Welcome to the Lounge!

It seems these days with the Coronavirus (Covid-19) bringing us to a social standstill that every possible kind of distraction is being sought.  Well, NASA’s got our backs! Their Hubble telescope project observes all kinds awesome celestial phenomena every day, and has now made those images available at the following link, https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/what-did-hubble-see-on-your-birthday

What was the Hubble looking at on your birthday or April 20th or January 1st? A galaxy, globular cluster, comet, Uranus…

This documentary opens on a poignant note about how NASA got its engineering roots: with German forces surrendering at the end of WWII either to Russian or United States forces. Von Braun, as we know, opted to surrender to the US forces – that reasoning can be discovered in a separate 4-part miniseries called Rocketmen. His work under the 3rd Reich was being grossly perverted into deadly powerful rockets known as the infamous V2, which leveled much of London during the height of the second world war. “The rocket performed perfectly,” Von Braun stated, “it just landed on the wrong rock,” (referring to Earth). 

Under the US Army project Operation Paperclip Von Braun and several of his scientists were brought to the States, Alabama by way of Ft. Bliss, TX, to continue working and improving the V2; some of the US-based engineers already at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama were not too thrilled with the notion of working on what had essentially become the first “weapon of mass destruction.” Fortunately, Von Braun’s engineers from Germany were able to assuage the US engineers that the rockets were being converted to propulsion vehicles for space flight, not for militarization. The chief sentiment among the Germans working the project was that this project offered a means of redeeming the image of Germany following the war and the atrocities committed at the hands of Hitler and the 3rd Reich. 

When the Russians successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, in October of 1957 into low-Earth orbit it lit a fire under the US to catch up; our first successful launch was with the Redstone rocket – Juno 1, a four-stage rocket that launched Explorer 1 as part of Project Vanguard; six months later President Eisenhower would officially create NASA and an initial 4600+ civilian jobs and more than a decade of job security. Many of the testimonies from the documentary declare how the initiative to get ahead of the Communist super-power stirred our nation – if only we didn’t require a war to achieve the same sense of unity. 

One of the more fascinating segments of the documentary was how it described the evolution of the V-2 into the Saturn V(5): an initial-stage, liquid-propellant rocket first used strictly as a long-range missile vehicle that, with a change in payload (bombs to satellites to eventual humans) and additional stages for longer trajectories, the transformation is nothing short of impressive. 

Once the rockets were developed they would need to be made mobile so they could be transported to launch pads that were placed far enough apart to account for a minimum 50-foot radius. Seeing the pictures of NASA building what would become the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), the Vehicle Assembly Plant, and so forth. They had to get the rockets from the plant to the launch pads; one of the more ingenius segments was when one of the engineers, noticing a problem with the tank that transported the rockets to their respective launch pads was getting regularly clogged by the sand that the original tracks had been made from, suggested covering the entirety of the track in river rocks to provide a buffer between the bearings on the tanks wheels and the ground itself – that method has remained in place since. 

With MSFC at operational capacity President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925 in March 1961, out of which gave us pivotal historical figures like Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Katherine G. Johnson featured in the 2016 hit Hidden Figures. Then, in late November of 1963, President Kennedy’s assassination would send shockwaves through NASA as not only were those direct beneficiaries of EO-10925 but all of NASA (an almost purely civilian agency) left in a state of concern for their jobs and livelihood. “His dream had become our dream.” 

Thankfully Kennedy’s successor, Vice-President-to-be-President Johnson, was also moved by the vision enough to maintain it. So moved was Johnson about the space program he would have Cape Canaveral renamed to Cape Kennedy. With those jobs kept secure it was back to work for NASA, and if The Shining taught us anything it’s that, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” So, where do a bunch of civilian operators and engineers go to let off all that steam? Why, The Mouse Trap! A veritable who’s who of NASA showed up there to rub shoulders, and no matter your role at NASA – from the lowliest janitor to some prospective astronauts to the many different administrators and program directors – the environment was exceedingly inclusive as long as you were at NASA. 

With technology on the cutting-edge hard lessons were learned almost daily, some lessons were harder and more costly than others. Apollo 1 was easily in the top 5 of hardest learned lessons with the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffie being consumed in a fire believed to have been caused by an electrical spark from their communication equipment in a pure-oxygen environment. Considerations like including Nitrogen in the Oxygen to better simulate real air and reduce the presence of a volatile breathing environment, having an access hatch that opens outwards instead of inwards, and the materials of the capsule itself. In the 2019 biography on Armstrong, even he called it an indictment on everyone at NASA. One of the “gifts” that came from that tragedy was flow-charts for electrical diagrams. Before then it was one engineer’s interpretations of another’s electrical symbolism – very little in the way of a concrete standard to work with where the complicated electrical systems of spacecraft was concerned. 

Apollo 3 would become the first victorious Apollo unmanned flight making Apollo 7 the first successful Apollo manned-flight; much of the first six flights were unmanned for testing the Saturn I – V rockets themselves. By Apollo 4, as a nation, we were deeply embroiled in the Vietnam War, Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, we needed a victory to keep national morale up. “People weren’t being forced to work those long hours,” stated one operator, incidentally reaffirming Mark Armstrong’s sentiments about his own father’s long hours at Marshall, “A lot of divorces here at NASA.” Life went on indeed: another operator reported that he only got to meet his 4th son briefly over teleconference to the hospital remotely from work. For the 60s that’s both sad and also kind of cool, from a technology perspective. Yet another operator recalls learning of his father’s death shortly following a meeting regarding Apollo 10. 

