On 15 Jul 2009 at 19:40, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Kurt Buff<[email protected]> wrote:
> >> What, no love for 12 April? ;-)
> >
> > Well, it was a good day in 1945, but otherwise not so much. Heh.
>
> Well, Yuri G. was the first human in space, and the first manned
> orbit, even if the USSR lied about the landing. I believe in giving
> credit where credit is due, and that's a human achievement worth
> noting.
>
> (For those who don't know: The first-generation "Vostok" spacecraft
> couldn't safely land a human, so they had the pilots eject and
> parachute down. By international rules, the pilot has to land with
> his craft, so /Vostok 1/ "didn't count" as a successful flight. So
> the USSR lied, and said he landed with his craft.
You learn something new every day ...
Vostok 1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The FAI rules in 1961 required that a pilot must land with the spacecraft
to be considered an official spaceflight for the FAI record books. At the
time, the Soviet Union insisted that Gagarin had landed with the Vostok
and the FAI certified the flight. Years later, it was revealed that
Gagarin had ejected and landed separately from the Vostok descent module.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1
Fascinating. Who would'a thunk (a) there was some sort of agency that
'certified' what constituted a flight and (b) that the CCCP would lie about
anything? ;-)
> The first craft that launched, reached space, and landed with a human aboard
> was /Freedom 7/, with Alan Shepard -- but he didn't orbit. Spaceflight's a
> complicated business.)
No duh!
I loved Alan Shepard's answer to this question:
Q: How do you feel when the countdown gets down to the last few seconds?
A: How do you think you´d feel if you knew you were on top of that
machine, [comprising] thousands of parts all built by the lowest bidder on
a government contract?
Friendship 7 - 20 years later
http://library.osu.edu/sites/archives/glenn/legacy/20year.htm
> That references the same NASA press release I did. Someone's
> reading more out of that press release than it actually says. It
> doesn't mention the lost tapes at all. It states they'll use "what is
> believed to be the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar
> excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years." I
> suppose it could be that NASA is trying to avoid mentioning the lost
> tapes, but it reads more to me like they're restored some *other*
> footage.
Yeah, I read today that they recycled the actual original NASA tapes. :-( The
"high res" tapes are being reconstructed by some Hollywood lab. Conspiracy
Theorists are rejoicing ...
--
Angus Scott-Fleming
GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona
1-520-290-5038
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