn almanacs and periodicals, 57, 426n Henry the Navigator’s horoscope, 79 in India, 54 “lunar cycle effect,” 56 in Nazi Germany, 57–63, 427–28nn, 429nn opposition to, 51–52, 58–59, 425n reliance on in wartime, 52, 425n, 429n stock market and, 55–56 in the United States, 53–54 Vedic astrology, 54 see also ancient astronomy astronomical photography, early history, 143–44, 456n astronomical unit (AU), 440n Astrophysical Journal, 149, 217 astrophysicists antiwar sentiments, 9 collaboration and recent discoveries, 398–400, 404 employment opportunities, 22–23 as lateral thinkers, 150 telescope design and, 101–2, 133 tools and technology used, 149 astrophysics alliance forged with military, 36–37, 150–52, 386 analysis of light and images, 149–50, 151–52, 176, 196, 198–99 and Cold-War science priorities, 29 electromagnetic spectrum and, 176 photography and, 140, 141–44 spectroscopy and, 140, 144–48 spending for vs. military spending, 403–4, 533nn Atacama Desert, 200 Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), 183, 200, 201, 231 atmosphere transmission of electromagnetic radiation, 199–200, 214, 225 twinkling of stars and, 152–54, 300 water hole, 200–201, 470n atomic bombs, 151, 190, 263, 303, 457n, 474n atomic clocks, 333, 339 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 216, 285, 402, 497n, 532n Atoms for Peace, 287, 498–99n AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph Company), 128, 177–78, 501n Augustine (saint), 51 Australia early presence of modern humans, 64, 430n exploration and colonization, 92 James Cook and, 92 as penal colony, 92 space program, 32 Square Kilometre Array, 183 Azores, 80, 94, 439n Babel-17 (Delaney), 260 Babylonians, 40, 41, 42 Bacon, Francis, 52 Bacon, Roger, 106–7, 162 BAE Systems, 412n Bahcall, John, 7 balance of terror, 285, 497–98n Ball Aerospace and Technologies, 16 BAMBI (Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts), 271, 278 Barnard’s Star, 344 Barr and Stroud Ltd, 136, 137 Battle of Copenhagen, 115–16 Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, 139, 140, 450n Bay of Pigs, Cuba, 284 Bechtel, 11 Behaim, Martin, 87, 436n Beidou system, 337 Bell, Alexander Graham, 128 Bell Labs (Bell Telephone Laboratories), 178–79, 288, 501n Berkowski, Johann Julius Friedrich, 144 Berlin blockade, 266, 303 Berlin Wall, fall of, 11, 29, 358, 374 B-52 bombers, 332 Big Dipper, 67, 432n Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests, 402–3 Bilmes, Linda, 416n bin Laden, Osama, 12, 206, 349 binoculars, 109, 125, 128, 132, 139, 451n Biot, Jean-Baptiste, 456n birds, as clue for wayfinders, 65, 430–31n Blackwater USA, 11, 25 Blanton, Thomas, 497n blending camouflage, 172 blinding, 174–75 Blue Origin, 300 Boeing campaign contributions, 412n in Colorado Springs, 16 prosperity after September 11, 2001, 11, 12 Russian rocket joint ventures, 363, 371 weapons manufactured by, 18, 20 Bolden, Charles, 376 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 115, 122, 130, 447n Bond, William Cranch, 144 Book of Calculation (Fibonacci), 77 Book of Useful Information on the Principles and Rules of Navigation, 67 Borghese, Scipione, 104 Bourdieu, Pierre, 92 Bourne, William, 107 Bowen, Alan, 47–48 Brahe, Tycho, 49 Brahma, 40 Brazil, 81, 310, 431n, 444n, 518n Brilliant Pebbles, 250, 271 British Mariner’s Guide (Maskelyne), 94 Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, 16, 17, 24, 26 Broder, John M., 250 bronze, 44, 69, 422n, 432n Browne, Malcolm, 334–35, 336 Brown, Louis, 185, 187, 190, 464n, 465n, 467n Brunhübner, Fritz, 62–63 B-2 stealth bombers, 198, 303, 470n Buchheim, Robert W., 248, 481–82n Buckland, Michael, 454n Bulganin, Nikolai, 277 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 310–11 Bull Run, First Battle of, 124, 448n, 449n Bunsen, Robert, 147 Burbidge, Margaret and Geoffrey, 402 Burns, Dean, 306 Burrows, William E., 80, 206, 270, 357, 362, 366, 468n Bush, George H.

pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

Even the JPL Deep Space Network team got in on the game, increasing the sensitivity of their receivers to deal with Voyager 2’s weaker and weaker radio signals as the spacecraft sped farther away, and adding the capability to communicate with Voyager 2 from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia (the one made famous by successfully broadcasting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 lunar landing live to the world in 1969) during the most critical part of the Uranus flyby—which would be best visible from the Australian DSN stations. As Ed Stone wrote in one of the early scientific papers describing the Voyager 2 results at Uranus, “That all of this worked so well testifies to the high level of expertise and the spirit of teamwork within the Voyager project and supporting organizations.”

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I have listed these folks among the Acknowledgments because I am truly grateful for their time and patience! Chapter 1. Voyagers the privilege of walking on another world: To be the hit of the party sometime (at least, the kinds of parties I go to . . .), memorize and then recite all twelve of their names! In order of their missions (Apollos 11–12, 14–17): Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin; Pete Conrad and Alan Bean; Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell; James Irwin and David Scott; Charles Duke and John Young; and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Gene Cernan. so cute with their long necks and bulging eyes!: Does “cuteness” matter in space exploration?

pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

In the next chapter we look at a voyage that was too far for the 25–40,000-kilometer (16–25,000 mile) range of the fictional Star Trek transporter, but is still a backyard trip in terms of exploring space. This is the 380,000 kilometer (230,000 mile) journey to the Moon. 13. DESTINATION MOON One of the biggest thrills of my teenage life was being allowed to stay up all night to watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing (the first time I’d ever spent a whole night without going to bed). And something was very clear to me, back then on that long 1969 night. I would be going to the Moon too. Not soon, but before I died. I was realistic. I didn’t expect it to be soon, because I never saw myself as an astronaut.

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Once suitable equipment has got out there—and initially this would have to be shipped from Earth at great expense—many of the raw materials needed for a colony are available on the surface. But not everything. The obvious missing essential is water. As we have seen, it was assumed at one time that the dark patches on the Moon’s surfaces were oceans, and as we have seen, they were named as such. Mare Tranquillitatis, where Apollo 11 landed—is the Sea of Tranquility. But it turns out that the relatively dark areas are vast pools of solidified ancient lava. (In fact, all the Moon is a mix of shades of dark gray—it only looks bright because, lit by the Sun, it is so intense in contrast to the night sky.) The hostile climate of the Moon means that any surface liquid water would be rapidly lost, boiling away into the vacuum.

pages: 546 words: 164,489

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space by Stephen Walker

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, fake news, Gene Kranz, lockdown, lost cosmonauts, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, South China Sea, Ted Sorensen

As well as the Smithsonian example, another Ivan, wearing a spacesuit and strapped to his cosmonaut couch, exists at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum, complete with a sign claiming that this Ivan flew on March 25, 1961, and that it was donated to the museum by Korolev himself. As so often with the early Soviet space programme, the truth can be frustratingly elusive, even after sixty years. One only hopes that Perot got the right one. Wernher von Braun’s career reached its astonishing apogee with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The Saturn V rocket that he and his team designed and built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville performed superbly – unlike its Soviet counterpart, the very slightly smaller N-1, which failed spectacularly on all four of its test launches, thus destroying any Soviet hopes of putting a Russian on the moon.

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Sidey was in the White House cabinet room when the president made this statement ‘Can we leapfrog’: This and other quotations in this meeting from Sidey John F. Kennedy 118–21 ten times as much as the bomb: The wartime Manhattan Project’s estimated cost was $2 billion or approximately $29 billion in 2021. Webb’s higher-end estimate of $40 billion was substantially too high. The Apollo programme cost approximately $25.4 billion (Forbes Apollo 11’s 50th Anniversary: The Facts and Figures July 20, 2019) The bombing began within hours . . . on April 15: SW is indebted to Rasenberger Brilliant Disaster, a fascinating recent account of the Bay of Pigs operation ‘the least covert military operation’: Salinger With Kennedy 147 ‘provide the Cuban people’: Sergei Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev 435–6 114 Cuban fighters: Rasenberger Brilliant Disaster xiv ‘the grimmest I can remember’ and other quotations: Salinger With Kennedy 147 ‘in the most emotional, self-critical state’: Logsdon John F.

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Able (monkey) 113 Agaltsov, Colonel General Filipp 362 Agitprop (Department of Propaganda and Agitation, USSR) 365 Akimova, Klavdia 277–8 Albert, Project 111–12, 115 Alekseyev, Semyon 190 Alfa (dog) 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 168, 299 Anfuso, Vincent 383 Antares lunar module 404 A.P.O. (Avariynyy Podryv Obyekta) (‘Emergency Object Destruction’) (Vostok on-board bomb/device) 11–12, 13, 14–15, 167, 169, 209–10, 226, 234, 257 Apollo programme 25, 74, 189, 198, 350, 396–7, 399–400, 403–4, 407; Apollo 1 189; Apollo 11 407; Apollo 13 74; Apollo 14 404 Armstrong, Neil 417 Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Huntsville, US 56, 59 Atlas rocket 59, 68, 148 Augerson, William 127 Aviation Week 114, 141, 143, 151 Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum, Kazakhstan 407, 416 Balanina, Maria (mother of Sergei Korolev) 92 Barbree, Jay 54–5, 69, 73, 134, 137, 146, 163, 330, 401 Barmin, Vladimir 176, 182 Barnes, Donald 113 Bay of Pigs (1961) 215–18, 255, 376, 397–9, 401 Belka (dog) 10–11, 23, 69–71, 115, 152, 166, 181, 406–7 Bell, David 199, 395, 396 Berle, Adolph 217 Berlin Wall 411 B.F.

pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography. The Library of Congress has had maps in its collection since its founding under President John Adams; in fact, the library’s very first shipment of books, purchased in London in 1801, included three maps and an atlas.

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CHAPTER 4: BENCHMARKS 56 “This information”: Barry Lopez, “The Mappist,” in Light Action in the Caribbean (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 159. 58 “River of Doubt”: This ill-fated expedition—the only time, as far as I know, that a U.S. president has defeated flesh-eating bacteria—is fascinatingly detailed in Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey (New York: Anchor, 2006). 59 Zelig-like role: The Snow and Normandy maps, among many others, can be seen in Jeremy Harwood, To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps That Changed the World (Newton Abbot, Devon: Davis & Charles, 2006). 59 The Apollo 11 crew pored: John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. 427. 59 the library’s very first shipment: Ralph E. Ehrenberg, Library of Congress Geography and Maps: An Illustrated Guide (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1996). 60 “cover for small detachments”: Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 127. 60 783 feet by 383 feet: James R.

pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Over the years, I’ve developed a series of strategies for tackling these kinds of challenges, none more important than birthing projects above the line of super-credibility. As will become clearer later, getting above that line requires a deep passion. Mine emerged in 1969. I was only eight years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and I decided then and there that going into space was what I wanted to do with my life. I was in my early twenties when I realized NASA was never going to get me there. Constrained by government spending and frightened by the risk of failure, the space agency had become a military-industrial jobs program unlikely to return to the Moon or push onward to Mars.

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Death.”45 In his widely circulated essay “Google Wins Everything,” Internet entrepreneur and blogger Jason Calacanis puts it this way: “If you work for Larry and are not thinking 10x, don’t expect to keep your job for very long. That insanity-by-design is creating a one-upmanship that hasn’t been seen in the history of mankind. Larry’s campaign, if successful, will make Caesar, Napoleon, Columbus, the Wright Brothers, the Apollo 11 Mission, the Manhattan Project, and our Founding Fathers look limited in scope.”46 PART THREE THE BOLD CROWD * * * CHAPTER SEVEN Crowdsourcing Marketplace of the Rising Billion * * * It’s the fall of 2000. There are now more than 20 million websites on the Internet.1 The browser wars (AOL versus Netscape) are in full swing.

pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Some cynics dismissed this as a public relations stunt to deﬂect growing opposition to the Iraq War. And that same administration ended the space shuttle mission. Meanwhile, the fortieth anniversary in 2009 of the ﬁrst moon landing did generate some enthusiasm for future space travel to Mars and for space colonies. The Apollo 11 crew was honored by President Barack Obama, among others, even as he eliminated a program to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and proposed ending all manned space missions unless funded by the private sector. He did, however, continue his predecessor’s plans for a new American spaceship, the Orion, that could be used for deep space exploration far from the earth.3 The ever-expanding list of products either generated or designed outright by NASA is promoted in, among other places, Spinoff, a journal of commercialized NASA science and technology.

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Most important, though, was the pre-industrial vision of the founder of Indian independence, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), whose commitment to a Hindu golden age constituted his vision for modern India. Gandhi wished to keep small communities, but less class- and casteridden communities than in his day, as the principal form of Indian life and culture. He stressed simplicity and collective self-sufﬁciency.82 Notes 1 See Nelson Hernandez, Washington Post, “As NASA Marks Anniversary of Apollo 11, It Looks to Future,” Boston Sunday Globe, July 19, 2009, A10; and Carolyn Y. Johnson, “JFK Had Doubts About Moon Landing,” Boston Globe, May 25, 2011, B1, B4. 2 See Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997). 3 See Louis Friedman, “NASA’s Down-to-Earth Woes,” Bangor Daily News, March 24, 2010, A5; Joshua Green, “Takeoff: With the Shuttle Program Ending Next Year, What Will Be the New Face of NASA?”

The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

• • • Preventing people from even using cell phones in the presence of radio telescopes may seem extreme, but radio astronomy can be particularly vulnerable to spurious signals, and separating the commonplace from the cosmic in these telescopes’ data is no easy task. The 210-foot Parkes Radio Telescope sits in a rural sheep paddock about 225 miles west of Sydney, Australia. The largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, it briefly became famous when it received and broadcast footage of the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing to the world, but it has also mapped the hydrogen gas of the Milky Way and discovered thousands of new galaxies. For years, Parkes also detected funny flashes known as perytons. Named for a mythological creature with a winged stag body that cast the shadow of a human—a creature that looked like one thing but turned out to be something else—the perytons appeared in the Parkes telescope data as brief blasts of radio light.

…

Eventually, they were all but arm-wrestling the thing to get it to turn and then digging it out of the lunar dust to relevel it after each move, taking up valuable time and oxygen. Still, the telescope was deemed a success, and George later went on to launch a similar ultraviolet telescope for use aboard one of the Skylab missions in the 1970s. The moon landings did offer us one additional bonus bit of astronomy. During Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin placed a special mirror on the lunar surface, designed to reflect lasers shot at the moon by telescopes. This means that by bouncing lasers off these mirrors, astronomers can directly measure the distance between the earth and moon to within a few millimeters; we learned from this that the moon is actually spiraling away from us at a rate of 3.8 centimeters per year.

pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

We also know that Chinese, Indian, European and US satellites have since taken photographs of the Apollo landing sites on the moon, showing ample proof that Armstrong and co. did irrefutably walk on the moon. Eight missions in all made it to the moon—Apollo 10 and 13 orbited the moon but did not land—but of the six missions that made it to the moon (i.e., landed), more than 840 pounds of moon rock, soil and core samples (just 48.5 pounds of that material came from the Apollo 11 mission) were collected. For those who ask why we haven’t returned to the moon, the answer is simple. The Apollo programme was an undertaking of massive proportions involving at its peak 4.4 per cent of the US federal budget, the equivalent of around US$200 billion in 2015. Less than a decade after the final Apollo mission, the US space agency’s budget had shrunk to less than 1 per cent, and today less than US$7 billion a year is spent on flight programmes by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

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He ran a profiling algorithm over its social and media presence and mentions and tried a correlation with its hiring and patent releases to see if its momentum was backed up by a growing team. The results were promising so he asked Alexa to monitor chatter from the venture community and search traffic in respect to the company, and report back in a week. He then settled back and put his glasses into VR mode, dimming the house lights so that he could try out his new Apollo 11 simulator. Later, his PAI gently pinged him. His readings: 6,000 calories burned for the day, including 42 splat points (minutes in which his heart rate was above 83 per cent of his maximum heart rate). In a few days, he had a Master’s track meet with Santa Monica Track Club and was on track to run a sub-six minute mile for the 44th year in a row.

pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

This was a low-level quest, overshadowed by the giddy reach for the stars that characterized the Apollo missions. While so much of the world turned its gaze upward, dreaming of extending humanity’s reach into outer space, these scientists trained their sights on the ground underneath their feet, hoping to reveal the planet’s innermost secrets. In August 1969, less than a month after Apollo 11’s historic landing on the moon, sixty-five geophysicists gathered at Williams College, in Massachusetts, for a meeting convened by NASA to discuss the need for improved techniques to measure positioning, velocity, and acceleration of points on the earth’s surface. The report produced by this meeting—The Terrestrial Environment: Solid-Earth and Ocean Physics, known today as the Williamstown Report—addressed the problem in the one-world rhetoric used by the nascent modern environmental movement (the first international Earth Day was less than a year away): “The planet earth is the only home for the human race for at least several centuries to come. . . .