While all that life is happening around NASA’s team the agents are clearly divided between losing that quality time with their own families versus the great firsts that they were experiencing as a direct benefit of working there: Apollo 8, on December 24th 1968, brought back the first images of the view of the earth from the moon… riveting, if even such a word is adequate. Today, we see those sorts of images after a simple Google search, but in those days that imagery was merely the work of speculative sci-fi writers and illustrators. 

By Apollo 11 the program was in full swing and had reached a few successful manned missions with the Saturn V rocket; what made this documentary really sweet was the inclusion of all the archived photos between Apollo 11 itself and the documentation never before seen, even in the 2019 Armstrong biography. Seeing the plaque left on the moon by the first three men, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” 

The job security for the civilian operators was solid during the days of Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo; however, as one operator put it, “The lack of enthusiasm was clear by Apollo 16 as the attendance for that launch was not even half of what Apollo 11 had been.” We had not only achieved Kennedy’s goal of beating Russia to the moon, but we had done so in style,” but again, “now, we had no answer or vision of where to go next.” 

It didn’t take long for the National budget’s consideration to lose sight of NASA now that we had put a man on the moon. By Apollo 12 NASA was already being forced to downsize on account of budget cuts. Some would suggest that those budget cuts were felt as early as Apollo 13 with Jim Lovell’s famous line, “Houston, we have a problem,” and the crew’s having to treat the return Lunar Module as a veritable “life boat” to return to Earth safely. Fortunately, Apollo 14 got that mission taken care of, but the point was sadly clear. NASA’s days with Apollo were officially numbered.  

Apollo 17 would go on to be the last Apollo mission carrying on it a professional geologist Eugene Cerna – the last US citizen to walk on the moon; from there all missions were eventually scrubbed for budget concerns. Not disclosed in the documentary, but Russia would go on to be the site for future launches from their Cosmodome in Baikonur. 

So what’s to be done with all the newly acquired understanding for this new rocket science and all the resulting technology? Von Braun released a statement shortly after Apollo 17’s successful return that, in recognition of the global leadership that NASA had essentially provided, the “program would be dissolving so as to spread the gained knowledge with the rest of the world.” For what is the point of advancing science and human progress if not to share what was learned. 

“Currently, we have a real focus on the individual, and that attitude is not going to cut it if we are going to go beyond ourselves. So, you go back to Apollo and you say, ‘What made it special? Why did it happen? What can we do today to put us back on track like we had?’” (Then), “Maybe, one of us will come up with an answer; it may not be ‘the’ answer, but it’s one of ‘em. Let’s go down that road!” 

Between 1961 and 72 an estimated 400,000+ civilians helped achieve President Kennedy’s goal of putting 12 men on the lunar surface and returned them home safely. 

“Nature cannot be fooled.” –Dr Richard Feynman on the political inclination to put image over safety. 

On a brisk January morning the 26th of 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated only 73 seconds after liftoff. The immediate fall-out brought on by engineers, management, and civilian consultants would ground the Space Shuttle fleet for at least three years. This review focuses on the two docudramas that were made: a 2013 direct-to-TV movie produced in conjunction with BBC, Open University, and The Science Channel called The Challenger that focuses on Dr. Richard Feynman’s contributions to the Rogers Commission investigating the accident. The second docudrama is a 2019 release that follows the lives of the engineers at Morton-Thiokol the night before the launch and in the days immediately following. 

Both movies offer gems of their own, and while they are centered on the same event in time their stories are so different from each other it’s not an intellectually fair move to compare their cinematic qualities. Reviewing them in order I watched them: the 2019 edition gives a surreal glimpse into a much different NASA administration than was seen during the 60s and into the early 70s. One glaring difference is that in the early days at NASA all the engineering was being accomplished in-house by Von Braun’s team as far as the rocketry went. Since as early as the late 70s that department has become outsourced, and the initial company to win that contract was Morton-Thiokol (MT). 

Much like 2016’s Hidden Figures the 2019 edition of the Challenger story does make use of a few composite characters, which makes sense considering at least a few of those engineers at MT would go on to become whistle-blowers, something NASA has never had to concern itself with until the Space Shuttle program. The character Adam played by up-and-comer Eric Hanson (Segfault, The Price of Fame) is essentially our protagonist; and there is a strong likelihood he may represent the top three whistle-blowers at MT, Brian Russell and Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly. For between a quarter and half the movie Hanson’s character is spending the hours leading to January 28th doing everything he can to convince those “on the fence” engineers as well as the management at MT that the O-rings are not tested at temperatures as low as the expected temperatures would be at Cape Canaveral/Kennedy in Florida on the morning of the 28th. 

Some of the more appalling parts of the movie are seeing the engineers squabbling with each other pedantically. In one nasty ad-hominem exchange Adam gets accused of being the pebble that gets caught in a shopping cart’s wheel and keeps the shopping cart from being able to move forward, at Adam’s insistence that the coming shuttle launch is simply not safe enough for the data they have. Adam’s response to this was to fire back, “And you’re the engineer who can’t design a shopping cart that can roll over the pebble.” I would have busted out laughing at that comeback had the implications of the movie not been so deeply in my mind. And, of course, the drama only continues from there. However, what begins to unfold in the first half of the movie is something quite revealing of NASA’s management, not to mention the management at MT. A historic conference call gets made between NASA’s administrators at Kennedy and Marshall Space Centers and the engineers and management at MT’s Utah plant. 

