#apollo missions

[dragons-in-spaceee]

Happy moon day folks!! Painting with a lava lamp for light is such a vibe, especially for the retro space feel!

[sumarex]

[stone-cold-groove]

Illustration detail from a Project Apollo mission profile brochure.

[ksodirty]

Shout out to my dad for this ridiculous info

[superbeans89]

Happy Apollo Day everyone!

[paradise-never-regained]

I love you handwoven Apollo mission computer memory

[supernovaa-remnant]

I’m gonna cry again. there are footsteps on the moon we went to the moon people saw the earth as a sphere for the first time people escaped earth’s gravity for the first time do you understand? no person has left earth’s gravity since the apollo missions. it’s been over 50 years and there are still footsteps on the moon. the last four pictures taken by people on the moon are three pictures of a hammer being thrown and the last picture is of the astronaut who threw them. do you– do you understand? there are videos and photos from the apollo missions and we have pieces of rock that are 4.5 billion years old. there aren’t rocks that old on earth. not in any accessible places. not on the surface. we have rock from the moon’s original crust. we know the ages of places on the moon because of the apollo missions. we know so much about our solar system because of the apollo missions. because for the first time ever, people left earth’s gravity. people have not left earth’s gravity in over 50 years. and there are still footsteps on the moon.

[sixminutestoriesblog]

moon landing anniversary

Fifty four years ago, the first human footprint was left in the powdery dust of the moon.  For the first time in history, humanity had not just left their own world behind but had set foot on a completely new surface.  For as long as humanity had been humanity, they had looked up at the moon and know it for the brightest light in their night sky, their one ever changing, consistent companion.  Now, finally, man had managed to reach back across that darkness and touch that familiar face.  The moon landing was the culmination of not just a decade and a half of a space race between two world powers, it was the realized dream of humanity back into the very early mists of time when ancestors that weren’t even entirely what we’d call humans today looked up into the night sky and fell in love with the pale light that fell down over them.  The sun gives us light and warmth and life but the moon is what humanity has hung their dreams, their wishes, their magic and their romance on.  

It has always been something we have hung our superstitions on too.

Superstitions are a part of humanity.  And when we went to the moon - we brought them with us.

Instead of talking about goddesses and harvests and animals and omens, I thought, today, on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, we’d talk about the superstitions that they took with them on that flight and the ones some astronauts still honor today in the space station that orbits between us and the moon and that may one day, hopefully soon, see us back on the moon and then even further.  Sailors have a reputation for being superstitious.  When you cast out into the great Deep, you can’t help but feel that you are very small and the world around and, more importantly under you, is very, very wide and very, very deep.  On land you can sooth yourself into believing that man has tamed nature.  There’s no such comforting lie when you are out of sight of land.  What are astronauts but sailors of the stars?  A ‘star traveler’.  And the space between here and the moon is a much longer and deeper horizon than any sailor on the water ever watched fade behind him.

Let’s start with the light stuff.  I was surprised by how much food factors into space launch tradition.  Not sprinkling corn meal or salt in circles to keep away evil spirits but eating food.  An astronaut’s breakfast the day of the launch?  Scrambled eggs and steak if you’re American.  If it worked for John Glenn and Alan Shepherd, it should work for every astronaut after, right?  Cosmonauts however get a champagne breakfast, because Russians know how to send someone off in style.  NASA has a cake delivered with the mission’s emblem on it.  No one cuts or eats the cake though.  Damaging the launch’s symbol would be bad luck.  When America first wanted to launch probes to photograph the surface of the moon in the early 1960s with the Ranger missions, every mission failed until the seventh one.  A seventh launch attempt that just happened to have everyone sharing the can of peanuts one of the engineers had brought into the room.  It’s been peanuts at ground control ever since.  After the rocket launch, everyone on the ground gets a meal of beans and cornbread, the meal that the original control crew had after the first successful launch.  And lets not forget the bagels and donuts ground crew gets after the shuttle orbiter gets successfully delivered to the launch pad.  Bagels and donuts are round; the shuttle is round.  Obviously.

In Russia, people would lay coins on the railroad track the shuttle would arrive via.  The flattened coins were not only a completely cool way to memorialize the event but were also considered lucky.  Cosmonauts were not allowed to lay coins on the tracks though.  It was considered unlucky for them to see the shuttle arriving.  Instead they were given haircuts during the shuttle’s arrival, as much a tradition as ward against bad luck.

In fact, you’ve probably already noticed that a lot of these seem to be tradition as much as superstition.  At its core though, what is a great deal of superstition but at some point someone did something and got the result they were hoping for and thought ‘if its not broke, don’t fix it’, carrying on with the habit until everyone forgot why it was a habit in the first place?    

For instance, cosmonauts sign Yuri Gagarin’s guestbook in his old office and, in some traditions, ask his permission to fly.  They also leave red carnations in his honor on the Memorial Wall.  And, like Yuri, they too pee on the right rear tire of the bus taking them to the launch pad.  Ladies don’t have to but some of them bring a jar of pee to contribute.

Both astronauts and cosmonauts bring a talisman with them into the shuttle.  Its for good luck, but it also is the first indication to the people inside the shuttle that they’ve left Earth as it starts to float once they’ve cleared the tug of gravity.  Stuffed animals are popular for this purpose.

Before launch in the States though, while waiting to enter the shuttle, the astronauts and the tech crew play cards until the commander of the mission has the losing hand.  This lets him leave his bad luck behind with his cards.  While the crew is playing cards, the launch crew fills the tanks with fuel for the launch and writes a woman’s name in the frost that forms during the process, a superstition picked up from their Russian counterparts.

In 1980, this tradition was left out during a satellite launch and 47 ground crew were killed in an accident.

Baikonur, Kazakhstan, leased by the Russians for their space program, has an Avenue of Heroes where a tree has been planted for every launch.  The successful ones - and the ones that weren’t. Every cosmonaut walks the route past the trees before launch.

Russia will not launch missions on October 24.  A disaster in 1960 was followed by another in 1963 on that date and it was permanently scratched from the calendar after that.

The Apollo 13 mission has put due to the taint already associated with that number for most Americans, though it did have a happier ending.  Incidentally, the vest worn by mission controller Gene Kranz during that mission is on display at the National Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.  His wife sewed him a new vest for every single mission he was involved in.  The Apollo 13 vest was white.

Lastly, every mission after the ill-fated Challenger explosion has seen a bouquet of flowers delivered to mission control.  One rose for every astronaut on the flight and a single white one to remember the ones that have been lost.

[cambion-companion]

Also speaking of the Apollo missions...why "Apollo"? I'm sure there is a reason and I may even Google it lmao but why not Artemis? Sea ships were always named for women so why not space ships? And the goddess of the moon? Wasted.

[dragons-in-spaceee]

im a little too obsessed with the Saturn V rocket I think…. shes just the most beautiful gorgeous machine ever built

[softlyapollo]

saturn v at kennedy space center

[stone-cold-groove]

Illustration detail from a Project Apollo mission profile brochure.

[estobrotvpodcast]

[perimsmouse]

[supernovaa-remnant]

this is one of my favorite videos ever btw <3