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., 143 Mercator, Gerardus, 240 meteorology, 15, 27–28, 204, 227–28 GPS-enabled, 228 methamphetamine, 179 Mexico, 31, 161, 249 microchips, 87 Micronesia, 265 microprocessors, 79, 84 microwaves, 36–37, 41, 78 Milky Way, 257 Minitrack, 30–32, 35, 39, 57 Minnesota, 155 missiles, 47, 209, 250 Atlas ballistic, 43 CALCM, 69 cruise, 62, 69 guided, 37, 62 Hellfire, 66 long-range, 69–70 nuclear, 62, 69 Russian, 81 Scud, 66 tracking of, 37 Missouri, 71, 89 Missouri, USS, 48 Mitchell, Donald, 88 Mitford, Jessica, 177 Mitre, 139 Moby-Dick (Melville), ix modems, 195 Mojave Desert, 215, 259 Molyneaux, Robert, 9 Monaco, 168 Mona Lisa (Leonardo), 99 moon, 24, 26, 252 craters on, 210 landing of Apollo 11 on, 208 landing of Apollo 15 on, 210 moon rover, 210 Moorman, Thomas, 68 Moscow, 251 Moser, Edvard, 129 Moser, May-Britt, 129 Mosul, 69 Mountain City, Nev., 112, 135, 136 MTSAT Satellite Augmentation System (MSAS), 142 Murray, Sara, 197–98 napalm, 51 National Academy of Science, 31, 256 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 212, 257 Ames Research Center of, 96 Apollo missions of, 208, 210 Communications, Tracking, and Radar Division of, 261 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of, 203, 210, 213, 214, 222, 231–32, 258, 261 Mars program of, 258–62 space shuttle program of, 61, 88 National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), 255–56, 261 see also Defense Mapping Agency National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 154–55, 166 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth System Research Laboratory of, 227 National Research Council, 99–100 National Space Policy, 101, 144 Naval Academy, 48 Naval Observatory, U.S., 44, 155 Master Clock at, xv, 154 Naverus, 139 navigation, 6–22, 48, 119–20 Carolinian, 18–21, 118 of carriages, 120 commercial shipping, 38 determining routes in, 17 Doppler-aided, 36–38, 40, 43, 44, 51, 259 estimating distance, speed and time in, 16–17, 19, 22–26, 31, 39, 40, 130 etak compared to, 18–19 experiments in, 127–29 home-centering vs. self-centering systems of, 17, 20, 21–22, 27 improving skills of, 133 inertial, 48, 82 local-reference system of, 17, 20, 21, 22 loss of environmental engagement in, 119, 129, 134 modern technologies of, 27 orientation in, 130–33 passive ranging in, 40–42, 44, 45, 53, 101–2 Polynesian, 6, 8–18 space, 30–45 by sun and stars, 4, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 86 tools of, 5, 6, 13, 25, 26–27, 38–39 see also GPS auto navigation units NAVSPASUR (Navy Space Surveillance System), 39–40 Navstar Global Positioning System, 54 Navy, U.S., 37, 40, 42, 46, 56, 251 Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) of, 29, 30, 31, 39, 42–43, 47, 57, 252 Ordnance Bureau of, 38 Navy Navigation Satellite System, 38 Navy Seals, 93 Nellis, Mike, 195, 197, 283 nervous system, 118 Netherlands, 166 neurological pathologies, 118 neutrinos, 155–56 Nevada, 111 Newark Liberty International Airport, 170, 171–72, 181–82 GPS jamming incident at, 200–201, 283–84 Newell, Homer, 29, 35 New England Datum, 249 New Guinea, 4, 86 New Haven, Conn., 184 New Jersey, 170–72, 249 New Jersey Turnpike, 170–71, 172, 181–82, 200, 281 New Mexico, 44, 146, 151 New Mexico penitentiary, 195 New Orleans, La., 192, 249 Newton, Isaac, 246 New York, N.Y., xv, 81, 164, 239–40, 245, 251 Coney Island, 249 distinguishing uptown from downtown in, 17 Greenwich Village, 17 Kips Bay, 236 Manhattan, 236 Queens, 243 Staten Island, 220 Times Square, 167 traffic patterns in, 192 transportation in, 17, 145, 192 World Trade Center in, 17, 170 New York City Marathon, 220–21 New York Herald Tribune, 34 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 34 New York Times, 173 New York Times Magazine, 86 New York World-Telegram and Sun, 35 New Zealand, 4, 12 NextGen, 142 NextNav company, 192 Nighthawk stealth aircraft, 66 NIMCOS company, 195 Nimer, Richard, 195 Nixon, Richard M., 51 North America, 25, 142, 215, 230, 242, 250, 254 electrical grid of, 158, 160 North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), xiii North American Datum of 1927 (NAD27), 249–51 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 71 North Korea, 166 North Stradbroke Island, Australia, 113 North Vietnam, bombing of, 51, 70 Norway, 251 NTS-2 satellite, 58–59 nuclear waste, 146 Oakland, Calif., 203 Obama, Barack, 255 oceanography, 15, 38 oceans: positional awareness on, 24–27 shipwrecks on, 26 see also specific oceans Odishaw, Hugh, 29 odometers, 120, 121, 243 Oetting, Valerie, 90 O’Hare Airport, 141 Ohio, 158, 164 Ohio State University, Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory of, 250–51 O’Keefe, John, 129, 252 Omega, 27 Omnitracs system, 182 Operation Allied Force, 71 Operation Desert Storm, see Gulf War Operation Eagle Claw, 77 Operation El Dorado Canyon, 61–62 Oregon, 111, 112, 202, 225 Origin of Continents and Oceans, The (Wegener), 205, 206 O-rings, 92–93 ornithology, 15 Oro worship, 7–8 Ortelius, Abraham, 204 Orwell, George, 177 oscillators, 41, 43, 77 oscilloscopes, 59, 79 Owens Valley, 214 Pace, Scott, 46, 68, 97–98 Pacific Ocean, xiv, 18–20, 26, 106–8, 122, 183, 218, 221–22, 229, 249 canoe travel on, 5, 9, 11, 14–15, 18–19, 264, 268 currents and winds of, 13, 14–15 exploration of, 4–10, 26, 27, 106–7 first detailed map of, 7 islands of, 4–13, 22, 27, 106–8, 251 maps of, 10, 13, 14, 263–64 ring of fire in, 221, 229 seismic disturbances in, 202 shipping charts of, 27 swell patterns of, 13, 14 Pacific Plate, 208 Pacific Rim, 4, 12 Palatucci, Joe, 242–43 Palo Alto, Calif., 77 Pangea, 3–4, 205 Pangea Ultima, 3 Papeete, 265 Paris, xv, 24, 154, 155, 167, 246 Eiffel Tower in, 167 Park Avenue Audio, 236–38 Parkinson, Brad, 45, 48, 50, 52–54, 56–58, 60–61, 65, 70, 81, 100, 140, 153, 165–66, 185, 230, 250, 272 particle accelerators, xix Pasadena, Calif., 203, 226 passive positioning systems, satellite-based, 40 passive ranging, 40–42, 44, 45, 53, 101–2 Pattabiraman, Ganesh, 192–93 Pave Low III helicopters, 65–66 PCM signals, 156 Pearl Harbor, bombing of, 34 Penn Station (New York City), 237 Penticton, 111 peregrine falcons, 237 Permanent GPS Geodetic Array, 214, 215 Permilab particle physics facility, 155 Persian Gulf, 63, 96 Peru, 12 Peterson Air Force Base, xiii Phasor measurement units (PMU), 159–61 Philippines, 12 photogrammetry, 251 photography, 235–39, 243 physics, 15, 28, 155, 204 Piailug, Pius “Mau,” 265–66 Picard, Jean, 245–46 pigeons, 174 PlaceMe, 193 planets, 24–27, 259 Plate Boundary Observatory, 215, 218 plates, tectonic, 215, 253, 258 continental, 207–8 movement of, 3–4, 202–8, 209, 214, 216, 232, 255 North American, 208, 221, 222 oceanic, 207, 208 Okhotsk, 221n Pacific, 208, 215, 221 Philippine Sea, 221 Point Arena, Calif., 249 Poland, 244 Polaris nuclear submarines, 37 police, 178–79, 181–82 British, 187–88, 197–98 German, 185–87 Irish, 187–88 Polynesia, 18, 21, 106, 264 Polynesians, 4–18 migration of, 11, 12–13, 21, 106, 264, 268 navigation of, 6, 8–18 origins of, 12 Polynesian Triangle, 264 Pong (video game), 121 Port Elizabeth, N.J., 170 Portis, Charles, 3 Precision Market Insights, 192 prime meridian, 25 prisons, 195, 197 privacy, xx, 177, 186–87, 190–91, 192–94, 200 Probation (magazine), 177 Project Moonbeam, 31 Project Moonwatch, 31 Project Vanguard, 29–35, 252 Pro Tech company, 196 proximity beacons, 121 psilocybin, 173 psychology, 116–18, 119, 131–32, 172–77 experiments in, 125, 127–29, 173–77, 277 psychotherapy, 173 Puea, 8 Pueblo, Colo., 75 Pullen, Sam, 181 Pyrenees Mountains, 246 Qihoo 360, 153 quadrants, 13 Qualcomm, 182 quasars, 209, 257, 261 radar, 27, 51, 66–67, 122, 142, 168, 229 GPS-assisted, 67 radiation, 43, 214, 258 radioactive materials, 146, 207 radio signals, xviii, 27, 30–31, 39, 54, 71, 91, 138, 171, 195 of celestial objects, 209 ham, 31 software vs. hardware components of, 149 transmission of, 210 Ra’iatea, 7, 9, 106 range measuring, 40 Rapa Nui, 4 rat experiments, 115–17, 118–19, 129, 133 Rea, Don, 90 Reagan, Ronald, 82, 140 Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM), 139–40 Red Army, 250 Red Army Faction, 185 Redoubt, Mount, 229–30 Regensburg, 49 Rehnquist, William, 180 relativity, xix, 267 Remote Oceania, 4 Resolution, HMS, 106–7 Rhodes, 168 Richmond Times, 34 Ring of Fire, 4 Rio Grande Valley, 40 Riyadh, 63–64 rockets, 28–29, 32–35 failure of, 33–35 Rockwell Collins, 58–60, 72, 78–79, 92, 93, 97 Rocky Mountains, 73 Rome, 55, 158–59, 164 Rosen, Milt, 252 Rotuma, 10 route discs, 120 Royal Institute of Navigation, 166 Royal Observatory, 25, 44 Royal Society, 7 Russia, xvii, 144, 166 Russian space agency, 88 Rutan 76 Voyager aircraft, 126 Saarbrücken, 127 Sahul, 4 Saigon, 64 St.

pages: 410 words: 103,421

The Martian by Andy Weir

8-hour work day, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, digital map, disinformation, lateral thinking, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, side project

They’re sad that they lost a crewmate, but they’d be devastated if they found out they’d abandoned him alive.” Annie looked to Venkat. “You’re on board with this?” “It’s a no-brainer,” Venkat said. “Let ’em deal with that emotional trauma when they’re not flying a spaceship around.” “This’ll be the most talked-about event since Apollo 11,” Annie said. “How will you keep it from them?” Teddy shrugged. “Easy. We control all communication with them.” “Fuck,” Annie said, opening her laptop. “When do you want to go public?” “What’s your take?” he asked. “Mmm,” Annie said. “We can hold the pics for twenty-four hours before we’re required to release them.

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“I’ll oversee the launch, then hand cruise and landing over to Venkat’s guys.” “Media?” Teddy said, turning to Annie. “I’m giving daily updates to the press,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Everyone knows Watney’s fucked if this doesn’t work. The public hasn’t been this engaged in ship construction since Apollo 11. CNN’s The Watney Report has been the number one show in its time slot for the past two weeks.” “The attention is good,” Teddy said. “It’ll help get us emergency funding from Congress.” He looked up to a man standing near the entrance. “Maurice, thanks for flying out on short notice.” Maurice nodded.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

In fact, the story is more nuanced: The engineer Kozo Ohsone, who is generally credited as the head of the Walkman development effort, spoke about this at length to Seiji Munakata, “Kanrishitsu no Bakko de Sonii Kara Hitto ga Kieta” (“Too Many Managers Are Why Sony’s Hits Dried Up”), Nikkei Business, May 30, 2016, https://business.nikkei.com/atcl/interview/16/031800001/052700007/. See also Yasuo Kuroki, Uookuman Kakutatakaeri (Walkman Struggles) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1990), 46. Apollo astronauts: David Kamp, “Music on the Moon: Meet Mickey Kapp, Master of Apollo 11’s Astro-Mixtapes,” Vanity Fair, December 14, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/12/mickey-kapp-apollo-11-astro-mixtapes. This caused a great deal of consternation: Morita, Made in Japan, 79–80. anything you put in your ears to hear with: Nathan, Sony, 154. Perhaps this was true abroad, too: Life, October 24, 1960, 43. Today, headphones represent a ten-billion-dollar-a-year industry: Grand View Research, “Earphones & Headphones Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Product,” June 2019, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/earphone-and-headphone-market.

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioﬀ, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

In interviews conducted thirty years after his death, she still spoke of Bruce as though he were sitting there beside her: “Now Bruce could give you some more profound observations than I could,” she said in one characteristic aside, still deferring to her longtime boss.85 Marie often struggled to support her work drafting new maps of the seafloor. No matter how popular the Tharp-Heezen maps of the seafloor became, they were eclipsed by the Space Race, the mania for all things moon shot that climaxed in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The world had moved on to a new frontier, and public investment in ocean mapping had dwindled. Near the end of her life, Marie began to gain more recognition for her work, and she welcomed curious historians, journalists, and writers into her living room. Despite the tragedies and setbacks, she sounded upbeat in those last interviews, thankful for what she had achieved.

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abyssal plains, 17–18, 84, 86, 193, 201, 208 Abyssal Zone, 51, 233 Advisory Committee on Undersea Features (ACUF), 112–13 Ahiarmiut people, 138–39 Albert I, Prince of Monaco, 55–56, 61, 166 Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, 73, 168–69 Allen, Paul, 8, 12 Allseas, 206, 216 Amazon, 240–41 Americas migration theories of, 177–81 myth of empty America, 203 Amundsen, Roald, 10, 146 Angel Falls, Venezuela, 18 Anowtalik, Mary, 139 Antarctica, 240–41 Antarctic Treaty, 93, 241 antisubmarine warfare, 56, 70, 83, 124–25 Apalachee people, 179–80 Apollo 11, 91 Aqqiumavvik Society, 134–35, 141, 144, 147 Archimède (submersible), 45 Arctic Ocean climate change and, 131–33, 136, 137–38, 146–47 depth of, 130 maps of, 88, 126, 128–29, 132, 135, 137, 144–46 Molloy Hole of, 14, 17, 130, 233 uncharted island in, 168 weather window for diving in, 21, 22–23 Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, 129, 130–35, 136, 137–44, 147, 149, 155 astronomy, 73–74 Atlantic Ocean.

pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Index Abelard, Peter, 370–71 Abraham, 351 Abu Hureyra (Syria), 90–91, 94, 97, 104, 122 Achaemenids, 249 Acheulean hand axes, 47–50 Act of Union (Britain, 1707), 472n Adam, African, 71 Adams, Thomas, 618 Adrianople, battle of, 313 Aeneas, 241, 244 Afghanistan, 249, 271, 604 Soviet invasion of, 548 African-Americans, 71 Agassiz, Louis, 91 agriculture, see farming Ahhiyawa, 197–98, 218 Ahuramazda, 249, 269 Ai, Marquis, 233 AIDS, 536, 603 ‘Ain Ghazal (Jordan), 100, 102, 124 ‘Ain Mallaha (Israel), 86, 88, 91, 94, 96, 100 Ainu, 450 Akaiwasha people, 218 Akhenaten, Pharaoh, 261–62 Akkadian Empire (Mesopotamia), 189, 192–94, 209 Albert, Prince, 6, 9–11, 14, 18, 19, 32, 36 Alberti, Leon Battista, 419, 420n Aleutian Islands, 421 Alexander of Macedon (the Great), 186–87, 268–71, 275, 292 Alexandria (Egypt), 352 Allen, Paul, 542 ‘Ali, 357, 358, 361, 444 al-Qaeda, 605 Altamira (Spain), 73–75, 74, 79–80 Alvarez Cabral, Pedro, 430 Amarna (Egypt), 197, 215 America, 160, 428, 482, 486, 519–20, 564 diseases in, 295 European colonization of, 19, 460, 462–67 farming in, 117–18 Ice Age in, 64, 65, 68, 75, 81, 91 native peoples of, 19, 109, 119, 430, 450, 464, 522 oil in, 511 prehistoric, 80, 84–85 Vikings in, 371, 421; see also United States American Journal of Human Genetics, 111 American Revolution, 260, 488, 490 Amorites, 191, 192, 194, 209, 353 Analects (Confucius), 256 Anatolia, 197, 199, 200, 225, 233n, 250, 311, 352, 366, 372, 401, 444 Anban (China), 125, 126 ancestor cults, 102, 231 Andun, King, 273 Anglo-Saxons, 346 Angola, 535 An Lushan, 355, 356, 375, 424 anti-Semitism, 514 Antonina, 345, 346 Antony, 283, 284 Anyang (China), 212–15, 220–22, 229 Apocalypse Now! (film), 520n Apollo 11, 182 Apollo 11 Cave (Namibia), 77 Apple computers, 542 Aquinas, Thomas, 371 Arabia, 16, 67, 275, 349 Arabs, 349–52, 360, 362, 370, 377, 427, 566 in China, 342, 407n, 478 lands conquered by, 33n, 350, 352–54, 356–57, 365, 367, 445, 563–64 modern, 535, 548 technologies of, 395–96 Arameans, 218, 220 Archaeology (magazine), 125 Arctic Dryas, 92 Argentina, 464 Arikamedu (India), 274, 275 Aristides, 280 Aristotle, 260, 268, 324, 370, 468, 537 Arkwright, Richard, 496 Armenia, 328 Army, U.S., 537, 539, 618 War College, 615 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne), 507, 511 Arzawa, 198 Ashoka, 263 Ashur-dan II, King, 235–37 Ashurnasirpal II, King, 236–37 Asian Tigers, 543, 546 Asimov, Isaac, 92–93, 577, 580–81, 614 Assad, Lake (Syria), 90, 94, 96, 101 Assassins, 367 Assaye, battle of, 489 Assyria, 219, 239, 243, 249, 262, 276–79, 369, 445, 528, 610 collapse of, 220 Hittites and, 197–99 language of, 138, 214 revival as gangster state of, 235–37 Tigllath-Pileser III’s rule of, 245–48, 303, 316, 335, 567 Astounding Science Fiction (magazine), 93 Atahualpa, King, 460 Atapuerca (Spain), 54–56 Atenism, 261–62 Athens, 240, 241, 250, 256, 260, 268, 296, 524 atomic bomb, see nuclear weapons Attila, 315–16 Auel, Jean, 57, 69 Augustus, Emperor, 283–85, 313, 320 Austen, Jane, 572 Australia, 16, 68, 70, 75, 77, 159, 410, 519, 520, 602 Austria, 446, 448, 526, 528 Avars, 349 Avignon (France), 398, 401 Axial thought, 285, 322 first-wave, 254–56, 259–63, 329, 562, 569 Renaissance compared to, 420, 476 second-wave, 324, 325–27, 330, 351, 353, 463 social development and, 271 Aztecs, 139, 433, 515 Ba’ath Party, 90 Babylon, 138, 197–200, 214, 215, 219–21, 247–51, 278, 349 Back to the Future (film), 572 backwardness, advantages of, 34, 36, 179, 195, 196, 217, 241, 332, 404, 552, 564, 584, 619 for Arab migrants, 351 in China, 207, 264, 334, 562, 585, 587, 615 Habsburgs and, 466 in Japan, 584 for Mongols, 389 for Muslim world, 571 for Macedonians, 268 in Mesopotamia, 499, 561 for Romans, 264 in Soviet Union, 530 in United States, 510 Bacon, Francis, 468–69, 473 Bactria, 271, 292 Baghdad, 357–59, 362, 364, 366, 370, 391, 401 Bai Juyi, 355–56 Balkans, 310, 313–15, 348, 401, 431, 526, 605 “Ballad of East and West, The” (Kipling), 620–21 Baltic region, 112–14, 127–29, 310, 466 Bamboo Annals, 232 Bank of England, 530 Bao Si, 242–43, 355 Barbegal (France), 287 Barker, Graeme, 107 Basiliskos, 316, 317 Battle of the Red Cliffs, The (film), 304 Beijing, 201, 265n, 441, 432, 465, 478, 482, 483, 523, 588–90, 605 Boxer Rebellion in, 211 Britain and, 506, 515, 517, 518 culture in, 436 fall of, 453, 454 Forbidden City in, 205, 528 Gorbachev in, 549 Imperial Academy in, 210 Mongol burning of, 389 Nixon in, 546–47 population of, 152, 482n wages in, 438, 501, 502 Belgium, 160, 446, 510 Belgrade, bombing of Chinese embassy in, 605 Belisarius, 345, 346 Belize, 121 Bell, Alexander Graham, 567 Belloc, Hilaire, 12 Benedict XIII, Pope, 401 Bentley, Edmund, 29 Benz, Karl, 510 Berlin Wall, 550 Bible, 81n New Testament, 14, 255, 325 Old Testament, see Hebrew Bible Bierce, Ambrose, 26 Bin Wong, 18 Birmingham University, 22 Black Death, see bubonic plague Black Hand, 526, 605 Blombos Cave (Africa), 64 Blue Gene supercomputers, 596 Bodhisattvas, 322, 329 Bohemia, 368 Bolivia, 460 Bolsheviks, 528 Bombay–Calcutta railroad, 507 Bonesetter’s Daughter, The (Tan), 51 Boniface VIII, Pope, 398 Boniface IX, Pope, 401 Book of Changes, 479 Book of Lord Shang, 257 Book of Martyrs (Fox), 436 Borneo, 127 Boswell, James, 490–91, 495 Botox, 594 Boulton, Matthew, 491–93, 495–97, 502, 504, 567, 568, 573 Bourbons, 551 Boxer Rebellion, 211, 525 Boyne, battle of, 20 Brain Interface Project, 595 Brando, Marlon, 520n Brazil, 430, 520 Brezhnev, Leonid, 542 Britain, 33, 35, 39–40, 158, 347, 398, 404, 451, 466–70, 472, 521, 525, 534–37, 553, 608, 610, 611, 615 American colonies of, 463–64 China and, 7–15, 25, 40, 143, 145, 147–48, 211, 484, 506, 515–18, 520, 524, 572–73 Christianity in, 353 civil service of, 339n; Civil War in, 452–53 emigration to North America from, 509 Enlightenment thought in, 468–73 exploration and, 416 farming in, 290, 368–69 French wars against, 486–89, 500 Habsburgs and, 461 India and, 7, 273–75, 339n, 495 industrial revolution in, 13, 19–21, 25, 40, 379, 382, 494–98, 500, 501–507, 510–12, 572, 597, 620 Ireland and, 450, 451, 505 medieval, 194 plague in, 397 prehistoric, 80, 189 privateers from, 462–63 Renaissance in, 419 Roman, 274, 290, 307, 311, 314, 320 Royal Navy of, 148, 511, 517 social development of, 147–49, 157, 159–60, 163, 168 trade of, 466–67, 485 Victorian, 136, 506, 513 Vikings in, 371 and World Wars, 528–29 British Broadcasting Company (BBC), 475 British East India Company, 7, 484, 515 bronze, 208–10, 212–14, 221, 231–34, 410 for coins, 251, 377–78 for ritual vessels, 208, 210, 212, 221, 231–33, 243 for tools, 181, 234 for weapons, 128, 181, 191, 200, 208, 234, 396 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 438 bubonic plague (Black Death), 396–401, 420, 437, 505, 520, 574, 603 in Byzantium, 346–48 in China, 355, 397, 401, 405 in Europe, 397–99, 427, 438, 446, 447, 455, 466, 467, 506 in Islamic nations, 397, 398 Buddha, 255, 256, 262, 274, 322, 324, 375–76, 398, 404–405, 440 Buddhism, 255, 256, 263, 351, 357, 393, 395, 420, 437, 525, 563 in Bactria, 271 in China, 321–23, 326, 328–29, 334, 339–42, 375–76, 378, 419, 423–24, 478, 543, 546 Christianity compared with, 324–28 in Japan, 440 Mahayana, 322, 324, 325 Bulgaria, 313 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 608 Bush, George W., 588 Business Week, 553 Byzantine Empire, 317, 343–49, 363, 373, 457, 566, 616 Arabs and, 352, 356–57 religious conflicts in, 352, 361–62 Turkic attacks on, 366, 372, 401, 403 Caboto, Giovanni (John Cabot), 416, 417, 430 Caesar, Julius, 228, 283, 419 Caffa (Crimea), 397 Cairo (Egypt), 359n, 364, 371, 392 Calicut (India), 429, 431 California, University of; Davis, 19 Irvine, 18, 20 Los Angeles, 18n California Institute of Technology, 18n “California School” of history, 19–20 Caligula, Emperor, 307 Calvinism, 448 Cambodia, 360 Cambridge University, 23, 107, 365, 475–76, 581 Cambyses, King, 249 Canada, 601 Candide (Voltaire), 280 Cann, Rebecca, 71 Cao Cao, 303–304 Cao Xueqin, 503 Carlson, Robert, 596n Carlson’s Curve, 596 Carlyle, Thomas, 472 Carpenter’s Gap (Australia), 77 Carthage, 242, 250, 268, 270, 315–17, 345 Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo, 540 Çatalhöyük (Turkey), 100, 102, 105, 123, 124 Catholicism, 20, 362, 372, 398–99, 401, 404, 448, 453, 477–78 Cavalli-Sforza, Luca, 110–12 Çayönü (Turkey), 102–103, 105, 125 Chang, Kwang-chih, 124, 125, 204, 205, 208 Chang’an (China), 153, 289, 293n, 298–99, 305, 306, 321, 337–38, 340, 342, 355, 359, 377 Chariots of the Gods?

…

Whenever this happy coincidence failed to arise, people must have gathered nearer to or even above the surface. Exposed to wind, sun, and rain for twenty thousand years, few traces of their artwork survive. “Few traces” is not the same as “no traces,” though, and sometimes we get lucky. At the wonderfully named Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, slabs of stone with drawings of rhinos and zebras peeled off the wall, fell to the floor, and were preserved under deposits that formed between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago, and some Australian examples are even older. At Sandy Creek, mineral deposits that built up over part of a carving on a cave wall can be dated to about 25,000 years ago and fragments of pigment are 26,000 to 32,000 years old, while at Carpenter’s Gap part of a painted cave wall fell into 40,000-year-old occupation debris, making it even earlier than Chauvet.

…

It was these shouts to the gods that originally drew me to archaeology. In 1970 my parents took my sister and me to see a film of Edith Nesbit’s Edwardian classic The Railway Children. I think I liked it, but the short feature that ran before it blew my mind (as people used to say in those days). Until that evening I had been obsessed with Apollo 11 and wanted to be an astronaut, but the B movie—a documentary (of a sort) based on Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods?—made me realize that archaeology was the way to go. Like Arthur C. Clarke in 2001 (which, like Chariots of the Gods?, was published in 1968), von Däniken claimed that space aliens had visited Earth in ancient times and taught humans great secrets.

pages: 396 words: 117,897

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

In terms of thrust/weight ratio, rocket engines have advanced from less than 20 for the PGM-11 that propelled Redstone, America's first ballistic missile in 1958, to nearly 140 by the early 1970s when the Kuznetsov group designed the NK-33, the world's most powerful liquid oxygen/kerosene engine that never carried out its intended mission to the Moon. To compare these specific masses by using the same units as in the case of car and airplane engines, when the Saturn C 5 rocket propelled Apollo 11 on its path to the Moon (in July 1969) its mass/power ratio (even after counting all the fuel) was merely 0.001 g/W. Reduction of specific mass has also been impressive in the case of the largest stationary prime movers: the mass/power ratios of steam turbogenerators installed in thermal power plants are 2 orders of magnitude lower than the rates for the best late-nineteenth century steam engines.

…

These improvements are among the most appreciated instances of the dematerialization process, and in the case of computers this trend has been even more significant because their declining mass has been inversely related to their performance: the machines are not only smaller, their power has increased as they have become lighter, a result of the remarkably long duration of Gordon Moore's law, formulated in 1965 at a time when the most complex integrated circuit had 50 transistors. Moore's original forecast was for the doubling of transistor density per integrated circuit every year, but a decade later he extended the doubling period to two years (Moore, 1965 1975). Comparisons of declining computer weight often start with the Apollo 11 guidance system that was used to steer and then to land the capsule on the Moon in August 1969. That computer had just 2 kB RAM and with mass of 32 kg that prorated to 16 g/B (Hall, 1996). In 1981 IBM's first personal computer had 16 kB RAM and mass of 11.3 kg or just 0.7 g/B. In 2011, my new Dell Studio laptop had 4 GB RAM and weighed 3.6 kg, resulting in a specific mass of mere 0.0000009 g/B.

pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

We can keep building pedestals and wait for a magical monkey to show up reciting Shakespeare (spoiler: there are no magical monkeys). Or we can focus on the important instead of the easy, and try to teach that monkey to talk, one syllable at a time. THERE’S A SCENE at the beginning of the movie Apollo 13. Jim Lovell, the backup commander for the Apollo 11 mission, watches with admiration as Armstrong and Aldrin take their first steps on the lunar surface. “It’s not a miracle,” Lovell says. “We just decided to go.” This isn’t unbounded optimism—an attitude that says once we dream big, the Eagle will magically materialize on Tranquility Base. Instead, it’s a combination of optimism and pragmatism—the sheer audacity that combines starry-eyed dreams with a step-by-step blueprint for turning the seemingly unreasonable into reality.

…

No one told us, “You’d better think hard about how you take that very first step because you get one step and that’s it.” We repeatedly fell. With each fall, our bodies learned what to do and what not to do. By learning not to fall, we learned how to walk. Nothing comes to existence perfectly formed. Rome, as the saying goes, wasn’t built in a day. The Apollo 11 spacecraft that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon didn’t just spring out of the factory. It took numerous iterations—through the Mercury, Gemini, and earlier Apollo missions—to get it right. For scientists, each iteration is progress. If we get a glimpse into the dark room, that’s a contribution.

pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Like Musk, he was a childhood addict of science fiction, racing through the shelves of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein books at his local library. As a five-year-old in July 1969, he watched television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission that culminated with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. He calls it “a seminal moment” for him. Later, he would fund a series of missions that recovered from the Atlantic Ocean the Apollo 11 rocket engine, which he installed in a niche off the living room of his house in Washington, DC. His exhilaration about space turned him into one of those hardcore Star Trek fans who knows every episode.

…

At almost every encounter, he maniacally hammered home the message: “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one.” Musk brought this message to the 2014 annual black-tie dinner of the century-old Explorers Club in New York City, where he was given the President’s Award. He shared the stage with Bezos, who accepted an award for the work of his team in recovering the engine of Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacecraft. The dinner featured dishes designed to appeal to the overly adventurous, such as scorpions, maggot-covered strawberries, sweet-and-sour cow penis, goat-eyeball martinis, and whole alligators carved tableside. Musk was introduced with a video showing his successful rocket launches. “You are kind enough not to show our first three launches,” he said.

pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Chapter 1 1 Areva, All About Nuclear Energy: From Atom to Zirconium (Paris: Areva, 2008), 8. 2 For Hannibal, see John Noble Wilford, “The Mystery of Hannibal’s Elephants,” New York Times, September 18, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/18/science/the-mystery-of-hannibal-s-elephants.html?sec=health. For Saturn V, see Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, “Apollo 11 Factoids,” n.d., http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/apollo11/factoids.html. 3 BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009, http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2009_downloads/renewables_section_2009.pdf.

…

., 120. 16 Jad Mouawad and Kate Galbraith, “Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity,” New York Times, September 20, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/business/energy-environment/20efficiency.html?scp=2&sq=mouawad%20and%20electricity&st=cse. 17 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2008, 180. 18 Ibid., 390. 19 Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, “Apollo 11 Factoids,” n.d., http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/apollo11/factoids.html. 20 Announced by an unnamed American Airlines pilot during Dallas to Austin flight, July 11, 2009. 21 John Kiewicz, “Top Fuel by the Numbers,” Motor Trend, February 2005, http://sciencececc.ep.profweb.qc.ca/physique/Documents/Mecanique/Top_Fuel_by_the_Numbers.pdf. 22 Federation of American Scientists, n.d., http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m1.htm. 23 CarandDriver.com, “We Drive a Honda F1 Car—The Big Day,” n.d., http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q1/we_drive_a_honda_f1_car-sport/the_big_day_page_3. 24 MotorTrend.com, n.d., http://www.motortrend.com/new_cars/04/ferrari/f430/index.html. 25 InternetAutoguide, n.d., http://www.internetautoguide.com/car-specifications/09-int/1999/acura/tl/index.html. 26 “2010 Ford Fusion Review.” 27 John Pearley Huffman, “Generations,” May 8, 2003, http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/articleId=93327#3. 28 Calculated by author from home A/C unit, which draws 19.2 amps at 220 volts, for 4,224 watts. 29 Wikipedia, “Honda Super Cub,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Super_Cub. 30 Based on author’s personal Yard Machines lawnmower. 31 Measured at author’s home with a Kill A Watt, August 27, 2009. 32 “Home Wattage Calculator,” n.d., http://www.poweredgenerators.com/wattage-calculator.html.

pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

—John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” On 13 February 1969, nine days before Mariner 6 set off for Mars and five months before Neil Armstrong was to step onto the dust of the Sea of Tranquillity, the newly inaugurated president, Richard Nixon, asked his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, to explore the options for a post-Apollo space program. Agnew became enthused. When Apollo 11 made its historic landing that July, he talked of committing the nation to the goal of sending people to Mars. The report of Agnew’s Space Task Group, offered to the president in September 1969, discussed this possibility and many others—but more or less ignored the question of how much it was going to cost.