As Adam tries to urge NASA’s chief administrator to delay until they have a confirmed warmer day to launch the admin fires back, “When do you want us to launch? Next April?” With NASA unable to launch without contractor approval, but still wanting to meet its own promise to Congress – a revelation not made in this film but was in the 2013 edition – they apply pressure to the admins at MT. Rather than see the issue from the engineering (and thus health and safety side) stance the management officials decide to fold and give NASA the administrative go-ahead against the engineers’ wishes. It was pretty disturbing watching that unfold. 

All the engineers, nay management, are in agreement that the launch is simply too dangerous with the weather conditions. At one point Adam explains that they only have test data confirming launches as low as 54° F, since that’s the coldest NASA has ever launched a shuttle in its history. NASA’s administrators, not liking this response because they’ve already had to delay the STS-51-L mission several times, the latest of which was for a faulty sensor in the orbiter’s close-out hatch. By the time the engineers were able to fix it the launch window had already passed. “If they had launched the day before the mission was have been just fine,” Adam tells Finch Richards played by the versatile Glenn Morshower (Transformers: Dark of the Moon, 24). It’s Richards’ responsibility to determine if Adam is merely a corporate troublemaker, finger-pointer as opposed to a legitimate whistle-blower. 

Finch’s opposition is played by the equally versatile Dean Cain (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Out of Time) whose responsibility it was to coach all the engineers who would go on to become whistle-blowers what to say both at the press and as far as how to handle and field all inquiries. 

For me, the selling point of the 2019 edition would only amount to about 10 seconds or so when we get to see inside the crew compartment for a few seconds immediately following the shuttle’s disintegration and at least one of the astronaut’s struggle to activate their Emergency Oxygen System, and what that says about those final two and a half minutes the astronauts had before plummeting into the Atlantic – almost none of them if any, it is believed, died immediately upon the disintegration itself. Most, if not all, likely perished on impact into the Atlantic considering the sheer g-force the compartment would have been under. I recall when watching Gravity for the first time that it would really suck to get hurdled into space due to random junk coming at you from “nowhere” and no means of being retrieved. But watching the panic in the face of the crewmember I recall feeling a deeper sense of “oh, shit!” than any fictional account could come close to achieving, and, yes, that includes the legendary Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would rather have to combat a homicidal AI machine than experience those two and a half minutes of pure uncertainty. 

And speaking of sensations that hit us “in the feels,” as revealing as I found the 2019 telling of the whistle-blowers’ story the 2013 edition is even more stark as to the revelations, implications and over-all explanations for why the Space Shuttle Program was in need of whistle-blowers at all. 

The 2013 edition focuses more-so on the Rogers Presidential Committee that investigated the accident, but more specifically on Dr. Feynman’s contributions. Played by Oscar-winner William Hurt (Lost In Space, Humans), Feynman’s tenacious efforts to uncover what actually brought the Space Shuttle Challenger down were so impactful that even the chairman of the committee, William P. “Bill” Rogers played by Brian Dennehy (First Blood, Tommy Boy) was discovered to have told Neil Armstrong, also on the committee, “That Richard Feynman’s turning into a real pain in the ass.” In the movie he doesn’t say this to Neil, but to another composite character. There’s a scene when Feynman first shows up at NASA and gets introduced first to the United States’ first woman in space Dr. Sally Ride played by Eve Best (The King’s Speech, Nurse Jackie) and the composite character “fellow Physicist” Dr. Alton Kiel (sp?) played by Langley Kirkwood (Dredd, Banshee). Unfortunately, while his is a composite character, he is only billed as “avionics engineer.” When Feynman meets him, “Your name I recognize too, a fellow physicist.” Kiel responds, “Informally. I’ve been in Washington [DC] several years,” to which Feynman chuckles a bit and asks, “How’s the integrity?!” Now that made me laugh out loud and still does even when I go and re-watch the show. Having read Surely, you must be joking, Mr Feynman that was the kind of humor I’d expect from a personality like his, and I tend to agree with his philosophy about the integrity of politicians: they’re like arachnids, they’d eat their young to make a buck or pass a bill. 

The 2013 edition starts within an hour of Challenger’s launch and interweaves that moment with one where Dr. Feynman is getting introduced at a Physics lecture hall where he’s about to put on the very show he does best – showing prospective physicists the importance of being able to conceptualize all the kinds of crazy Calculus formulae they’ll be subjected to in their futures before learning the theory, the formula; and the way he does it is nothing short of Feynman-brilliant. 

As Feynman takes the stage, he wastes no time describing the mathematical explanation of the transition from potential to kinetic energy. The formula he uncovers looks completely Greek to anyone who has never had so much as an Algebra or Calculus class; I have studied both I barely got the gist of the formula before Feynman, seeing students starting to furiously scribble down the formula, tells them to stop, “Not till you know what it means.” Since the theory is only as good as its application Feynman prepares the demonstration by setting up the infamous bowling ball experiment. I won’t go into how it works because I do want you to watch the movie, but suffice to say his point is made loud and clear. He presses, what good would it have done them to write the formula down? “Make you feel pretty smart? But now you understand it.” While he is going through this philosophy of science his words are pulled into narration as we see the crew preparing for the trip to the launch pad and the Challenger launch. “What is science? Science is a way to teach how; something gets to be known, in as much as something can be known because nothing is known absolutely. That’s how to handle doubt and uncertainty.” It’s the line he delivers just before the disintegration that still gives me goose-bumps, “Science teaches us what the rules of evidence are; we mess with that at our peril.” Hurt does a phenomenal job nailing Feynman’s mannerisms, eccentricities, and even that famous New York accent that always pervaded Feynman’s speech patterns being from upstate New York. 

