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"Flight: My Life in Mission Control" by Chris Kraft is a pretty interesting autobiographical book by a guy who was intimately involved and new the astronauts well. I read it a few years ago, and I still have it on the shelf somewhere around here.....

seamusTX wrote:The early astronauts and test pilots seem to have had ice water in their veins.

Can you imagine being in an experimental spacecraft that suffered an explosion and was heading in the general direction of the moon with no propulsion? And they said, "Houston, we have a problem."

I like to think I can cope with emergencies, but I probably would have been screaming like a little girl.

- Jim

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about one of the Mercury astronauts.....I think it was either Armstrong or Shepard, who was running a simulation in a mockup capsule when the test administrators deliberately dropped about a ton of gravel on an angled piece of sheet steel, making an enormous and unexpected racket. The astronaut's heartbeat didn't even register a slight uptick, and he kept on with running the simulation. When the test was over, he found the responsible party and cussed him out.

WildBill wrote:

Dragonfighter wrote:Two Semi-Related incidents in the space race:

During our early ventures into space, NASA spent untold dollars developing a pen that would write in micro gravity. The Russians took pencils...elegant.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin re-entered the LEM and began pre-launch preparations, they discovered that somewhere along the suiting up, debarking or returning to the craft, the circuit breaker that had to be set in order to fire the main engine was broken off. Aldrin took apart the little gadget and used the barrel of the pen, inserted it in the now vacant hole and closed the CB.

They call that ingenuity, do whatever it takes to complete the mission.

There might have been just a little bit of "I sure don't want to die up here on this moon" mixed in there too.

seamusTX wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:The "Nudes" were on the Pioneer spacecraft:

So sue me. Notice I didn't say "shoot me," because I wouldn't want that.

If any intelligent member of another species sees this stuff, a few ten-to-the-power-something years from now, I don't know what they will make of it. Either it will rock their boat, or they'll catalog it with other artifacts of previously unknown bipedal species in their equivalent of the Smithsonian.

I doubt any of that will ever happen.

- Jim

Let's leave the lawyers out of it.

jimlongley wrote:Being a ham and somewhat fascinated with weak signal work, I see this as the ultimate in QRP DX.

It's not converting an audio signal to an image, it is merely recording the analog signal for the image.

But is that related to FAX? Honestly, I have no idea how that works. How would one record the analog signal for an image? Or maybe the appropriate question is, how would one produce and analog signal for an image in the first place?

seamusTX wrote:It was basically "we come in peace" in several hundred languages, along with the least interesting nude figures in the history of art. I'm sure there's a copy of it in a museum somewhere. Otherwise we can wait until it comes back in a giant menacing cloud broadcasting cosmic drumbeats.

Just this morning I read that somebody made another record of that sort and attached it to a geosynchronous satellite. He wanted to do it so that when we destroy the earth (in his world view) there would be something left as a souvenir for the Martians or whomever. Actually the future denizens of Europa are more likely to show up in a couple of billion years.

- Jim

The "Nudes" were on the Pioneer spacecraft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque#Criticism

Here is what was put on Voyager I, from the NASA website (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html, http://webodysseum.com/art/116-images-o ... en-record/):



There are apparently 116 images stored on the record, although I am not familiar with the technology which would allow you to convert an audio signal to an image (unless it is something like FAX technology or something). Some of those images are on the WebOdysseum page linked above.

My FIL was a gyroscope specialist, and he built the guidance package for Voyager I on his workbench in his lab at JPL. He also built the guidance packages for Voyager II and pretty much every other unmanned exploratory spacecraft built by JPL until Casini, which was his last project before he retired.

I have a funny story about the Galileo guidance package involving my FIL.....who was an eminently practical man. When he still had the finished Galileo package on his workbench and his crew was gearing up for Casini, the project director came to him and asked him to design a set of removable handles that could be bolted to the Galileo package so that it could be picked up from the workbench and set down elsewhere to clear space on the bench so they could start on Casini's package. Apparently the thing was large enough that it took two men to lift it safely without risking dropping it. So the project director budgeted X thousands of dollars for machining costs and materials to accommodate his request and left if up to Bob (my FIL) to solve the problem.

About a week or so later, the project director dropped by Bob's office and noticed a 4' long piece of 2" wooden dowel leaning up in the corner of his office, and he asked Bob what it was for. Well, it was the "handle" to pick up and carry the Galileo package with. It seems that the physical architecture of the device had a sort of hole all the way through it, so Bob figured he could just go to the local Ace Hardware and buy the dowel for $1.29/foot......or whatever the price was.....and if you ran that dowel through the middle of the Galileo package, two men could each grab an end of the dowel and hoist the package up off the bench and set it down out of the way. He spent a total of $5.00-$6.00 on the job instead of the $10,000 budgeted for it. The rest of the team, also being engineers to the bone, recognized the elegance of the solution and that was the end of development on that particular request from the director. They never did make the bolt-on handles machined from exotic metals. Didn't need to.

I found out about this when my wife and I attended his retirement party after 40 years at JPL. They handed him that very piece of dowel, with a "Remove Before Flight" flag pinned to it, as a retirement gift.....and that's when the presenter told the assemblage about that particular story. If you knew Bob, you'd just smile because that was so him.