…

Stan Robinson, Bob Zubrin, Matt Golombek, Chris McKay, and all the other specialists brought in to add to the commentary will be looked to for response; some will be lost for words. (How old will they be? I don’t know.) Some of them may cry. Some of us watching will certainly cry. But it’s only fair to say that the majority will be less strongly affected. To most it will be an entertainment. There will be a pause—a pause long planned and scheduled. (On Apollo 11, the crew was ordered to take a nap after landing, though they didn’t.) Then the first EVA will be prepared. We’ll probably be able to watch some of the suiting-up; we’ll see a face with which we have become familiar vanish under a helmet, its visor strongly tinted against the hard ultraviolet rays outside.

pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Leaders of the civil rights movement would come to view the space race and the arms race as a flight of a different sort, a flight from justice, a flight from commitment, a white flight. “It will cost thirty-five billion dollars to put two men on the moon,” the National Urban League’s Whitney Young would complain. “It would take ten billion dollars to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year.”45 At the launch of Apollo 11, headed for the moon, protesters would carry signs reading, “$12 a day to feed an Astronaut. We Could feed a Starving Child for $8.” “We may go on from this day to Mars and to Jupiter and even to the heavens beyond,” the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would say, “but as long as racism, poverty, and hunger and war prevail on the earth, we as a civilized nation have failed.”46 The unease ran deeper, too.

…

Abelson, Robert, 118, 130, 133, 310 “Abraham ’58: A Nuclear Fantasy” (Wheeler), 174 advertising — computer models from advertising agencies, 152–54, 360n — by Eisenhower campaign, 18, 20, 21–22 — “Great Computer Hoax” of 1962, 154 — growth after World War II, 15 — presidential election of 1952, 14, 15, 20, 21–23 — presidential election of 1956, 43–44 — Simulmatics marketing to advertising agencies, 138–39, 152–53, 322, 356n — Stevenson opposition to political advertising, 15, 20, 21, 22, 43, 65 — targeted advertising by Simulmatics, 5 Age of Jackson, The (Schlesinger), 94 Albee, Edward, 85, 146 Alsop, Stewart, 23 American Freedom of Residence Fund, 14 American National Election Study, 34 American Power and the New Mandarins (Chomsky), 291 American Voting Behavior (Burdick, Brodbeck), 37 antiwar movement — at Harvard, 297–98 — march on the Pentagon, 251–53, 286 — National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 235, 251, 286 — New York protests in 1967, 233–34, 235 — overview, 234–35 — protests against Project Cambridge, 292–93, 295–98, 315, 385–86n — San Francisco protests in 1967, 235 — Science Action Coordinating Committee (SACC), 291–92 — student attacks on Pool and Simulmatics, 285, 292–93, 295–96, 298–300, 303, 315, 385n — student protest pamphlets and posters, 49, 255, 276, 293, 299, 386n — student protests against ARPANET, 296 — Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 199, 242, 276, 286, 292, 295, 296–97, 299 — surveillance of, 305, 307, 315 — teach-ins, 199–200, 225, 234, 251, 292, 294 — see also Vietnam War Apollo 11, 78 Apple Macintosh, 317 Aquaman, 30, 109 Arbuckle, Mrs., 155, 164 Arendt, Hannah, 78 Armies of the Night, The (Mailer), 233, 252 Arnold, William, 243–44 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) — ARPANET, 284, 296, 310–11, 312, 313–15, 316, 318 — complaints about Simulmatics, 221, 224, 236–37, 240–41, 244, 245–48, 254, 265, 290 — counterinsurgency, 200, 213, 216 — dynamic modeling, 200, 213–14, 216–17 — Eisenhower creation of, 77–78 — Licklider and, 284, 296, 310, 370n ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) (continued) — network building, 152 — offices in Saigon, 207 — Pool’s presentation to, 169–70, 363n — Project Agile, 213 — Project Cambridge, 283, 284–85, 296 — reaction to Hoc’s projects, 251, 267 — Simulmatics contracts, 221, 231, 240, 243, 254, 267, 284 — “TV Hamlets” study, 246–47, 248 — Vietnamese spoken by Americans, investigation, 220 artificial intelligence — Alex Bernstein playing chess with an IBM 704, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74–75 — Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford, 312 — Artificial Intelligence Project at MIT, 76, 170, 311 — automation and simulation related to, 71–72 — Dartmouth conference in 1956, 73, 74–75, 87, 89 — defined, 5 — history of man vs. machine chess match, 72–73 — origin of term, 71 — see also computer revolution Aspin, Les, 303 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 127 atomized society, 277, 312, 316, 322 Attwood, William, 103 automation and unemployment fears, 69–70, 99, 129–30 Bagdikian, Ben, 191 Ballantine Ale, 27, 173 Ball, George — on precision of McNamara’s predictions, 208 — Stevenson 1952 campaign, 20, 22, 23, 62–63 — Stevenson’s death and, 370n — warnings about Vietnam escalation, 163–64, 194, 213 Baran, Paul, 282, 284, 337n Barlow, John Perry, 319 Baudrillard, Jean, 4 Baxter, Leone, 16, 17, 273 Bay of Pigs invasion, 141, 156 BBDO (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn), 20, 152, 153, 321, 359nn behavioral sciences — “Behavioral Science and National Security” congressional hearings, 211 — conservative opposition to, 57 — data science and, 324–25, 326–27, 389n — defined, 36–37 — laws of nature compared to, 324, 389n — predictive analytics, 5, 327 — profit motive and money for universities, 324–25, 326 — proper public role of, 172–73 — psychoanalysis and, 58 Belknap, George, 117 Bellevue Hospital, 90–91 Bellow, Saul, 56, 58–59, 186, 344n Berelson, Bernard, 34 Berkeley protests in 1964, 196–98 Bernstein, Alex — counterinsurgency research proposal, 216, 370n — Dartmouth artificial intelligence conference, 73, 74–75, 87 — early life and career, 68 — election simulation, 78–79 — Greenfield and, 79 — marketing for Simulmatics, 136, 152 — marriage, 74 — Media-Mix simulation, 138, 359–60n — Moynihan and, 260 — playing chess with an IBM 704, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74–75, 100 — preparation for 1962 Times election coverage, 154–55, 166, 362n — Project Macroscope, 92 — as psychoanalyst, 303 — Simulmatics stock offering and, 139 — on Turing’s machine, 73 — in Venezuela, 209, 210 Bernstein, Carl, 309, 310 Bernstein, June Atlas, 74 Best Man, The (Vidal), 11, 63–64 big data, 279, 282, 325 Billion-Dollar Brain, The (Deighton), 125 Bork, Robert, 308 Boulding, Kenneth, 36–37, 38 Bowles, Chester, 112 brainwashing, 20–21, 93 Brain-Washing in Red China (Hunter), 20 Brando, Marlon, 27, 40, 101, 173 Brand, Stewart, 310, 311–12, 314, 317–18 Brinkley, David, 192 Brin, Sergey, 6, 55 Brown, Claude, 256–57, 258, 287 Brown v.

pages: 180 words: 61,340

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

Small boys on sleds rocket down the slope beside it, giving not a rat’s ass that they are playing at ground zero of the global calamity. It all looks the same as it did before the crash, even though it couldn’t be more different. The fuse is burning its way toward the bomb. When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

They went afterward to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, where they paused before the grave of Emerson, who had written over a century earlier, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore.” Two months later, Asimov, who was not yet fifty, published his hundredth book. IN MARCH 1969, HEINLEIN FLEW WITH GINNY TO A FILM FESTIVAL IN RIO DE JANEIRO, WHERE HE met the director Roman Polanski. Later that year, he attended the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, which he called “the greatest spiritual experience I’ve undergone in my life,” telling the anchorman Walter Cronkite, “This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race. . . . Today is New Year’s Day of the Year One.” It was a moment in which reality and science fiction seemed close enough to touch.

…

abortion, 130, 254, 257, 269, 277, 278 Ace Magazines, 181 Ackerman, Forrest J, 106, 237, 238, 272, 286 “Ad Astra” (Asimov), 94–95, 96 “Affirmations” (Hubbard), 233–34, 260, 450n “Against the Fall of Night” (Clarke), 244 AIDS, 403, 406 Air Trails and Science Frontiers Magazine, 236, 241–42, 245–46 Alaska, 127, 130–31, 132 Aldrin, Buzz, 350 Algol, USS, 179, 201–2 “All” (Heinlein), 64, 118, 120 All About Radiation (Hubbard), 332 Allen, John, 323 Allen, Woody, 398, 495n “—All You Zombies—” (Heinlein), 339 Amazing Stories, 6, 30, 75, 100, 463n Asimov’s story, 93, 94 Campbell’s stories, 30–33, 37, 57, 61 American Chemical Society, 221 American Fiction Guild, 84, 86 American Institute of Advanced Therapy, 270 American Journal of Psychiatry, 256 American Medical Association, 287 American Museum of Natural History, 325 American Red Cross, 46, 154, 172 American Rocket Society, 204 Amis, Kingsley, 415n Amis, Martin, 399, 409 Analog Science Fact & Fiction, 8, 325–26, 333, 350, 355, 358, 360, 367, 370, 374, 387, 401 Anderson, Poul, 317, 360–61, 362, 374, 387, 484n “—And He Built a Crooked House—” (Heinlein), 120 “—And Now You Don’t” (Asimov), 222 anti-Semitism, 96, 164–65, 366–67, 487n Apollo 11, 350–51 Apollo 17, 381–83 appendicitis, 38, 68 Arabian Nights, The (Hubbard), 25, 88–89, 129 Arcot stories (Campbell), 32–33 “Arena” (Star Trek episode), 371 Argosy, 30 Armstrong, Neil, 245, 350 Arnold, John, 473n Arwine, John, 117, 158, 160, 225 Ashwell, Pauline, 366, 488n Asimov, Anna Berman, 47–51 Asimov, David, 3, 342, 346, 349, 398–99, 406 Asimov, Gertrude Blugerman background of, 162 death of, 406 divorce from Isaac, 397, 398 marriage and family life, 166, 167, 221, 222, 223, 342, 343–44, 346 meeting and marriage, 161–63, 164 during World War II, 167, 170, 204, 208, 218, 219 Asimov, Isaac Astounding and, 76, 90–97, 133–42, 248, 346 birth of, 47 at Boston University, 222–23 Campbell’s legacy and, 386–87 celebrity of, 2, 4, 220–21, 347, 349 at Creativity Conference (1963), 2–3 death of, 406–7 dianetics and, 282–83, 294–95 on The Dick Cavett Show, 396–97 early life of, 14, 47–52 early writings of, 90–97 education of, 51–52, 90, 97, 220–22 family history of, 47–48 Foundation series, 10, 140–41, 167, 207, 220, 222, 275, 343, 349, 400 Futurians and, 99–100, 102–4, 103, 133–34, 141 Galaxy stories, 283–85, 343 health issues of, 399, 400–401, 404–6 Heinlein and, 114, 165–66, 226–27, 338–39, 344, 385, 390, 404 HIV and AIDS, 401, 405–6 later writings of, 342–49, 398 legacy of, 399–400, 407–8 marriages and family life, 2, 161–63, 164, 166, 342, 343, 346–47, 349, 397, 398–99, 404.