As the 2013 edition was based on the collective efforts of Richard’s and Gweneth’s book What Do You Care What Other People Think we do get to see an incredible degree of insight into Feynman’s initial reluctance to join the committee, but then Gweneth played by Joanne Whalley (Willow, The Man Who Knew Too Little) counters with how his methodology in finding answers is exactly what would make him the perfect man for that committee, and boy was she correct. Much later in the film General Don Kutyna, played by the also highly versatile Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek, Thirteen Days), corroborates that sentiment as Feynman is the only genuinely independent scientist on the commission – everyone else, including Dr Ride, had some amount of their careers in space at risk depending on what they made known. Where the 2019 edition showed that there were certainly problems on MT’s end where the overall engineering and manufacturing of the SRBs were concerned the 2013 edition shows just how much arm-twisting and pressure NASA’s administration was putting on its own team-members, also another first. 

One would think that with a disaster that was televised to the entire world NASA would be eager to have the Rogers Commission get started investigating right away, I and Feynman both seemed to. At the opening of the meeting Bill Rogers poses the idea that the Challenger shuttle, being composed of more than 2 million parts, may well be too complex of a machine to accurate pin down a single cause for the accident. Feynman’s own insistence that no matter how many parts may have been involved with the Space Shuttle that thanks to his path integral formulation any problem could have an infinite number of parts involved and one would still be able to use statistical analysis to predict the likelihood of any one of those parts involved as the culprit of the accident, “…whatever happened to Challenger an explanation can be found. Or what are we doing here if we don’t think it’s possible?” After handling a few more concerns as far as the best method to proceed with the investigation and how to handle press queries Bill Rogers strangely adjourns the meeting with the assertion that everyone, “Would reconvene in five days’ time, and enjoy Washington in the meantime.” The look on Feynman’s face was a cross of confusion and contempt; completely understandable since this was a guy who loathed wasting time for concerns of ceremony or political image. 

Being the tenacious explorer, Feynman bypasses Chairman Rogers wishes (they weren’t orders after-all) and starts investigating on his own starting at the Marshall Flight Center. The discontentment of the engineers is palpable from the get-go. Like being the new “weirdo” at school Feynman takes his lunch and goes to sit at a table to start nomming at which point two of the engineers get up to walk away knowing precisely why Feynman was there. One of the engineers even goes as far as to say he’s got nothing to hide. Um, great?? It’s while sitting down to that lunch Feynman’s able to notice the body language on the two engineers remaining at the table upon asking them to come up with a number they believe accurately predicts the statistical likelihood of a launch failure. The two engineers kinda eye-ball each other for a moment. It’s just long enough that anyone who’s at all familiar with the Netflix show Lie to Me could tell you the two men were sweating their jobs. Why, though? Why should any engineer whose job it is to make the launch as safe as it can be for the astronauts to do their jobs ever fear the repercussions of being honest with an investigator about the concerns they might have as engineers about the products they were making? 

As Feynman starts to inquire with one of the SRB engineers played by Nick Boraine (Homeland, Black Sails) about what must have happened the engineer believed the main engines to have been the culprit rather than the SRBs. When Feynman pressed for why that had to be the case the engineer replied that it couldn’t have been either of the SRBs since they couldn’t “fly with holes in them.” Just as Feynman believes he’s getting some cooperating the engineer stops mid-explanation with a paranoia creeping into his tone, “Look, I’m not ratting out any of my fellow engineers,” to which Feynman rebuttled that if answers aren’t provided and a cause isn’t found there will be no more jobs for any of those men. Truth! 

As the story continues we get to see more into Feynman’s own quality of life. While he claimed to Gweneth only scenes earlier that he was “fit as a fiddle” he was unfortunately far from that. Turns out the exposure to the atom bomb he got along with everyone else at Los Alamos was creating football and similar-sized tumors that were affecting his kidney function. In multiple scenes he is seen all but wrapping himself around his room’s heater. 

In the following scene he is with the full committee at the hangar where about 70-ish% of the debris from the wreckage has been collected and laid out for examination. The committee learns about the emergency oxygen having in fact been activated by at least a few of the crew. Rogers approached Feynman, while in the midst of examining some of the debris, about the visit to Marshall and strongly recommends how he prefers the committee stick together on the investigation. Feynman’s rebuttal is simply that he doesn’t agree with just standing around as the rest of the committee has essentially been ordered to do. “The other members are just showing respect, Dr Feynman.” Feynman, clearly indignified by Bill’s implication, fires back, “Are you saying I’m not? You understand the implications of the Oxygen being activated? I do; they had to do that themselves, which means they were still alive for some of those two minutes and 36 seconds before slamming into the ocean; Mr. Rogers, I’m an atheist. I personally doubt they were touching the face of God so I prefer to show my respect by finding the cause of their appalling deaths and not stand around looking sad.” Being a self-described agnostic I had to let out a small ovation for that sentiment. “I don’t know why you wanted me on this commission,” Feynman continued, “but now that I’m on it I have every intention of finding out what went wrong.” If you have ever worked on a speed-bag that was what I call the intellectual equivalent of an Iron Mike right-hook taking the speed bag off its ceiling! Again, from Feynman, “Ya know, I don’t know that NASA did a great job.” General Kutyna shoots him a look that I consider a glimmer of hope in the good General’s eye. The tension between Chairman Rogers and Feynman is definitively palpable. Question is why? 

By the next scene we see a bond forming between Kutyna and Feynman, and from there it doesn’t take Kutyna long to “gently,” as can be accommodated for bringing a civilian in on a government project, express to the physicist how much his being an independent party gives him the most leverage for finding the answers above anyone else on the team including Dr Ride. “I’m invisible,” Feynman boasts a bit, “Invisible,” General Kutyna affirms, “but watch your six.” Not a military man Feynman asks him to clarify the metaphor, and Kutyna does just that. You’re invisible, but not beyond some amount of intervention if you push too hard in the wrong direction. For the duration of the film Kutyna makes a point to Feynman that NASA is not the same civilian organization it once was. 

Feynman returns to Marshall Flight Center and this time around comes across even more unsettling information about the Challenger’s SRBs: pogo oscillation. After challenging one of the engineers at Marshall (a different one than he’d spoken to on his first visit to MFC) he began finding that the engineers were miss-classifying matters of a mission critical nature with lower levels of critical rankings. Unfortunately, Feynman’s impulsive nature gets him into a small pickle with Chairman Rogers when Feynman hastily jumps to the conclusion that the main engines were the problem as opposed to the SRB O-rings. Though not disclosed in the 2013 production Feynman was actually still correct that even while the O-rings were the immediate cause of STS-51-L’s accident the safety of the shuttle itself has been called into question several times by elite engineers. What’s more unfortunate is that the same design used on Space Shuttle Columbia would ultimately lead to its own disintegration upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003 killing all of its crew members in a significantly more violent manner than anyone aboard Challenger would have experienced.  

I could spend another four pages providing more and more break down into the 2013 movie, but perhaps one of my favorite scenes was the exchange between Feynman and Kutyna in the ladder’s garage as the good General was looking for the most “in one’s face” hint possible to direct Feynman’s attention to the O-rings. Kutyna’s first method was to use his own sports car and mentioned how it would make a great ride if the carburetor weren’t so problematic, suggesting that the O-rings always cause trouble in the cold. Greenwood doesn’t say this in the movie, but the book suggests Kutyna was actually a little more obvious than the movie suggests. While Feynman is admiring the car though not much of an enthusiast about sports cars, he and Kutyna talk a bit about Feynman’s own involvement in World War II back in the 40s and how Feynman must have had his share of government types. Feynman tells Kutyna that he had been responsible for determining how much fissionable material would be needed to produce the kind of blast Oppenheimer had in mind. “It’s not a good use of science.” Kutyna tried consoling him with, “Your efforts helped end the war.” Feynman gave off a scoffing chuckle. Even while Feynman might not have taken Kutyna’s hint in the garage the same engineer from Feynman’s first visit to Marshall Space Flight Center showed Feynman the O-rings of the SRBs, and finally Feynman, at least in the movie, is able to piece together the concern. 

In the following scene there is a cross-over validation of the engineers for MT telling the committee that the engineers at MT were in disagreement about the approval of the launch. As Dr Ride points out that if the management at NASA was indeed warned by MT engineers, “The astronauts sure weren’t.” Even Feynman describes in his book how livid that made him. 

I think what I found to be the most disturbing of all the revelations was when Kutyna takes Feynman to the Pentagon and has the eminent scientist sign a bunch of NDAs; Feynman would ultimately reveal in What Do You Care … was that in fact NASA, while still a chiefly civilian research agency in guise, had ultimately become absorbed into the military industrial complex (as seems to happen when a civilian government agency loses its crowd-funding), and thus its guise of being a civilian agency becomes merely a smoke screen. What becomes revealed is that while NASA may have gotten its start at the beginning of the Cold War and while we fulfilled Kennedy’s initiative of reaching the moon before the Russians, the Cold War was still in full swing. The US Air Force was still interested in deploying unmanned satellites to keep an eye on our overseas interests. “Paranoia,” Feynman calls. “Whatever you civilians are told we are still deep in the Cold War. NASA approaches Congress with a deal that seems to make great economic sense,” essentially use NASA’s Space Shuttle program as the sole vehicle into space. In theory it would save the taxpayers a boat load of money instead of having to build Falcon-heavy rockets that had to be rebuilt with every launch they could re-use the Space Shuttle as many times as needed to get the Air Force’s satellites in space. The tragedy folds over a new layer as NASA renegs on its promise to launch satellites and starts using the money instead for one PR stunt after another – in Challenger’s case: high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was sold on the falsehood that launch failures are at a ration of 1 in 100,000+, which Feynman would point out in the last day of the investigative committee that such odds are so ridiculously incalculable it would impossible that they could have derived that number from experimental data. At the end of this unveiling of sorts Feynman vents, “Upstairs you made me sign that classified information thing. So what’s going on, Kutyna? You’ve got me trapped. It would jeopardize national security: the Soviets learn we can’t launch anything in cold weather. You’ve been playing me from the beginning?” Seeing the exchange at that point between Kutyna and Dr Feynman was more than enough to raise the goose bumps for me, again. Feynman grows furious as he tells Kutyna, “I can’t do anyting with this. Don’t ever tell me anything I can’t open my mouth and blab to the world about,” but Kutyna, not ready to lose the battle to expose the shabby management NASA has fallen into is eager to help Dr Feynman find a way to bring the information to public’s eye. It’s there that Kutyna finally explains to Feynman how as a civilian he really is the one truly independent scientist on the whole committee. Dr Ride, Armstrong, everyone knows a lot of the puzzle, but no one knows the entire story. 