pages: 226 words: 66,188

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome) by Gavin Francis

Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell, traveling salesman

Wellcome Image Collection. p. 204 ‘X-ray of Right Total Hip Replacement’, from the US National Institute of Health. p. 211 Romería poster from 2011, courtesy of Chemi Marquez. p. 213 Skeleton of the foot (medical aspect) (figure 290 in Gray’s Anatomy, 1918 edition). p. 221 Photograph by Edwin Aldrin, Apollo 11, courtesy of NASA. Index A abdomen kidney 131–45 large bowel and rectum 156–62 liver 146–55 About Looking (Berger) 40 acrylic 39 Adamson, P. B. 110–12 Aeneid (Virgil) 111 afterbirth 186–96 alanine transaminase (ALT) 147 albumin 147, 155 anatomy 1–2, 7–8, 214–22 and beauty 158 Bell 54, 56, 96 brain 9–10 breast 94 ear 61–2 eye 35 face 44–51 foot 213–14 hand 125 heart 83, 86 Homer 107 Leonardo 50 lung 79–80 shoulder 108–9 Anaxagoras 53 anger 50, 58, 59 angor animi 85 Antarctica 109–10 aortic valve 83, 86–8 Aristotle 33, 89, 133, 171 arms 110, 113–14 shoulder 103–9, 113 wrist and hand 115–28 Armstrong, Neil 210 astronomy 33, 35–6 asylums 15–16 Aurora Leigh (Browning) 115 Australopithecus afarensis 212–13 Avicenna 176 Ayurvedic medicine 72–3 azoospermic 165 B Babylon 150 Bacon, Roger 33 balance 60–62 Bamforth, Ian 199 Bárány, Robert 65 Barbet, Pierre 126–7 Bartholin’s glands 173 Battle of Maldon, The 42 beauty 158 Bedlam 15 Bell, Charles 53–5, 56–7, 96, 110 Bell, John 53, 54 Bell Jar, The (Plath) 26, 28 Bell’s palsy 45, 51–3, 55–6, 57–8, 59 benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) 64–8 Berger, John 40–43 bilirubin 149, 155 Bini, Lucio 21–2 Bischoff, Theodor 177 Blake, William 40 Blind Man, A (Borges) 37 blindness 34, 36–7 Blomberg, Sven 40 blood albumin 147 heart 82–9 and hip 201, 202 internal loss 104 and kidneys 133–5 and liver 147, 149–50 septicaemia 148–9, 153–4 test results 146–7 transfusions 141 Book of Imaginary Beings, The (Borges) 34 Borges, Jorge Luis 31, 34, 36–7, 39, 41, 42–3 Botox 56, 58 bowels 156–8 boxer’s fracture 117–20 brachial plexus 108–9 brachial stun 106–8 brain carina 78 neurosurgery of the soul 7–14 seizures, sanctity and psychiatry 15–28 vertigo 63 breast 92–9 breath 71, 73, 78–9 bronchial breathing 74 Browne, Sir Thomas 53, 219, 227 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 115 Bruno, Giordano 34 Burns, Robert 97 C Callatiae 190 Cameron, Ewen 23 camphor 19–20 cancer 155 breast 3, 92–9 lung 74–5, 76–8, 80–81 womb 180–85 Cardiazol 20–21 carinas 77–8 carotid artery 71, 72, 121 Cataract (Berger) 40–41 cataracts 34, 36, 38–41 catatonia 20–21 caul 191–2 Cenacolo (Leonardo da Vinci) 47–9, 50, 57 Cerletti, Ugo 21–2 Chawla, Hector 34–5 chest breast 92–9 heart 82–91 lung 71–81 child abuse 122–4 China 191, 192 Chinese medicine 72–3, 132 collarbone 105–6 Collins, Brigid 96–9 coma 3, 147–9, 152–5 conception 165–70, 173, 174–9 corrugator supercilli 45 cremation 207–8 crepitation 74 Crimean War 112 crucifixion 125, 126–8 cryogenics 195–6 cutting 121–4 D da Vinci, Leonardo 1, 49–50 anatomy 50, 222 The Last Supper 47–9, 50, 57 muscles and facial expression 46–9, 50, 56, 57 placenta 189 Darwin, Charles 56–7, 59 David Copperfield (Dickens) 191–2 De Motu Cordis (Harvey) 88 de Zerbis, Gabriele 133 death 71–2, 81, 206–7 angor animi 85 cremation 207–8 womb cancer 180–86 deliberate self-harm (DSH) 121–4 della Torre, Marcantonio 50 Demirel, Selçuk 41 depression 16–19, 27–8 depressor anguli oris 45 Descartes 9–10, 85 Deuteronomy 191 dialysis 135 diastole 83, 84 Dibb, Michael 40 Dickens, Charles 191–2 Diomedes 113–14 dizziness 60, 63–8 Doors of Perception (Huxley) 40 Duncan, Andrew 15 dura mater 12, 14 E ear 60–68 ectopic pregnancy 166 Edinburgh psychiatric hospital 15–19 Royal Botanic Garden 143–5 Western General Hospital 93–4 see also University of Edinburgh Einstein, Albert 33 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) 16–19, 21–8 electroencephalograms (EEGs) 24 eloquent brain 13 emergency medicine 2, 103, 115–16, 122, 124 angor animi 85 death 71–2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 44 Empedocles 32 emphysema 76 epilepsy 10–14, 19–20 Epley, John 65–8 Eros 173–4 Essays on the anatomy of the expression in painting (Bell) 56 Exequy (King) 82 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The (Darwin) 57, 59 expressions 3, 46–9, 50, 56, 57, 58–9 eye 31–43, 71, 72 Eyeless in Gaza (Huxley) 40 Ezekiel 150 F face 3, 44–59, 78 fairy tales 3, 151–3 fascism 21 fear 50, 58, 59 feet 127–8, 210–22 Fergusson, Robert 15 fetoliths 166 fibrillation 85–6 fibroadenomas 94–5 fibrocystic change 94, 95 Fillan, St 143 Findlater, Gordon 214, 216, 218, 219 Finlay, Alec 131, 143–5 First World War 112 Fisher, Carrie 28 footprints 212–13, 221–2 Forestus 167 Fortunate Man, A (Berger) 42 Fox, Chris 40 Frankenstein (Shelley) 7 Frazer, James 192, 193 Freud, Sigmund 28, 173–4 Frissure (Jamie) 92, 99 frontalis 45, 50, 52, 58, 59 G Galen 110, 167, 172, 176 gamma glutamyltransferase (GGT) 115, 147 Genesis 202–4, 208–9 genitalia 165–79 Gerentocomia (de Zerbis) 133 glaucoma 36 Glaucus 113–14 glia 20 Gold of Tigers, The (Borges) 37 Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 192, 193 gout 214 Gräfenberg, Ernst 172 Greeks eyes 32–3 faces 53 heart 89 Homer 3, 103, 106–8, 110–12, 113–14 kidneys 133 lungs 72–3 Omphalos 190 seizures 19 Thanatos 173–4 vertigo 60, 64 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 146, 151–3 H Halving, The (Robertson) 87, 88, 90–91 hand 125–6, 214 boxer’s fracture 117–20 crucifixion 125, 126–8 Hanging Man, The (Plath) 26 Harvey, William 88 head ear 60–68 eye 31–43 face 44–59 injuries to 111, 112 see also brain healing 3, 92–9, 132–3, 142–4 Heaney, Seamus 194–5 heart 82–91, 149–50 heel 127–8 Here Is Where We Meet (Berger) 42 Heredity 2 (Jamie) 98 Herodotus 186, 190 Hippocrates 15, 64, 109, 167 hips 199–209 Hitler, Adolf 21 Hollis, Richard 40 Homer 3, 103, 106–8, 110–12, 113–14 Hooke, Robert 134 Hungary 191 Huxley, Aldous 40 I Iceland 192 Iliad, The (Homer) 3, 103, 106–8, 110–12, 113–14 increased vocal resonance 74 Indonesia 192–3 infertility 165, 168–70, 174–9 inner ear 60–8 IVF 175–6, 177–8 J Jacob and the angel 202–4, 208–9 Jamie, Kathleen 92, 95–8 Jannini, Emmanuele 172 Japan 192 Joyce, James 31, 156 Jung, Carl 174 K Kepler, Johannes 33, 34 Kesey, Ken 26 kidney 131–45 Killin 143–4 King, Bishop Henry 82 ‘Kist’ (Collins) 98 Kodama, Maria 42 Kolff, Willem 135 Kristmundsdottir, Fanney 9–10 L Laetoli 212–13, 221 Lancet 177 large bowel 156–8 larynx 79 Last Supper, The (Leonard da Vinci) 47–9, 50, 57 Leakey, Mary 212–13 legs feet and toes 210–22 hips 199–209 Leonardo da Vinci see da Vinci, Leonardo levator labii superioris alaeque nasi 45, 50, 58, 59 light 33–4 limbs feet and toes 210–22 hip 199–209 shoulder 103–14 wrist and hand 115–28 lips 78 liver 146–55 liver function tests (LFTs) 147, 155 lobotomy 21 Logos 174 lower limb feet and toes 210–22 hip 199–209 lung 71–81, 151 M McDowall, David 141–2 Maleficent (Disney) 153 Malpighi, Marcello 134 Mantel, Hilary 84 march fractures 214 Marcus Aurelius 171 Married Love (Stopes) 177 Meduna, Ladislas 20–21 meiosis 165 men fertility 191 infertility 165, 177 Logos 174 orgasm 170–73 rectum 157 menstruation 177 Mental Health Act 18 metacarpals 125 Micrographia (Hooke) 134 military medicine 109–10 Milton, John 36, 37, 40 mitral valve 83 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) 47 Monro, Alexander (Secundus) 217 Montaigne (Emerson) 44 Morton’s neuromas 214 Mossbawm (Heaney) 194–5 moxibustion 132 muscles face 44–53, 57–8 forearm 119 hand 125 larynx 79 Mussolini, Benito 21 N Napoleonic Wars 54–5 nerves face 50–53, 55–6, 57–8 injury 112–13 shoulder 108–9 Neuroanatomy Teaching Laboratory 7–8 neurology 21 neurosurgery 10–14 neurotransmitters 25 Newton, Isaac 33, 134 nightstick fracture 111 nose 78–9 O Omphalos 190, 194 On Dizziness (Theophrastus) 60 On Nature (Parmenides) 71 On the Sacred Disease (Hippocrates) 15 One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) 26 ophthalmology 31–43 orbicularis oculi 45, 58 organ donation 139–42, 143–5 orgasm 167–8, 170–73, 176 osteochondritis 201 ovulation 167, 169, 172, 177 P pacemakers 85–6 palsy 51–3, 55–6, 57–8, 59 Paracelsus 19–20 Parmenides 71 pelvis afterbirth 186–96 genitalia 165–79 womb 180–85 Perceforest 152 Pinard stethoscope 90 pineal body 9–10 placentas 3, 186–96 plantar fasciitis 214 Plath, Sylvia 26, 28 Plato 32–3, 34 Prometheus 150 psychiatry 15–28 psychotherapy 28 psychotic depression 16, 27–8 pudendal nerve 170–72 pulmonary valve 83 pump-head 87–8, 89 R radial artery 121 rectum 156–61 Robertson, Robin 86, 87, 88, 90–91 Rodin, Auguste 158 Romans 110 crucifixion 126–8 female sexuality 167 infertility 176 swords 111 Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh 143–5 Russia 192 S saccule 61–2, 65 sacrum 171 Sade, Marquis de 167 Sadler, John 177 Samson Agonistes (Milton) 40 schizophrenia 20, 22 Scottish ECT Accreditation Network (SEAN) 26 seagull murmur 87 seasickness 63 Seed, The (Hippocrates) 167 seizures 10–14 camphor-induced 19–20 Cardiazol induced 20–21 electroconvulsive therapy 18, 19, 21–5 electroencephalograms 24 self-harm 121–4 septicaemia 148–9, 153–5 sexuality 167–8, 170–3 Sforza, Francesco 46–7 Shakespeare, William 36, 53, 150 Shelley, Mary 7 shock therapy 16–19, 21–8 shoulder 3, 103–14 Sicke Woman’s Private looking Glass, The (Sadler) 177 Sinclair, Iain 53 Skene’s glands 172 skin 136 sky burial 142 sleeping beauties 152–3 Snow White 146, 151–3 Song of Myself (Whitman) 180, 223 soul and brain 9–10 and face muscles 46 and heart 88 and lips 78 speech 11–13, 23 sperm 165, 171, 172–3 stem cells 195–6 Sterne, Laurence 165 stethoscopes 74, 89–90 stigmata 128 stones 132–3, 142–4 Stopes, Marie 177 stroke 52, 64 Svevo, Italo 199–200 systole 83, 84 T Tacitus 150 Taigh (Finlay) 131, 143–5 Taylor, William 173 Teucer 106–8, 111 Theophrastus 60 Tibet 131–3, 142–3, 202 toes 210–11 transplantation 131, 135–42, 143–5 tricuspid valve 83 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 165 tumours see cancer U ulna 111 Ulysses (Joyce) 156 umbilical cords 3, 186–7, 195–6 University of Edinburgh 7–8, 216–20 Unsystematic Anatomy (Bamforth) 199 upper limb shoulder 103–14 wrist and hand 115–28 utricle 61, 65 V vagina 78, 172 Vasari, Giorgio 49 vertigo 60, 63–8 Vesalius 133–4 vibrators 167–8 Virgil 111 vision 31–43 vocal cords 79 Volsunga Saga 42 W Warner, Marina 151, 153 Waterloo, Battle of 54–5, 110 Ways of Seeing (Berger) 40 Western General Hospital 93–4 Whitman, Walt 180, 223 womb 180–85, 187 women breast cancer 92–9 eating placenta 190–91 Eros 174 fertility 177 infertility 165–6, 169, 176–7 orgasm 166–8, 170–73, 176–7 rectum 157 womb cancer 180–85 Woolf, Virginia 219 wrist 115, 121, 125–6 X X-rays 76, 77, 158, 160–62 Z Zohar 203 zygomaticus 44–5, 52, 58 WELLCOME COLLECTION is the free visitor destination for the incurably curious.

pages: 222 words: 74,587

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

Meyers Großes Konversations=Lexikon. 1906. Article “Buchdruckerkunst.” Vol. 3, 6th newly revised edition, 528–532. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut. Meynen, Gloria. 1997. Bürokratien von Imperien, Bibliotheken und Maschinen. M.A. thesis, Humboldt Universität Berlin. Meynen, Gloria. 1998. Büroformate: Von DIN A 4 zu Apollo 11. In Work@Culture: Büro. Inszenierung von Arbeit, ed. Herbert Lachmeyer and Eleonora Louis, 81–88. Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag. Michel, Paul. 2002. Ordnungen des Wissens: Darbietungsweisen des Materials in Enzyklopädien. In Populäre Enzyklopädien: Von der Auswahl, Ordnung und Vermittlung des Wissens, ed.

pages: 83 words: 7,274

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Virgin Galactic

The rock doesn’t come from the Berlin Wall—it’s even more exceptional than that. The rock you have in 08/08/2009 10:45 74 of 83 file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.html your hand is an authentic moon rock, a chunk of the roughly six ounces of lunar detritus that Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts brought back home with them during their 1969 Apollo 11 mission. A moon rock is pretty special. There are a limited number of them in the world. And after all, it comes from the moon. What an exquisite present, you think. You’re shocked, genuinely overcome. The fact of the matter is that I found the rock by the side of the road, put it in my pocket, and threw it into a box.

pages: 229 words: 71,872

Fred Dibnah's Age of Steam by David Hall, Fred Dibnah

Apollo 11, cable laying ship, clean water, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, North Sea oil, railway mania

Once the Elizabeth and Mary retired, this vessel would make or break Cunard, and the only way the company could succeed was if it adapted to the changing times. It wasn’t easy for a firm that had established many of the traditions of the industry. Queen Elizabeth II’s keel was laid in June of 1965 in the same slipway where the Queen Mary had been built thirty years earlier. QEII made her first crossing in May of 1969 – it was just two months before Apollo 11 would land on the moon. In a time when man was preparing to go to the moon, crossing the ocean over the course of days in a steamship seemed prehistoric! She travelled at an average speed of 28.02 knots (51.9 kmph), taking four days, sixteen hours and thirty-five minutes. She was welcomed to New York with a traditional fanfare, but most people realized that this was the last time a new liner would steam in to the harbour.

pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

system to classify the planet’s life forms: Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 185–193. led to the theory of evolution: Roland Moberg, “The Development of Protoecology in Sweden,” Linné on Line, University of Uppsala, 2008, http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/eco/utveckling.html. The moon landing required: “Apollo 11 Mission Report,” NASA, n.d., http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11_PAOMissionReport.html. 10,000 scientists from over one hundred countries: Roger Highfield, “LHC: Scientists Jockey for Position in Race to Find the Higgs Particle,” Telegraph, September 10, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/large-hadron-collider/3351478/LHC-Scientists-jockey-for-position-in-race-to-find-the-Higgs-particle.html.

pages: 285 words: 78,180

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

The current evidence suggests that DNA has a maximum lifetime of around 1.5 million years when held at ideal preservation temperatures,13 though it is possible that the dry, cold conditions on Mars might have enabled it to last longer. But, as underscored by the fact that scientists are still arguing over the significance of Viking data collected in the 1970s, the best hope we have of detecting life on Mars is gathering direct evidence of it. Ever since Apollo 11 returned the first extraterrestrial samples in the form of forty-nine pounds of moon rock to Earth, it has been a fervent hope that samples of soil from Mars could be obtained for study on Earth. The argument has been that scientists on Earth can make a more thorough and detailed analysis of samples than would be possible by robotic means on the planet itself.

pages: 245 words: 72,391

Alan Partridge: Nomad: Nomad by Alan Partridge

Apollo 11, cuban missile crisis, glass ceiling, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, rolodex, Skype, TED Talk, University of East Anglia

Quite camp but maybe that’s the tinsel. ‘No,’ I say, for some reason out loud. I’m tired and irritated – what is wrong with me? I pry the torch from my now sore lips, switch it off, and then climb down the loft ladder, jumping the last two steps (as I always do) so I look like Neil Armstrong dismounting the steps of Eagle, the Apollo 11 lunar module – not so much a moon landing, as my landing (my emphasis). I nod appreciatively. ‘Nice line, Alan.’ I don’t even bother slinking back to bed. I shower up and get ready for work. *** ‘Like the name of a cartoon Belgian detective said in a Scottish accent, it’s 10:10.’11 It’s later that morning and I’m ten minutes into my daily radio show Mid Morning Matters.12 ‘The song you just heard was “Midnight Train to Georgia”.

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

I had deliberately chosen an image that he wouldn’t have seen before—in this case, an advertisement for a technology company that I found in an old issue of Scientific American I’d grabbed off a nearby shelf. I wanted to see how he expressed himself in words. He studied the picture, and then he turned to his keyboard. Apollo 11 on a horse, he typed rapidly. Then he ran around the library flapping his arms. When he returned to the keyboard, I showed him a picture of a cow. We don’t eat those in India, he typed.5 Then he ran around the library flapping his arms. I asked him another question, but I no longer remember what it was.

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Beaumont (1973), “Border cave—A progress report,” South African Journal of Science 69, 41–46. Note that there are even older “notched” bones dated back to 80,000 years, but the meaning of the notches is less clear. See R. Vogelsang et al. (2010), “New excavations of Middle Stone Age deposits at Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia: Stratigraphy, archaeology, chronology, and past environments,” Journal of African Archaeology 8(2), 185–218. The speculation that the Lebombo bone was used to measure the length of the menstrual cycle or the lunar cycle comes from P. Beaumont and R. Bednarik (2013), “Tracing the emergence of paleoart in sub-Saharan Africa,” Rock Art Research 30(1), 33–54.

pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

But why had Riesenfeld mentioned the case to us? What was the connection to Israel, or to its innovation economy? The Apollo 13 crisis occurred on April 15, 1970, when the spaceship had traveled three-fourths of the way to the moon. It was less than a year after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had stepped off Apollo 11. NASA was riding high. But when Apollo 13 was two days into its mission, traveling two thousand miles per hour, one of its primary oxygen tanks exploded. This led astronaut John Swigert to utter what has by now become a famous line: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The flight director, Gene Kranz, was in charge of managing the mission—and the crisis—from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

As a result, Aldrin held centre stage. With a 70-millimetre Hasselblad camera, Armstrong took these pictures of his pilot, as well as the famous, hesitant photograph of Aldrin standing in the Sea of Tranquillity, Armstrong himself reflected as a tiny highlight in Aldrin’s visor. The idea that the Apollo 11 landing was fake is fundamental to Flat Earth theorists, and so once again we see the camera-operator, however unevenly, cleaved in two, symbolic of both valour and deception. The Best Picture Just as the notion of ‘the story’ can refer either to what really happened or to a ruse, so the photographic image is a similarly two-sided representation of reality.

pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

The idea that inward investment should revert to local ownership after 20 years, beyond the normal time horizon of investment, would probably be welcomed too, but for the opposite reason. Most investors look no further than 20 years; providing them with perpetual ownership because they provided the capital and initial management is therefore overpaying them. Increase local production When the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon in 1969, the astronauts carried with them a much publicized series of meals in tubes and plastic wrappers – to which you added water – which became iconic images of the future. The fact that we have in some ways gone in the opposite direction – huge kitchens, bestselling cooks and TV cookery programmes, foodie magazines and organic supermarkets – demonstrates that the technocratic vision of the big food companies may already be going into reverse.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Some of the pictures have been blatantly doctored. Studio shots, probably.” Shenton’s talk of staged photographs was an echo from the future. Although moon-landing truthers are among some of the twenty-first century’s most famous skeptics, the conspiracy theory was nearly as obscure as Flat Earthism when the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon for the first time in July 1969. In fact, one of the first groups to question the moon landing did it in jest. The six-hundred-member Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society launched three years after the International Flat Earth Research Society and parodied the Flat Earth group at annual meetings, in which members got drunk and pretended to believe air travel was impossible.

pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Those writings, however, fired the starting gun of a process that within a few thousand years would lead to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Arabian Nights, Virgil’s Aeneid, Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, Hugo’s Les Misérables and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Meanwhile, the Newcomen steam engine set in motion the technological leap that, in just 250 years, would allow the Soviets to launch sputnik into space and the Americans to land humans aboard Apollo 11 on the moon. The textile industry was the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution, the high-tech sector of its day. A pantheon of British inventors – most notably John Kay, Richard Arkwright, James Hargreaves, Edmund Cartwright and Samuel Crompton – designed sophisticated machines that automated much of the textile manufacturing process.

pages: 337 words: 87,236

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Above all, imperial Britain’, The New York Times, 18 August 2017. 20Sushmita Pati, ‘ “A nation set in stone”: Insight into the politics of statuary in Delhi (1950-65)’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 July 2012, p. 235. 21Quoted in ‘Statue of George V and other British figures trouble Indians’, The New York Times, 31 July 1966. 22Ibid. 23Quoted in McGarr, ‘“The viceroys are disappearing”’, p. 825. 24Quoted in ‘Statue of George V and other British figures trouble Indians’, The New York Times. 25Quoted in Sanjoy Hazarika, ‘Delhi cupola waits twenty years for the Mahatma’, The New York Times, 29 May 1988. 26Author’s interview with Rana Safvi, 1 January 2021. 27Sameet Yasir, ‘Gandhi’s killer evokes admiration as never before’, The New York Times, 4 February 2020. 28Debika Ray, ‘The rise of the monumental statue in modern-day India’, Apollo, 11 March 2019. 29Corey Flintoff, ‘In India, once marginalized now memorialized’, NPR, 28 October 2011; ‘Is India’s poverty line of 65 US cents a day fair?’, BBC News, 5 November 2011. 30‘Mayawati should reimburse public money spent on building statues, observes Supreme Court’, Scroll.in, 8 Feb 2019, https://scroll.in/latest/912521/mayawati-should-reimburse-public-money-spent-on-building-statues-observes-supreme-court. 31Krishnadas Rajagopal, ‘Why no questions raised on 182-m high Sardar Patel statue, Mayawati asks in SC’, The Hindu, 2 April 2019. 6: ‘The Horror!

pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioﬀ, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

To my dear children, Sydney and Miles: On May 25, 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy proclaimed, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong with the Apollo 11 crew fought to land the lunar module before it ran out of fuel. Armstrong eventually took that first step on the moon. The average age of the remarkable team at Mission Control in Houston was twenty-six years old. That means the scientists and engineers in Mission Control were just eighteen years old when Kennedy made his 1961 statement.

pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

When the paper’s editors discovered what Blair had been doing, it responded the way any good publication should—which was to fire him on the spot and retract or correct all of the errors he had introduced into the paper’s pages. But for the Times, there was more. In its Sunday, May 11, 2003, edition, the paper published a 7,249-word story telling the tale of Blair—the kind of length not even the most globally important stories get. In the paper’s July 21, 1969, edition, the front-page story reporting the Apollo 11 moon landing ran just 3,151 words, less than half the column inches the editors determined that the decidedly less epochal tale of Blair warranted. And that didn’t even include the actual retractions—the whole point of the exercise—which went on for thousands of additional words in the same edition.

pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

By the end of his life, he held more than eighty patents. However, his true gift was for speculating on future technology, and at several points his predictions proved uncannily accurate. He imagined space flight, including multistage rockets, space walks, and radar along with a manned lunar landing by 1970—missing the Apollo 11 date by about a year. What Gernsback either unleashed or promoted was the age of the radio hobbyist. Thousands of hobbyists around the country began building their own radio sets, first relying on units such as the Telimco, then improvising as they went along. Car batteries, spark coils, and even homemade batteries provided the power as they scavenged parts to build increasingly powerful transmitters.

pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

Furthermore, the computing power of these devices exceeds by a wide margin the performance of computers that were available just a few decades ago. A single iPhone 5s, for example, which will soon be a model so antiquated that my teenaged children would be embarrassed to be seen with it in public, contains more memory and processing power than all of the computing equipment that powered the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The same phone’s graphic capabilities outstrip the performance of the famous Cray supercomputers of the 1970s by a factor of a thousand.4 Much has been made of the transformation of everyday life that has been fueled by the development of this remarkable technology; it is beyond the ambit of this book for me to recount very much of it.

pages: 291 words: 92,406

Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports From My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, factory automation, Gregor Mendel, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, source of truth, theory of mind, twin studies

He had to be prompted after he typed each short sentence to keep him on task and to prevent him from running across the room. To make sure that he was not using prerehearsed phrases, I asked Tito to tell me about a picture he had never seen before. The picture was from an advertisement and it showed an astronaut on a horse. Tito immediately typed “ Apollo 11 on a horse. ” This convinced me that Tito was not being cued by his mother. Tito's description of how he thinks and feels indicates that the different subsystems in his brain are not working together. He has written about a thinking self and an acting self. When I questioned him about visual perception he typed that he saw fragments of color, shapes, and motions.

pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Baynes’s little operation along the North Platte River also offers a one-day wagon train trek ($200) most days from June into the first part of September, as well as canoe and log cabin rentals. HOW TO GET IN TOUCH Oregon Trail Wagon Train, Route 2, Box 502, Bayard, NE 69334, 308-586-1850, www.oregontrailwagontrain.com. U.S. SPACE ACADEMY train to be an astronaut HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA We came in peace for all mankind. —Apollo 11 lunar module plaque 73 | Houston, we have a vacation. If you’ve ever suffered from celestial wanderlust or dreamed of being an astronaut (and what self-respecting kid hasn’t?), it’s time to get off your duff and head to Space Camp. Don’t even think about trying the “but I’m too old excuse” John Glenn was 77 when he last ventured into space.

pages: 328 words: 92,317

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Fractional reserve banking, hiring and firing, jitney, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Money creation, radical decentralization, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

This job could perhaps be done better by firms whose sole business was such arbitration. A potential arbitrator has a multibillion dollar market now almost completely in the hands of a government monopoly selling low quality services at an exorbitant price. All you need to go into business is honesty, ingenuity, hard work, and luck. MIGHT HAVE BEEN Since Apollo 11 opposition to the space program has come almost entirely from critics on the left, who argue that it consumes resources badly needed on Earth. Few of them made that objection to Sputnik. Perhaps they object, not to the space race, but to America winning it, just as many of them oppose, not our intervention in Vietnam, but our choice of sides.

pages: 323 words: 94,156

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern, David Grinspoon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, four colour theorem, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, space junk, SpaceShipOne

The solution to this challenge was called the “fail-safe” data transmission. When he conceived it, Alan likened it to astronaut Neil Armstrong’s “contingency sample” collection, the first thing Armstrong did after stepping onto the Moon in 1969. Then the logic was to have something to show scientifically for the mission of Apollo 11 in case something went immediately wrong, and he and Buzz Aldrin had to suddenly abandon their moonwalk before more comprehensive lunar sampling could take place. Channeling the same logic, Alan asked Leslie’s PEP team to draw up a list of imaging, spectroscopy, and other data sets that could be fit into a fail-safe data transmission to be sent back to Earth just hours before the flyby’s closest approach, when the craft was still far enough from Pluto that there was no significant possibility of a lethal impact.

pages: 302 words: 90,215

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

He was nearing the end of the nine-day mission to the moon, and it had been packed with constant activity—scientific experiments, equipment monitoring, piloting the lunar module, collecting rocks, not to mention fraught hours dealing with equipment malfunctions during the descent to the surface. Once there, Mitchell, along with Apollo 11 veteran Alan Shepard, had also gone on two moonwalks, including one when Shepard famously hit golf balls with a club he’d fashioned from a 6-iron head and a lunar excavation tool. Mitchell’s primary duties on Apollo 14 were to perform science experiments during the trip to the moon and on the surface, and he was also the pilot of the landing module.

pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

First of all, though, it's time to go back to the dreams of my youth, dreams that took us to the moon and led us to thoughts of life on Mars. CHAPTER ONE TAKING PROGRESS FOR GRANTED One of my earliest childhood memories was waking up at some ridiculously early hour of the morning to watch the late Neil Armstrong step out of the Eagle – Apollo 11's lunar module – and utter his now famous ‘one small step’ mini-speech. In the years that followed – alongside millions of other young boys – I became obsessed with space travel. I read articles and books which predicted – with considerable confidence, I might add – that lunar colonies would soon be established and that humans would be heading to Mars before the end of the twentieth century.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Could a digital bazaar become a significant thing? Wouldn’t shoppers want to flip through the pages of a book before buying it, or talk to an expert in a wine store, or try on a dress? The baffled disconnect reminded Magdalena of July 1969, when she was ten years old, growing up in Turkey, and listening to the news that Apollo 11 had landed a man on the moon. She had gushed about the historic landing for days afterward and couldn’t comprehend the shrugs or apathy. “What’s wrong with you guys?” she implored her friends. “America spent the money! Came up with the technology! This is a new frontier!” The incomprehension felt similar today, though the frontier this time was the nascent but boundless Internet.

pages: 284 words: 89,477

Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System by Natalie Starkey

3D printing, Apollo 11, gravity well, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, the long tail, Tunguska event

One of the major costs of a space mission is the amount of rocket fuel required to launch a payload from the surface of the Earth to escape Earth’s gravity and start its journey into space. Therefore, the amount of science that can be achieved on a space mission is severely limited by rocket motor design and thrust. The less fuel that’s needed the better, and the more likely a mission is to get funded and to be able to spend money on more exciting things. When Apollo 11 launched to the Moon in 1969, its total weight on the launch pad was 2,800 tonnes, of which fuel was 2,100 tonnes, or roughly 75 per cent. By contrast, the Apollo Lunar Module weighed 16 tonnes, less than 1 per cent of the launch weight. Of course, sturdy construction materials are generally heavy, and light ones are weak, so this is a key area of instrument planning.

pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

Many companies are betting on just that, doing the research and development they hope will lead to tomorrow’s predominant computing technology. What does this mean in real-world terms? It has been noted that the smartphones so many of us use each and every day have far more processing power and storage than the entire Apollo 11 moon landing program from more than four decades before. Perhaps an even more impressive statistic was reported by Udi Manber and Peter Norvig of Google when they wrote in 2012: When you enter a single query in the Google search box, or just speak it to your phone, you set in motion as much computing as it took to send Neil Armstrong and eleven other astronauts to the moon.

pages: 300 words: 99,432

Godforsaken Sea by Derek Lundy

Apollo 11, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, the scientific method, William Langewiesche, Winter of Discontent

The Apollo astronauts, graduating from their warplanes to little capsules that were catapulted with negligible safety margins into orbit or to the barren wilderness of the moon, are the only humans who have been farther from the planet earth than sailors on the planet ocean. I remember reading that as the landing module from Apollo 11 was rising from the moon’s surface to dock with the mother ship the pulse rate of the mission commander, Neil Armstrong, rose to only ninety beats a minute. Even allowing for the calming effects of experience and preparation, this was the reaction of a man whose emotional and physiological response to danger is quite different from mine.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

The appeal to human solidarity, to fellow feeling, reaches its limits at the borders of consciousness. So, we’d best get started soon if we’re going to get started at all. Epilogue Grounded I was eight years old in July 1969, and so, almost from the start, my dawning sense of the outside world included the larger universe. I watched Apollo 11 from hours before liftoff to the end of the mission a week later, switching off the television only for occasional bouts of parentally mandated sleep and for trips to the backyard, where I would stare at the moon in wonder. I memorized all the NASA acronyms (LEM, for “lunar excursion module”; EVA for “extravehicular activity,” which is to say, walking on another heavenly body).

pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

Light from the Earth of Thales, Democritus, and other ancient Greeks now washes over the blazing newborn stars and shimmering molecular clouds of the Christmas Tree Cluster, just over 2,500 light-years distant. The Earth in the skies of the giant planets circling the Sun-like star HR 8799 has just begun transmitting in radio and perfecting the internal combustion engine. The first television transmissions of the 1930s now roll over the ice-blue stars of Regulus, and news of 1969’s Apollo 11 lunar landing has just reached the aging yellow suns of Capella. Whether any of this has actually found an audience somewhere out there, we cannot yet say. For all we know, the lively broadcast from Earth may be the only one of its kind in the observable universe. Viewed from the vicinity of the closest stars and compressed into a short time-lapse movie, our solar system’s birth and evolution would present an eerie picture.

pages: 460 words: 108,654

Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, index card, indoor plumbing, Johannes Kepler, life extension, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Thales of Miletus, walking around money, white picket fence, Winter of Discontent

Dave grinned, pleased that Shel had taken it so well. “There’s room for both of us,” he said. “Thanks.” Shel didn’t really need the money. They gave up on Camelot, and made the final stop on their grand tour, though neither knew it at the time, on the beach at Cape Kennedy, July 16, 1969, where they relaxed and watched the launch of Apollo 11. And the subject came up again. “You know,” said Shel, when it was over and the applause had died down, “I like the idea of collecting art.” “What did you have in mind?” “Michelangelo.” “That’s a good place to start.” “I mean, why bother with some relatively minor-l eague stuff when we could go get a portrait or something by him?”

pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

But internally the Good Judgment Project incentivized collective culture. Commenting was an expectation; teammates were encouraged to vote for useful comments and recognized for process milestones, like a certain number of lifetime comments. Prior to Challenger, there was a long span when NASA culture harnessed incongruence. Gene Kranz, the flight director when Apollo 11 first landed on the moon, lived by that same mantra, the valorized process—“In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data”—but he also made a habit of seeking out opinions of technicians and engineers at every level of the hierarchy. If he heard the same hunch twice, it didn’t take data for him to interrupt the usual process and investigate.

pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the surface of the moon. America and its allies rejoiced — finally, an American victory in the space race. And almost immediately, the physics job market collapsed. As the space race accelerated, so too did America’s commitment to the war in Vietnam. The success of the Apollo 11 mission gave Nixon an excuse to divert funds from NASA and other research groups to the military effort. By 1971, NASA’s budget was less than half of what it had been in 1966 (in real terms). Meanwhile, college enrollment began to drop, largely because the Baby Boom years were over. Once the “Boomers” had graduated, universities stopped hiring new faculty members.

pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

My first computer was an early laptop, circa 1986. It cost $1600 and had no hard disk — just two floppy drives — plus a small non-backlit, black-and-white LCD screen. It boasted 640K RAM internal memory and a processing speed of 9.54 MH. I thought it was wonderful! Its capabilities dwarfed those of the Moon-landing Apollo 11 spacecraft on-board computer, developed by NASA over a decade earlier. My most recent laptop cost $1200 (that’s a lot to pay these days, but it’s a deluxe model), has a 250 gigabyte hard drive (holding about 200,000 times as much data as you could cram onto an old 3.5 inch floppy disk), 4 Gigs of internal memory, and a processing speed of 2.4 gigahertz.

pages: 398 words: 108,026

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

We weave a strand of it everyday and soon it cannot be broken." I personally do not agree with the last part of his expression. I know they can be broken. Habits can be learned and unlearned. But I also know it isn't a quick fix. It involves a process and a tremendous commitment. Those of us who watched the lunar voyage of Apollo 11 were transfixed as we saw the first men walk on the moon and return to earth. Superlatives such as "fantastic" and "incredible" were inadequate to describe those eventful days. But to get there, those astronauts literally had to break out of the tremendous gravity pull of the earth. More energy was spent in the first few minutes of lift-off,in the first few miles of travel, than was used over the next several days to travel half a million miles.

pages: 465 words: 103,303

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

But we had hoped to be bestowed with some new laboratory finding, a promising clinical trial, some kind of Anderson magic. With the rest of the day to fill, we took a tour of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center south of central Houston and saw the old Mission Control Center, the nexus of operations for Apollo 11 when a human first walked on the moon. Anything seemed possible then. Back in the city we visited the Rothko Chapel. Years before when we had lived in New York, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were two of our favorite artists at the Museum of Modern Art. Pollock’s drip paintings always left me feeling that I was peering inside the frenetic workings of a human brain—ideas looping and sparking in motions that teetered between order and chaos.

pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

(Of course if all those minerals ever made it to Earth, they would flood the markets, so the twenty-trillion-dollar valuation would plummet – but there’s still potentially big money in space-mining.) Others suggest that if we could afford to get more of our world leaders to see the Earth from space, they might embrace environmentalism and see the value of increased cooperation among nations. Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins said, ‘The overriding sensation I got looking at the Earth was, my God that little thing is so fragile out there,’ while Apollo 8’s Frank Borman told Newsweek that looking back at the Earth brought home the thought that ‘this really is one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people?’

pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

But when the ENIAC was introduced in the press in 1946, these six critical women were not mentioned or photographed. (If you saw the movie Hidden Figures, you get the idea.) In 1962, three black women working as NASA mathematicians helped calculate the flight paths that put John Glenn into orbit. A woman, Margaret Hamilton, also headed up the team that wrote the code that plotted Apollo 11’s path to the moon. At the time, the term “programmer” had the negative connotation of referring to women’s work. That’s because computers still involved a lot of manual, mechanical labor that was less like doing higher mathematics than like running a telephone switchboard. Computers were also associated with typing, a skill mostly acquired by secretaries, almost all of whom were then female.

pages: 319 words: 108,797

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town by Lamorna Ash

Apollo 11, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hive mind, invisible hand, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tragedy of the Commons, Year of Magical Thinking

Each time I go on a new boat, I feel it is like meeting a stranger unwilling to give anything of herself away, just yet. I learn that the Filadelfia (PZ – Penzance – 542), is a 79-foot beam trawler. She was built in 1969, the same year man felt the Moon beneath his feet for the first time and, like Apollo 11 she is a voyager, transporting man away from familiar landscapes into the unknown, protecting her crew from the mysterious waters existing just outside her thick, steel, yellow-painted shell. It is often said we know more about the entirety of space than we do of the oceans whose ebbing borders touch our earth, as if it were more natural that the human eye be trained upwards through telescopes than down into the world’s depths.

pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

To manage the inflation risk, his administration pressured unions and private industry, urging them to keep wage and price increases to a minimum to avoid driving inflation higher. It worked. The economy grew, unemployment fell sharply, and inflation remained below 1.5 percent for the first half of the decade.47 Eight years after that famous speech, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission safely landed the first human beings on the moon. Today, almost all of us benefit in one way or another from that historic endeavor. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato put it, “the launching of Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviets led to an eruption of panic among US policy makers.”48 That panic gave rise to a space race that paved the way for the development of many of the things we now take for granted.

pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

In 1944 a V-2 became the first object fired into space, reaching a height of 176 kilometres following a vertical take-off. After the war von Braun and 120 other scientists were brought to the USA along with captured V-2s to begin work on the American space project, and twenty-four years later he was in the Kennedy Space Center watching as Apollo 11 set off for the first Moon landing. The Russians were busy too, and at times led the race. In the early twentieth century a self-educated and reclusive scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was working on theories of spaceflight and was the first to work out that the escape velocity required to get into space was 8 kilometres a second and could be achieved using liquid fuel and multi-stage rockets.