After the Apollo program, specifically Apollo 17, many of the employees who worked at NASA felt the sting of downsizing as public interest in space exploration weigned in the years following that last Apollo mission. So by the late 70s, NASA becomes desperate to keep government funding flowing their way, Kutyna tells Feynamn. In a bold initiative NASA made a promise to Congress that they’ll send up a payload whenever needing, which it decides to dedicate to General Kutyna’s satellite deployment project. 

Whether the statistical analysis Feynman had requested from the Marshall Space Flight Center’s engineers was figured out in the code by Feynman upfront or if the code phrase, “We think: Ivory Soap” in the movie it’s Gweneth that actually translates the code. “the old Ivory Soap ads, 99.4% pure.” Eureka! The Marshall engineers estimated the success analysis of any mission at only 99.4%, which is considerably less than the NASA management’s claim of 1 in 100,000 launches before a mission failure would happen.  

In the final day of the investigation Feynman makes a point of how even some of the most complex ideas in nature can be demonstrated with easily comprehendible experiments. To make his point about O-ring resilience he used the same material the standard O-rings for the SRBs were made from, he pinched some into a C-clamp and immersed it in ice-cold water for a cuople of hours and successfully demonstrated, as Dr Ride and General Kutyna had long suspected, that at lower temperatures the O-rings do in fact lose their resilience and ability to expand as designed when subjected to freezing temperatures. 

Over-all grade for the 2019 edition: 8 

Over-all grade for the 2013 edition: 10 

What is BOINC?? In so many words BOINC lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux) or Android device. BOINC downloads scientific computing jobs to your computer and runs them invisibly in the background. It’s easy and safe.

The BOINC project is located at the University of California, Berkeley. It has existed since 2002, with funding primarily from the National Science Foundation.

About 30 science projects use BOINC; examples include Einstein@Home, IBM World Community Grid, and SETI@home.These projects investigate diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.

I personally run BOINC on my Android tablet, which you can download here; and here is a list of projects you can contribute to.

I love origin stories regardless of who the subject is about for the insights they tend to provide into the subjects lives, which can help us understand whether the deeds that we know them for were potentially or ultimately circumstantial and beyond their control. This review of Armstrong is going to be almost as much a biographical essay as it will a review of the documentary since there were that many awesome details both in testimonial and in terms of the overall cinematography. How fitting that this origin story was released so close to the 50^th anniversary of Apollo 11. I was blown away by this documentary in terms of all the archived footage and testimonials from family and friends as well learning that Harrison Ford (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Fugitive) narrated Neil’s words! You can’t be first without making someone else second… some dark revelations also make this documentary a must-see.

For starters I was amazed to learn of his small-town upbringing in socially conservative Wapakoneta, OH.  and the origins of his love for flight. We get to hear from Neil’s father Stephen at one point say that Neil was interested in airplanes “from the time he was a little boy. His mother bought him a .20 cent airplane and he built that; then from the 20-cent he went to a 50-center and went on up. Pretty soon he was building em with motors and was flying and testing em.”

 

“I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Harrison reads, “I wanted to be an airplane designer. I wanted to spend my life in aviation.” His younger son Mark said Neil got his pilot’s license before he got his driver’s license – unsurprisingly cool, but was this the beginning of a potentially dangerous obsession? His sister June recalls he had turned 17 and was awarded a Navy scholarship to study aeronautical engineering and flight training in college when the North Koreans invaded South Korea. Testimonies from his commanding officers and superiors were consistent between his being a quiet and humble individual, and a great aviator. As commendable as being a great aviator is the traumas of war and human loss take their toll and harder so on younger minders, Neil was among the youngest in his squadron. Neil’s ship suffered what he described in one of his letters as “a terrible accident,” with a count of four killed and five missing and about 15 others severely burnt, Harrison narrates, “It was a tragedy. It took me a long time to get over.” One commonality I have heard in testimonies from veterans is that you don’t ever “get over it,” as much as numb yourself to a point that you can continue with your job.

On September 13 of the same years as that accident he was on an armed reconnaissance mission when he came under anti-aircraft fire. As Harrison narrates it Neil states he was diving on a target and only narrowly missed crashed landing, but was able to “nurse the aircraft” back over friendly territory and parachuted out; it was that experience, Neil’s commander states, that sold Neil as more than just “one of the boys.” His decision making and skills in maneuvering the aircraft the way he did, “put him head and shoulders above the rest.”

Once Neil completed his tour in Korea he returned home to attend Purdue University in Indiana, which was where he met Janet at a Phi Delta Tau party. As Janet recalls it he was confident she was the one he’d marry, but he wouldn’t ask her out till after he finished school. However, finishing school only led him to back his obsession: test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base (EAB). Easily the most exciting place to work for a guy like Neil, but that excitement came with a price: being an aircraft test pilot means constantly looking for problems with the aircraft and trying to making the correct adjustments so as not to die, which didn’t always work out. He and Janet got started on their family in January 1956. Rick was their first born followed about four years later by Karen. Janet recalls attaching cowbells to their backs so she could hear them playing, which might beat the sounds of screams when accidents happen… jury’s out since I’m not a parent.

While at EAB one of Neil’s more memorable and defining moments came when he got to fly the X-15: a small plane powered by a huge rocket and dropped from a B-52 bomber; the plane’s purpose was to give pilots the opportunity to get themselves just above the atmosphere to be able to figure out how to get back down and come to a landing. If you have ever seen Firstman (2018) it’s the first scene, and those who have seen it are familiar with what happened to Karen, but this edition goes a little deeper about what happened, and it’s difficult to not shed a tear or two: less than three years old she developed a brain tumor that not even radiation and therapy could stop. Listening to Harrison read Neil’s words I got a sense that Neil’s only idea of mourning is the same one he had to rely on during his time in Korea that you steel yourself and keep going. Both this documentary and the afore-mentioned Hollywood blockbuster show Neil discovering NASA’s Apollo project down in Houston looking for aspiring astronauts, and as tends to happen when a tragedy of that magnitude occurs Janet, like any mother, was ready to be anywhere else but the desert. So they relocated to Houston in 1962.

Neil became NASA’s first civilian astronaut, and then Mark – their second son – came along that same year. He along with colleague and close friend Ed White went halfsies on a plot of land and built houses across from each other. That’s when we get to hear from his colleagues at NASA. Frank Borman recalled one of the big differences between Neil and most of the more military-types were the type that would simply want to know what time it was when looking at a clock, but Neil was always equally interested in how it worked! “Neil lived in a shell, and in order to get Neil out of his shell you had to introduce him to a subject he was interested in and convince him you knew something about that subject, and if you passed that test then he’d pop out of his shell with a big smile on his face and be your best buddy!” –Michael Collins.

Once Project Mercury was completed and the test of putting a man into orbit and bringing him safely back home had been a success the next mission was Project Gemini, which you can read more about in the linked Wikipedia article. Neil’s writings make it clear that everyone in the NASA program had their minds on the race between the US and the USSR. The idea of hourly employment and notions like “quitting time” were not in the vocabulary of any of those men. Mark recalled that his dad was training all the time and would often not be home for long stretches (14-hour days and 6.5-day weeks), which would put Janet in a position of having to play all parts mom, housekeeper, nanny and super-woman. While Neil would be off on some kind of assignment whether boning up on his geology, getting subjected to this and that endurance test by NASA Mark recalled, “Mom was an unsung hero,” he described how Neil was probably most guilty of simply not being communicative enough and keeping Janet more informed of what he was doing.

March 1966: Neil and David Scott were to pilot the Gemini VIII (8) to rendezvous and dock with the Agena. Scott recalls that the first two stages of the mission went off without a hitch, but only a few minutes after Neil completes the docking Scott alerts him to their roll, but Scott only found out from reading Neil’s attitude horizon “8 ball” indicator as they couldn’t see Earth from the angle they were at; Harrison reads, “When the rates became quite violent it was a bit dicey,” and then to worsen matters they lost radio contact. This was likely the hardest time in Janet’s life once even NASA decided to cut off their direct communications link to radio exchange that wasn’t even available to the general public. Fortunately, Neil was able to recover from the rapid roll by using the Re-entry Control System (RCS). Yet, probably the funniest take-away from that story was hearing Harrison reading about how Neil’s carrier was waiting for him in the Caribbean, but he landed somewhere near Okinawa, “That’s the furthest anyone’s ever missed; I don’t expect that record to be broken.”

Footage from Neil’s welcome home party back in his home town spoke volumes to why, probably, he was the one who NASA’s top PR spokesman Christopher Kraft asserted ought to be “the first on the surface.” Not long after Neil’s welcome home party did the Apollo 1 tragedy occur that took the lives of Ed White, Virgil “Guss” Grissom, and Roger Chaffee. Neil described the loss and the lesson as an indictment on all of them as to how much work still had to be done. There were 30 people applying to be the first man on the moon, and interestingly Kraft stated he believed all the men could have done a great job. Even Collins asked what set Neil apart from the other 29? Collins’ own belief was bi-sected: on the shorter view there was the combination of Neil’s experience as a combat pilot during Korea coupled with his experiencing flying the X-15; alternatively, the longer view was that Neil’s general demeanor was far more socially conservative as his upbringing would have suggested about him. Collins further remarked that Neil wasn’t the type to sell the program, or “go out and drink with the boys and make a fool of himself. He was a straight arrow.”

Chris Kraft said, “Did I have something to do with Neil being the first on the moon? Yes, I did it!” While I am not a military man I have been in a fraternity, and the sense of comradery is often palpable enough that you figure out how to accomplish certain tasks as a team regardless of whether the team is two or 10 members because while the task could be as simple as putting one‘s foot on an alien surface the gravity behind the task, as Neil so eloquently describe the gravity of being first, it affects more than just that individual. After having discussed this matter with at least a couple of my own friends as well as to have seen enough archive footage to know the suggestion is not outlandish I have wondered for at least 10 years now if both men couldn’t have descended the Lunar Module, Buzz immediately after Neil, and then both men stand on either side of the ladder and make their first step together. Kraft’s explanation left me livid, suggesting that Aldrin simply wasn’t as good as Neil was as far as likeability and “being the right person.” If you’ll forgive the tangent, I also believe there was enough room for Jack on Rose’s floating wood. Perhaps Neil’s son Rick said it best to explain why Neil was selected over Buzz and that’s because Neil always came across as a team player. It was never about Neil, it was about the team with him. We’ll never know if Buzz kept that attitude in his heart.

One of Neil’s more moving sentiments was when he was staring back at Earth and seeing it as the remarkably vulnerable blue marble he said, “Protection is required; however, not from foreign aggressors or natural calamity, but from its own population.”