pages: 394 words: 107,778

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

airport security, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, COVID-19, crew resource management, glass ceiling, human-factors engineering, index card, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking

., his wife, and her sister had disappeared somewhere between New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard. Like the rest of the country, we were shocked and saddened to watch the terrible story unfold over the weekend. Despite this awful news, excitement was building for our launch early Tuesday morning. July 20 was also the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were coming to KSC for a celebration of that anniversary, and they planned to stay for our launch. I invited Lisa Reed and her training team to KSC as our guests to see us off. They were so wonderful in helping us prepare that I wanted to be sure they had a small reward for their hard work.

pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

His ideas were dismissed by academics and the military in the United States. A New York Times editorial stated that Goddard “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” namely that of Newton’s law on action and reaction, which made rocket flight impossible. (Forty-nine years later, the day after the successful launch of the Apollo 11 rocket to the moon, the paper issued a retraction. It announced that rockets did not in fact violate the laws of physics and that “the Times regrets the error.”) Scientists in Germany, however, had taken Goddard’s ideas seriously. They began their program after reading his papers. Years later, a German officer being grilled by American officers about their V-2 rocket program exclaimed, “Why don’t you ask your own Dr.

pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

With this system, if it can be used at hospitals in rural cities, then it will make the medical experience much better.”55 There are only twenty eye doctors for every million people in China, recapitulating the general trend for the country, where the proportions of various specialists to the population as a whole are one-third or less the proportions found in the United States. China is using more than 130 medical AI companies to promote efficiency and expand access in its healthcare system.56 Behind all this is major support. In 2018, the Chinese government issued its manifesto to become the world leader in AI, making the endeavor its own version of an Apollo 11 moon shot.57 Although there has been a talent gap between China and the United States, with the United States having a great many more computer scientists with AI expertise, that gap is quickly closing. Since 2014, more research papers have been published on DNN in China than in the United States.

pages: 379 words: 118,576

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

It was the first time they had exercised with a real submarine and to mark the occasion, the first helicopter lowered a box of Sea King ties as a memento. But that was not the only first of the day. I was on low-stress periscope watch, quietly surveying the Cornish coast, when news came in that man had landed on the Moon. Apollo 11 had made it. Better still, the first human to set foot on the moon was a Naval Officer – Neil Armstrong was a US Navy pilot. There was I sunbathing through the periscope in an antique submarine while up there on the Moon was a blood brother. Yes, I was definitely playing non-league football. That night, I surveyed the Moon in great detail through our high-powered Search Periscope and tried to imagine another human being up there on its surface. **** Andrew was a maid-of-all-work.

pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Star Trek was a fixture in the Bezos household in Houston, and they watched reruns in the afternoon after school. “We were all Trekkies. It got to the point where Jeff would quote the lines, he was so captivated,” says Jackie Bezos. The program reinforced a budding fascination with space exploration that had begun when he was five and watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on his family’s old black-and-white television. His grandfather, who two decades earlier had worked in the military’s research and development wing, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA (now DARPA), also stoked this obsession, telling stories of rockets, missiles, and the coming wonders of space travel.

pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” When I first tried to get some traction on understanding these issues, I hoped that this would turn out to be an unforeseeable, unavoidable confluence of independent events. It wasn’t. If Apollo 11 had ended up a pile of wreckage in the Sea of Tranquility, we might attribute it to a random accident or a bad component. If the same thing happened to Apollo 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17, that conclusion would be unsupportable. Alan Greenspan and a few others are to be commended, if not applauded, for acknowledging their errors.

pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

One unidentified venture capitalist described Webvan as a “moonshot,” a daring, high-risk venture, and the reporter wondered alternatively whether the company would end up becoming “the Internet era’s equivalent of Waterworld, a disaster so epic it becomes an American legend.” Such comparisons were made casually, but they are worthy of a second look because they throw into relief how Webvan was actually quite different from either a big-budget space program or a big-budget movie. One obvious difference was cost: Apollo 11’s 1969 landing on the moon was the culmination of eight years of manned space programs that had spent $24 billion. The Webvan moon-shot was a bargain, by comparison. It would be headed for an IPO having only burned up $50 million in capital. Not all start-ups that launch untested technology can start off with an ante of that size—Iridium, for example, burned through a $5 billion investment before its creditors and shareholders learned that there were virtually no customers for $5-a-minute wireless phone service anywhere around the globe.

pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

IMUs are now used in rockets, satellites, airplanes, drones, smartphones, smartwatches, and, of course, the autonomous driving systems in vehicles of every kind, including TuSimple’s trucks. Doc Draper’s first ever IMU, tested in 1949, weighed 3,000 pounds. One put into guided missiles in the early 1960s weighed about 120 pounds. A much-refined version of that IMU that flew on the Apollo 11 spacecraft in 1969 was the size of a volleyball and could be lifted by one person. Fast-forward to the present, through the commercialization of the integrated circuit and countless subsequent generations of Moore’s law, and the IMU in your phone or smartwatch has shrunk until it’s now about the size of a sesame seed—three millimeters square and 0.6 millimeters thick.

pages: 432 words: 128,944

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes

Apollo 11, colonial exploitation, Columbine, disinformation, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, friendly fire, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, music of the spheres

‘Airabelle’, the heavenly cow, a regular favourite at the annual Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, New Mexico, a folksy icon of American good humour and goodwill. The renowned ‘mass dawn ascent’ at the Albuquerque Fiesta, photographed by Richard Holmes, 2010. ‘Earthrise’, the famous environmentalist image, this time photographed from Apollo 11, July 1969. ‘The dream of flight is to see the world differently.’ Footnotes fn1 A transcendent cluster of philanthropic balloons also appears in the classic French film The Red Balloon, but with happier consequences. Shot in the backstreets of Paris, significantly in the time of recovery after the Second World War, it was directed by Albert Lamorisse and won both an Oscar and the Palme d’Or for short films at Cannes in 1956.

pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

The political battle over the human in the loop was waged over two divergent narratives: that of the heroic astronauts landing on the surface of the moon and that of the specter of a catastrophic accident culminating in the deaths of the astronauts—and potentially, as a consequence, the death of the agency. The issue, however, was at least temporarily settled when during the first human moon landing Neil Armstrong heroically took command after a computer malfunction and piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft safely to the lunar surface. The moon landing and other similar feats of courage, such as Wally Schirra’s decision not to abort the earlier Gemini flight, have firmly established a view of human-machine interaction that elevates human decision-making beyond the fallible machines of our mythology.

pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Like India today, the United States was buoyed by an entrepreneurial spirit. A battle against America’s rent-seeking political corruption was fought effectively in the nineteenth century.10 Consumer culture, now burgeoning in India, was all but invented in the United States circa 1920. And Indian pride in their Mars orbiter echoes American sentiment toward Apollo 11, the world’s first moon landing. Despite huge differences in culture and history, there is no denying the commonalities among societies that experience socioeconomic growth. I grew up partly in Japan and partly in America. Despite the differences between the two countries, the repeating patterns of modernization were evident: Infrastructure tends to improve, technology to proliferate, government to become more efficient, parents to have fewer children, industrial employment to overtake agriculture, and gender disparities to shrink.11 When I landed in India, I felt a sense of déjà vu.

pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The second play was Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, which premiered in 1955, just before Miller wed Marilyn Monroe. The illegal immigrants believed by the play’s protagonist to be ruining America are not from Syria or Yemen, rather, from Italy. The movie was Easy Rider, premiering the same month as the Apollo 11 moon landing and starring Jack Nicholson. The musical was West Side Story, which premiered on Broadway in 1957. The Jets gang wants the Sharks gang out of New York City. Members of the Jets consider the Sharks encroaching foreigners, though the latter are from Puerto Rico, where, since 1917, anyone born is a US citizen.

pages: 434 words: 124,153

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cape to Cairo, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, profit motive, surplus humans, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, women in the workforce

They succeeded in their first objective in 1962 when John Glenn, a cigar smoker, became the first American to orbit the earth. He was presented with his own weight in cigars upon his return from space. The United States’ second off-world objective was achieved in 1969 when Space Commander Neil Armstrong, climbed down out of the Apollo 11 mission’s lunar module and stepped on to luna firma. He was later joined by Space Captain Buzz Aldrin on the face of the ancients’ Goddess of Love. Commander Armstrong was a pipe smoker in the true explorer’s mould, although he did not take his instrument of pleasure with him into space. Nevertheless, this small step by a smoker, yet giant for mankind, was a measure of the distance the weed had travelled from humble scrub to accompanying humanity (internally) to the moon and back.

pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

He applies a rigor to mission plans that NASA can only admire—though it doesn't—and try to emulate. His realism is the key to our larger future.” —Gregory Benford, author of The Berlin Project “At last, here is the vision we were aiming for when we landed on the Moon. The Case for Space is the case for the future!” —Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 “Zubrin is one of our generation's thought leaders in space exploration, and with The Case for Space he makes another major contribution to humanity's journey to the stars. We are several human generations since Apollo, yet nation-states have retreated from their once-bold path beyond our planet.

pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

—Buckminster Fuller, 1969 In 1969 a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. There was a lot of money to be made by whoever could divine the single technology most likely to capture the market in the coming decades. It was the era of James Bond gadgets and Apollo 11. Everyone was sure that some fabulous new machine would emerge to change everything. Eric Britton dove into the task. He gave his clients a thorough accounting of even the most fantastical possibilities. He keeps the faded report on a shelf in his apartment, a few blocks from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement.

pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Well, that computer, which was at the height of computing technology in the ’70s, had around 32k of memory and ran at a clock speed of 1.024 MHz. When the IBM PC XT launched in 1981 it was already about eight times faster than the Apollo computer. The current iPhone 4S is roughly two million times more powerful than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer that landed men on the moon. In fact, the first iPhone model (the 2G as it is now known) had more computing power in one handheld device than NASA had in its entirety in 1970. Figure 9.2: Apollo Guidance Computer (circa 1970) Credit: Draper Labs Those little musical greeting cards with a chip inside them to play a tune have more computing power than all the Axis and Allied forces had combined in World War II.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

now known as astrobiology: In response to Lederberg’s concerns about interplanetary infection, NASA developed ways to sterilize spacecraft before departure from Earth. These have not been entirely successful: There is a thriving volunteer population of bacteria and fungi aboard the International Space Station (Novikova et al. [2006]). When the Apollo 11 mission returned from the first trip to the moon in 1969, the astronauts were isolated in stringent quarantine in a converted Airstream trailer for three weeks (Scharf [2016]). several hours a day: It had been known that bacteria are capable of acquiring DNA from their surroundings since the work of Frederick Griffith in the 1920s, later confirmed by Oswald Avery and his colleagues in the early 1940s.

pages: 441 words: 124,798

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The company was virtually unheard of when a trio of research psychiatrists and brothers—Mortimer, Raymond, and Arthur Sackler—bought it from its original Manhattan-based owners in 1952, with only a few employees and annual sales of just $20,000. The new owners made their initial fortunes specializing in such over-the-counter products as laxatives, earwax remover, and the antiseptic Betadine, used to wash down the Apollo 11 spacecraft after its historic mission to the moon. Expanding internationally in the 1970s, the Sacklers acquired Scottish and British drug companies and paved the way for their entry into the pain-relief business with the development of an end-of-life painkiller derived from morphine, MS Contin, in 1984.

pages: 411 words: 140,110

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

It’s a great Twitter moment, unplanned and unscripted, and it gets thousands of likes and retweets. Not long after, a reply appears from Buzz Aldrin: “He’s 249 miles above the earth. Piece of cake. Neil, Mike & I went 239,000 miles to the moon. #Apollo11.” There is no good way to engage in a Twitter debate with an American hero, so I don’t. In my mind, I reflect on the fact that the crew of Apollo 11 spent eight days in space, traveling half a million miles; by the time I’m done I will have spent a total of 520 days in space and will have traveled over two hundred million miles, the equivalent of going to Mars and back. Only later, when the Twitter chat is over, do I have the chance to reflect that I just experienced being trolled, in space, by the second man on the moon, while also engaging in a Twitter conversation with the president.

pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

The green space between the homes had been done away with, and the meanly proportioned houses were crammed together, separated only by the width of an alleyway. Here was a version of Span that had shrunk in the wash. ‘Happiness is an adopted frog,’ announced an advert in The Times in June 1969, a month before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. ‘Come home to New Ash Green.’ The blurb was persuasive – invasive, almost. ‘Span is building a village with your children in mind.’18 The advert campaign was pure Mad Men, slick and shameless. ‘A complete village, entire in itself, with a choice of 18 brilliantly designed “homes for all seasons”’ went another.

pages: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

But the Voyager spacecraft will plunge on, penetrating the heliopause sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century, skimming through the ocean of space, never to enter another solar system, destined to wander through eternity far from the stellar islands and to complete its first circumnavigation of the massive center of the Milky Way a few hundred million years from now. We have embarked on epic voyages. *Or, to make a different comparison, a fertilized egg takes as long to wander from the fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto. *We even know what gifts they brought the Court. The Empress was presented with “six little chests of divers pictures.”

pages: 554 words: 142,089

Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet by Steven Squyres

Apollo 11, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, gravity well, Mars Rover, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, two and twenty

He opened it while sitting in the back of the room during the Opportunity science assessment meeting. It didn’t take him long to figure out that somebody was putting him on, but for about five seconds the look on his face was priceless. We’re a very happy team tonight. And we’ve finally picked a name for our little hole in the ground. We’re going to call it Eagle Crater, after the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, using the ships-of-exploration theme that didn’t quite make the cut back at Gusev. And it’s also got a nice little double meaning. If you’re golfing on a par three hole, an eagle is a hole in one. OPPORTUNITY SOL 48 We’ve done it. The Mössbauer spectrum of the Berry Bowl is down, and it’s got by far the strongest hematite signal we’ve ever seen.

pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

In 1973, when he served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Pournelle believed there were fewer than twenty SF authors in the country who could make a living from sales of their writing.22 But the times were rapidly changing. Interest in the SF genre had been piqued by real-world events throughout the 1960s, a decade that began under the shadow of Sputnik 1 and concluded with the Apollo 11 moon landings in fulfillment of John F. Kennedy’s pledge. The same decade saw the debut of Star Trek in 1966 and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968; Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), meanwhile, proved that written SF could also produce blockbusters. Science fiction was increasingly in demand, but changes in the publishing landscape were also mitigating away from the dominance of SF’s early serial publications and more toward novels as the basic economic unit of the genre.23 Increased reader demand, coupled with greater expectations for long-form work: that meant opportunity, but it also “presented a problem,” as Pournelle notes in a typical summation: “In order to make a living at writing I had to write a lot, and writing is hard work.

pages: 482 words: 147,281

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

(Only two other luminaries of the town are thought worthy of mention, and both are by contrast memorably forgettable: one a heavily moustachioed hero of the Civil War who fought at Vicksburg; the other the screenwriter of The Bells of St Mary’s, who also happened to have invented a device allowing naval vessels to lift mines harmlessly from the seabed.) The town’s website is where all this is so serendipitously revealed. It opens with a scratchy sound recording of an unnamed baritone reading a launch-pad countdown. He follows this with the announcement of the liftoff, in July 1969, of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, a ship that is destined, he says gravely, for the moon. And while his voice is intoning on what turns out to be an original NASA recording, an image of the moon swirls and grows steadily bigger on the screen – until it is eventually replaced, with a booster’s flourish, by an image of a bustling community and, in bold, the name of the town: Wapakoneta.

pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

(In 1903, the Times declared that flying machines were a waste of time, just a week before the Wright brothers successfully flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1920, the Times criticized rocket scientist Robert Goddard, declaring his work nonsense because rockets cannot move in a vacuum. Forty-nine years later, when Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon, the Times, to its credit, ran the retraction: “It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum. The Times regrets the error.”) The lesson here is that it is very dangerous to bet against the future. Predictions for the future, with a few exceptions, have always underestimated the pace of technological progress.

pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Another tricky issue is adjusting prices for changes in the quality of products; in other words, when we get a lot more features for the same price. This book’s introduction recounted the changes in the quality of light from fires to candles to LED bulbs. A smartphone has more computing capacity than NASA did when it sent Apollo 11 to the moon.8 A modern TV is lighter, less prone to failure, and carries many more channels than did its counterpart in the 1970s. Economists try to make adjustments for these “hedonic” improvements but may not get it right. All these objections also apply to the GDP deflator. So as well as overestimating or underestimating inflation, economists may be overstating or understating real GDP growth.

pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Nevertheless, the term ‘Andromeda Strain’ soon mutated from Crichton’s original alien epidemic to mean any out-of-control infection, including one created accidentally. It became a microbial synonym for ‘Frankenstein’. Scientists could protest that The Andromeda Strain was science fiction, but a plague from space was exactly what NASA had been afraid of when the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the Moon and were immediately quarantined. Recombinant DNA looked exactly like the realisation of science fiction’s dreams and was fêted as such. And as fiction is fond of telling us, dreams can become nightmares. Australian newspaper cartoon from 1976 explaining the controversy over recombinant DNA, showing how the issue spread all around the world

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Be prepared for lines and bag checks. National Air & Space Museum MUSEUM (cnr 6th St & Independence Ave SW) The Air & Space Museum is the most popular Smithsonian museum; everyone flocks to see the Wright brothers’ flyer, Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis and the Apollo 11 command module. An IMAX theater, planetarium and ride simulator are all here (adult/child $9/7.50 each). More avionic pieces reside in Virginia at the Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center (Click here), an annex to hold this museum’s leftovers. National Museum of Natural History MUSEUM (cnr 10th St & Constitution Ave SW) A favorite of the kids, the Museum of Natural History showcases dinosaur skeletons, an archae- ology/anthropology collection, wonders from the ocean, and unusual gems and minerals, including the 45-carat Hope Diamond.