Probably one of my favorite parts was listening to one of Neil’s close friends Charlie Mechem describe the way three generations of his family watched and reacted to the moon landing. Charlie’s father was born in 1893 and had already witnessed a lot of other firsts for mankind so his jaw was already on the floor just seeing Eagle land on the moon. Charlie was himself ecstatic for the obvious reason of seeing one of his best friends “be the first,” but what really made this particular anecdote was how Charlie described his own kids’ reaction to the live footage, “Yeah, I think I saw a show about this last week,” even Charlie belted out a laugh.

There’s a scene where the camera is essentially taking Neil’s perspective as he descends the LM’s ladder. Harrison is narrating in the background that Neil didn’t really have a script or any real plan for what he was going to say when he made the first step except that he reasoned to himself, “I’ll be taking a relatively small step from there down to there, but then I thought about all the people who had made it possible for me to make that step.”  The camera pans down the ladder in such a way that between the lighting, the angles, and the slow descent of the view down the ladder the Lunar Module seems to transform into this state-of-the-art piece of technology with the aluminized Kaptan film seeming to glow gold in reflection of the sun’s light that it must have looked like in 1969.

Some of the awesome voice-overs from those who rejoiced in the accomplishment, “Being closer to the moon helps us realize that we’re all human beings together,”
“I hope this brings unity,” and more similar sentiments came out that for at least one day there was a mission being accomplished that had us all united… well, most of us.

Following the three heroes’ return home was the world tour they went on; everywhere they went they were heralded, but only Neil was requested to speak. Watching all the footage and seeing the numerous speaking engagements the three men attended I got the overwhelming sensation that the world at large thinks Neil was up there by himself, and that Buzz’s being second somehow doesn’t register in many a minds that he was still the second human being to walk on another planetary surface. One report says Neil wasn’t all that fond of the media exposure from the tour, but that he dealt with it as part of the job almost like one tolerates the meetings one may have to attend at work; it’s not fun just necessary. As David Scott put it, “The fact that he’s first everybody wants Neil Armstrong.”

“Thank God social media didn’t exist back then,” Rick Armstrong on the sheer volume of exposure and media attention garnered from Neil being first on the moon.

50 years ago yesterday Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle on the surface of the moon, and as Neil stepped from one of the module’s landing-leg platforms onto the luanar surface and uttered his famous line, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” the notion of flying to and exploring worlds beyond our own became thus cemented into human, US history and was no longer merely the speculations of many science fiction authors.

For all the crap I talk about Google I have to say I have long appreciated how they always make a doodle to celebrate anniversaries of scientific achievements. I am pleased to report Google didn’t let me down for this spectacle either: for those who may have missed it, they made a touching animation narrated by Apollo 11’s command module pilot Michael Collins exploring just how impressive that mission really was.

One of my own favorite fun facts is how the entire Apollo series relied on a computer (the Apollo Guidance Computer) with 0.043MHz clock speed that ran on at most a few hundred megabytes of information, and its clock: about 127 million times slower than the iPhone 6’s 64 bit Cortex A8 ARM architecture.

One of my other take-aways was nearer the end of the animation when Collins reaffirms one the underlying philosophies of what it takes to accomplish large-scale scientific endeavors, everyone. When they came back they went on a tour of the world and everywhere they visited people would say, “We did it,” as a testament to what our species can accomplish when we set aside our differences.

In a rare interview with Neil Armstrong back in 2011 he mentions how even when he and Buzz were descending to the lunar surface and made a successful touchdown on “fumes” the two didn’t spend a great deal of time meditating over the accomplishment. To hear Neil tell it was a handshake between him and Buzz, and then back to work. And then again while he and Buzz were on the surface working through their checklist of “get these done while you’re up there,” the US President calls the phone on the lunar module from the Oval office to congratulate him and the entire team for just landing the module. And to paraphrase Neil’s response, “Thanks, Mr. President. There’s still lots of work to be done…,” and, frankly, there will never be an end to the workload when it comes to making scientific progress. Every answer brings a hundred more questions.

That there is always more work to be done raises a fundamental question: why haven’t we gone back to the moon since Apollo? Many theories have been posited, but the short answer is finance. It is an expensive endeavor to send even three people to another rock, and since NASA was begat from and remains a government entity it’s the American taxpayers who get to float the bill. What really pushed Americans to consent to floating the bill for this mission was the burning desire to not come in second place to Russia in the space race.

Fortunately, today neither are relations between the US and Russia as tense as they were back then nor is the mission of space exploration solely a NASA (or US Government) enterprise. Thanks to private agencies like Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman (formerly OrbitalATK), and Lockheed Martin new technologies are emerging all the time to improve everything about space exploration from mission longevity to the overall health and comfort of the astronauts themselves.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard project is streamlining “recyclable” rocketry! Northrop Grumman’s unmanned cargo transporter Cygnus has been making regular deliveries to the International Space Station since 2017, which you can read more about here. One of Lockheed’s many projects is the AA-2, a safety abortion mechanism designed to ensure any Orion spacecraft crew’s safe return to Earth in the event that a mid-launch abortion becomes necessary.

Hopefully in the next 50 years we’ll have something in the way of either a fueling station between Earth and the moon and perhaps establish some between the moon and Mars and/or even a long-term lunar colony setup, more ideas can be found here.

As an added bonus I hope to be able to add a collage of imagery from newspaper clippings from July 20th 1969 to this article in a few days.

This is addition is a compliment to our Facebook group, but a compliment I hope to see take over eventually as the primary forum for our group’s communication.

Think of this area as much for suggesting areas for improvement and offering feedback for the time being.

This site can be anything we want it to be.