…

The complex comprises open-air animal enclosures, an aviary, gardens and a planetarium. In nearby Hampton, the Virginia Air & Space Center ( 757-727-0900; www.vasc.org; 600 Settlers Landing Rd; adult/child $12/10; 10am-5pm Mon-Wed, to 7pm Thu-Sun) will fascinate budding aeronautic geeks with exhibits like the Apollo 11 command module and a DC-9 passenger plane. IMAX films cost extra. Virginia Beach With 35 miles of sandy beaches, a 3-mile concrete oceanfront boardwalk and nearby outdoor activities, it’s no surprise that Virginia Beach is the largest city in the state (population 438,000) and a prime tourist destination.

pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

But the professor in him couldn’t help it. Or maybe, now in retrospect, that was why he became a professor. “So there’s this thing called a kinematic singularity,” LaValle explained, speaking in a pedantic-very-unpretentious Jeff Goldblum–esque manner. “It’s related to gimbal lock, which you might remember in relation to Apollo 11—No takers? That’s okay, interesting story for another day!—the long story short is that when you’re dealing with 3-D transformation, if you don’t really, really know what you’re doing, then quick movements straight up and straight down will misalign the tracking system.” Iribe opened his mouth but didn’t know how to reply.

Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Her enemy, as in India, would be Soviet spies, only instead of typing up reports of their activities for her MI5 boss in Delhi, she would be on the first rung of tracking them down herself. It was a heady prospect, which filled her with excitement as the train rumbled under the streets of London. Passengers were reading newspapers filled not only with the continuing threat of the cold war but the successful NASA mission of the Apollo 11 manned flight to the moon. A feat so extraordinary it had involved twenty thousand contractors employing three hundred thousand skilled workers. It was capped by Neil Armstrong planting his size 9½ boot on the lunar surface and pronouncing, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

And if it wasn’t enough that men were also about to fulfill JFK’s dream of walking on the moon, and on Richard Nixon’s watch, a certain Kennedy brother, surfing so gracefully heretofore, had just suffered a calamitous wipeout. He was returned to the cover of Time—wearing a neck brace and a pained, guilty expression. CHAPTER NINETEEN If Gold Rust AT 11:15 P.M. ON JULY 18, 1969, THE APOLLO 11 ASTRONAUTS WERE CIRCLING the moon and in Martha’s Vineyard a ’67 Oldsmobile veered from a ten-foot-wide bridge near the road to the Chappaquiddick ferry. It was found eight hours later by two boys looking for a fishing spot. Fire department scuba divers pried out a dead body inside. The police chief tracked the license number to the driver, who had escaped, then wandered to a nearby restaurant, asked friends to drive him to the inn where he was staying, then walked around “for a period of time,” never mentioning he had been in an accident.

…

At First Division Headquarters, the camera panned over the crowd, the traditional mocking banners (WELCOME, BING CROSBY!)—but many weren’t wearing shirts; most had shaggy hair; some wore mustaches and necklaces with garish medallions. Tom Sawyer–faced Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, an icon of the new square chic—he brought his fraternity pin along on Apollo 11—did a question-and-answer session. The NBC cameras trained upon a blond nurse in hippie sunglasses asking him in all earnestness “when you’re going to take the first woman to the moon.” Armstrong answered with leering innuendo. Bob chimed in with a joke about diet-conscious ladies: “I’m sure they’ll all go when they find they can go up there and be weightless.”

pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Christopher Rader, then age twelve, submitted a crowd-pleasing drawing of Darth Vader. The sci-fi villain is not the cathedral’s only unconventional architecture. Other decorative sculptures include a raccoon, a girl with braces, and a grinning man holding an umbrella. One of the stained glass windows honors the Apollo 11 moon landing and contains a fragment of lunar rock. 3101 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, Washington. You will need binoculars to see Darth Vader. From inside the cathedral, go through the wooden doors near the Abraham Lincoln statue. Stand on the grass to your right and turn around to look at the closest tower.

pages: 612 words: 181,985

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, death from overwork, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, military-industrial complex, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, éminence grise

The judge prosecuting the Essen-Dora trial also took the testimony of General Dornberger, in Mexico, where the now-retired Dornberger spent winters with his wife. Some months later, von Braun and Dornberger corresponded about the matter. “In regards to the testimony, fortunately I too have heard nothing more,” wrote von Braun. No news was good news for both men. After the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, columnist Drew Pearson—whose fierce exposés of Major General Dr. Walter Schreiber had helped to banish the man from America—wrote in his column that von Braun had been a member of the SS. But von Braun’s glory had reached epic proportions, and Pearson’s article went by relatively unnoticed.

pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

We still do not know where—with two glaring exceptions—these zero-days came from, whether they were developed “in-house” by TAO or Israel’s Unit 8200 or procured off the underground market. What we do know is that the worm—in its final form, 500 kilobytes—was fifty times bigger than anything discovered before it. It was one hundred times the kilobytes required to send Apollo 11 to the moon. And it was pricey, easily worth millions of dollars. But, held against a single $2 billion B-2 bomber, it was a Costco bargain. Each of the seven zero-days played a critical role in getting their worm into the Natanz computers and crawling its way into the centrifuges. The first was a zero-day in Microsoft software that allowed the worm to jump from the infected thumb drive onto Natanz’s computers.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

…

KENNECOTT’S BINGHAM CANYON COPPER MINE The view into the century-old mine (www.kennecott.com; Hwy 111; per vehicle $5; 8am-8pm Apr-Oct) , 20 miles southwest of SLC, is slightly unreal. Massive dump trucks (some more than 12ft tall) look no larger than toys as they wind up and down the world’s largest excavation. The 2.5-mile-wide and 0.75-mile-deep gash, which is still growing, is visible from space – and there’s a picture from Apollo 11 inside the museum to prove it. Overall, it’s a fascinating stop. Activities Within easy reach on the east side of the Wasatch mountain range, Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons not only have excellent skiing but opportunities for hiking, mountain biking and camping. For more, see Click here.

pages: 752 words: 201,334

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Boycotts of Israel, Burning Man, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, Transnistria, Yom Kippur War

The paratroopers took turns napping, four men alert, three asleep. Arik didn’t sleep. Despite a cool wind, his shirt was damp with sweat. A full moon rose. Voices from an Egyptian position just across merged with the slowly moving water. No commandos appeared. Preparing to decamp as the first light broke, Arik looked up at the sky and suddenly remembered: Apollo 11 was approaching the moon. In the coming hours, a human being would take his first steps on its surface. The whole world was watching the future on television, and here he was, lying in the mud of the Middle East. FORTY-FIVE DAYS AFTER arriving at the canal, Arik returned to Tel Aviv. He had refused to take leave.

pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

But this conference, organized by parents, was different: between the formal workshop sessions, speakers and participants commingled in the hallways and the dining room, sharing information on equal terms. Speech therapists, psychologists, and biochemists chatted informally with family members about their research. Most of the participants were too engaged by what was going on around them to pay much attention to the other historical milestone taking place that week: the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon. The air in the Sheraton Palace was electric as parents spontaneously formed support groups to address issues that weren’t acknowledged in the medical literature, such as the challenges of raising autistic girls, or parenting children who were blind as well as autistic. Rimland and Lovaas were on the speakers list, as was Eric Schopler, a former graduate student of Bettelheim’s at the University of Chicago who had gone head-to-head with him for scapegoating parents.

pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

The fireball exploded above Murchison, a town of six hundred people in the Goulburn Valley north of Melbourne, and came raining down in chunks, some weighing up to twelve pounds. Fortunately, no one was hurt. The meteorite was of a rare type known as a carbonaceous chondrite, and the townspeople helpfully collected and brought in some two hundred pounds of it. The timing could hardly have been better. Less than two months earlier, the Apollo 11 astronauts had returned to Earth with a bag full of lunar rocks, so labs throughout the world were geared up—indeed clamoring—for rocks of extraterrestrial origin. The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Minuteman weapon system ICBM tested 1961 U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise launched Manned space flight (Yuri Gagarin) 1962 Transatlantic television relay (Telstar) 1964 Shinkansen (Japan National Railways) starts operation 1966 U.S. jumbo jet aircraft Boeing 747 ordered 1969 British-French supersonic aircraft Concorde takes off Boeing 747 in commercial service U.S. Apollo 11 spacecraft lands on Moon 1970s Radio and television satellite broadcasting Concerns about fossil fuel supplies Acid rain over Europe and North America Japanese car exports soar 1971 First microprocessors (Intel, Texas Instruments) 1973 OPEC’s first round of crude oil price increases (until 1974) 1975 Brazil starts producing automotive ethanol from sugar cane 1976 Concorde in commercial service Unmanned U.S.

pages: 1,294 words: 210,361

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

With their voices now muted in Washington, with little sympathy in the House and no friend in the Senate, the Laskerites were forced to revamp the strategy for their crusade—from backstage political maneuvering to front-stage public mobilization. In retrospect, that turn in their trajectory was well-timed. The success of Apollo 11 may have dramatically affected the Laskerites’ own view of their project, but, more important perhaps, it created an equally seismic shift in the public perception of science. That cancer could be conquered, just as the moon had been conquered, was scarcely a matter of doubt. The Laskerites coined a phrase to describe this analogy.

pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

When Columbia launched the first big exhibit of Arthur’s Asian art, in Low Library—the one that was staged by the window designer from Tiffany—Richard brought his roommate along to the show. “It was a big deal for Richard,” Kapit said. “He was so excited to see those beautiful objects.” The “whole family,” Kapit realized, “had a thing about Asian art and Asian beauty.” * * * On July 24, 1969, the Apollo 11 space capsule hurtled through earth’s atmosphere at twenty-five thousand miles per hour, shedding flaming shards of protective casing so that it resembled a giant fireball. Inside were the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, who had just made history by walking on the moon.

pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The gap in 1964 between television ownership in East and West Germany, for example, was fairly small: 42 per cent to 50 per cent of households. By 1970 Sweden had the greatest number of television sets proportionate to its population (312 sets for every 1,000 inhabitants) of any country in Europe, but Hungary (171 sets) was not far behind Ireland, Italy and Austria. On 20 July 1969 the landing on the moon by the Apollo 11 spacecraft and the first steps taken by mankind on its surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were watched across the globe as extraordinary pictures were relayed by satellite to the largest television audience ever recorded up to that time – an estimated 530 million viewers worldwide. Televised sport was by this time becoming an integral part of popular culture.

pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

BEST TIMES: Wed noon for free talks in the American Treasures gallery; evenings at the Madison Building’s Mary Pickford Theater for showings of films from the museum’s collection. The Final Frontier THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM Washington, D.C. For those in thrall with the notion of flight, this is your place. Under one roof you’ll find Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, Chuck Yeager’s Glamorous Glennis Bell X-1, the Apollo 11 command module, the Skylab space station, and some moon rocks collected by Apollo 17. Orville and Wilbur Wright made history’s first manned flight in 1903, but the Smithsonian’s aeronautical collection actually predates that by 17 years, beginning with its 1876 acquisition of a group of Chinese kites.

…

—JFK, Sept. 12, 1962 KENNEDY SPACE CENTER Cape Canaveral, Florida Set amid 150,000 acres of marshland and mangrove swamp, Kennedy Space Center has been the headquarters of American rocketry and space exploration since the launch of the unmanned Bumper 8 research rocket in July 1950. Eleven years later Alan Shepard lifted off from the Cape’s Pad 5 to become the first American in space, and in July 1969 Apollo 11 blasted off from Pad 39A, carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon. Since the end of the Apollo missions in 1972, the base has been home to America’s space shuttle and International Space Station programs, and to unmanned missions that have traveled to Mars and beyond.

pages: 787 words: 249,157

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Allan J McDonald, James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, flying shuttle, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway

Prior to the appearance of this impressive book, most interpretations of the Challenger disaster had been highly critical of the role played by Alabama's NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. In his 1998 autobiographical survey of American space history, Liftoff: The Story of America's Adventure in Space (NASA/Grove Press), even the fair-minded Michael Collins, command module pilot for the historic Apollo 11 mission, had come down hard on Marshall. “Huntsville has become a castle whose occupants have pulled up the drawbridge, leaving the moat full of serpents,” Collins wrote. MSFC was “the only part of NASA that did not cooperate fully” with the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger accident.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

The history of ubiquitous artifacts illustrates two opposite mass trends: miniaturization of commonly used components and devices on one hand (a trend enabled to an unprecedented degree by the diffusion of solid-state electronics), and a substantial increase in the average mass of the two largest investments modern families make, cars and houses, on the other. The declining mass of computers is, obviously, just an inverse of their growing capability to handle information per unit of weight. In August 1969, the Apollo 11 computer used to land the manned capsule on the Moon weighed 32 kg and had merely 2 kB of random access memory (RAM), or about 62 bytes per kg of mass (Hall 1996). Twelve years later, IBM’s first personal computer weighed 11.3 kg and 16 kB RAM, that is 1.416 kB/kg. In 2018 the Dell laptop used to write this book weighed 2.83 kg and had 4 GB RAM, or 1.41 GB/kg.

Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

KENNECOTT’S BINGHAM CANYON COPPER MINE The view into the century-old mine (www.kennecott.com; Hwy 111; per vehicle $5; 8am-8pm Apr-Oct), 20 miles southwest of SLC, is slightly unreal. Massive dump trucks (some more than 12ft tall) look no larger than toys as they wind up and down the world’s largest excavation. The 2.5-mile-wide and 0.75-mile-deep gash, which is still growing, is visible from space – and there’s a picture from Apollo 11 inside the museum to prove it. Overall, it’s a fascinating stop. Activities Within easy reach on the east side of the Wasatch mountain range, Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons not only have excellent skiing but opportunities for hiking, mountain biking and camping. For more,Click here. Church Fork Trail HIKING (Millcreek Canyon, off Wasatch Blvd; admission $3) Looking for the nearest workout with big views?

Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY & MUSEUM The Nixon Library ( GOOGLE MAP ; %714-993-5075; www.nixonfoundation.org; 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd, Yorba Linda; adult/child 5-11yr/student/senior $16/6/10/12; h10am-5pm Mon-Sat, 11am-5pm Sun; p) offers a fascinating walk though America’s modern history and that of this controversial native son of Orange County (1913–94), who served as president from 1969 to 74. Noteworthy exhibits include a full-size replica of the White House East Room, recordings of conversations with Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon, access to the ex-presidential helicopter – complete with wet bar and ashtrays – and excerpts from landmark TV appearances including the Kennedy-Nixon debates and Nixon's famous self-parody on the Laugh-In comedy show. Exhibits about Watergate, the infamous scandal that ultimately brought down Nixon's administration, also figure prominently.

Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

KENNECOTT’S BINGHAM CANYON COPPER MINE The view into the century-old mine (www.kennecott.com; Hwy 111; per vehicle $5; 8am-8pm Apr-Oct), 20 miles southwest of SLC, is slightly unreal. Massive dump trucks (some more than 12ft tall) look no larger than toys as they wind up and down the world’s largest excavation. The 2.5-mile-wide and 0.75-mile-deep gash, which is still growing, is visible from space – and there’s a picture from Apollo 11 inside the museum to prove it. Overall, it’s a fascinating stop. UNIVERSITY FOOTHILLS DISTRICT Utah Museum of Natural History MUSEUM (http://umnh.utah.edu; 200 Wakara Way; adult/child $7/5, 10am-5pm Mon-Sat) The massive Rio Tinto Center makes a suitable home for the museum’s prize Huntington Mammoth, one of the most complete fossils of its kind in the world.

pages: 1,234 words: 356,472

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

Wilson didn’t even begrudge her that; political correctness wouldn’t allow it any other way. And NASA was ever mindful of pleasing as many people as possible. Commander Lewis was busy taking a high-resolution photo of his historic footprint. A requirement that had been in the NASA manual for the last eighty-one years, ever since Apollo 11 got back home to find that embarrasing omission. Lieutenant Commander Orchiston was going down the ladder—a lot faster than Commander Lewis. Wilson stepped into the airlock. He couldn’t even remember the time the little chamber took to cycle; it never existed in his personal awareness. Then it was him backing out onto the ladder.

The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

Major refurbishments have created some fantastic new displays, including the Zaha Hadid-designed Maths Gallery, though with redesigns ongoing, some areas are closed for the foreseeable future. On the ground floor, Exploring Space follows the history of rockets and space, with a full-size replica of the Apollo 11 landing craft which deposited US astronauts on the moon in 1969. Making the Modern World displays iconic inventions of modern science and technology, including Robert Stephenson’s Rocket of 1829. Other galleries cover flight – including flight simulators and a vast gallery of flying machines – energy and materials.