It will be 40 years ago on Monday when Neil Armstrong took his giant leap. It still pains me that I wasn’t around to see it as it happened.
NASA, of course, has a lot of new material on their website to celebrate the anniversary, including a Flash interactive that lets you explore the Apollo 11 landing site “through the astronaut’s eyes”.
From a purely scientific perspective, Apollo was a lousy investment. But, as New Scientist puts it, it was never really about science:
No one yet can say with confidence when the next footprints will appear on the moon or whose they will be. One thing we can say is that next time round New Scientist will not take as jaundiced a view as we did in 1969. Robots may be cheaper and more expendable than humans, but when it comes to white-knuckle inspiration they are no substitute for the right stuff.
When talking about the right stuff, that memorable phrase popularized by Tom Wolfe, it’s easy to assign it to the astronauts whose lives were ultimately on the line. But, personally, I’ve always identified with the story of Steve Bales and Jack Garman. Bales was the guidance officer, working in Mission Control, during the landing of Apollo 11. Garman, only 24 at the time, was NASA’s expert on the lunar module’s flight control computer, designed at MIT and built by Raytheon.
Earlier, in the endless simulated practice runs of the moon landing, Garman suggested that a scenario where the flight control computer produced an error message be tried. The scenario ended in a technically unnecessary aborted landing. Afterwards, flight director Gene Kranz suggested that a list be put together of all the possible errors from the computer, and the recommended course of action for each.
During the real mission, Bales had already been faced with a difficult decision, after the landing had drifted off course slightly. As the lander continued to drop towards the moon, the control computer started to report errors. In essence, the control computer was running out of time to perform its calculations, so, as designed, it stopped performing some of the lower-priority, non-essential ones. Garman immediately recognized the faults, and advised Bales that the landing could continue if they only occurred intermittently. Bales, whose ultimate responsibility it was to decide, agreed. As we all know, the landing went ahead.
The actual fault? As briefly explained here, the trouble was, in essence, a flaw in testing and procedures. The radar system, meant to be used for ascent, was switched on during descent. The computer time used for radar processing just marginally overloaded the computer resources available. A frantic debugging effort at MIT while the lander was on the moon finally figured out the problem, just in time for the astronauts to ascend.
That’s what I call making the right call under pressure.
You really missed a treat, Robert.
We all skived off a maths lecture to watch it.
I have always thought it was nice of NASA to celebrate my first birthday in this way.
Those guys had balls the size of elephants. All astronauts do.
Raise a glass. The stupid fuckin’ monkeys did something besides tolchock each other for once.
I was in fourth grade at Keon Park Primary School at the time, and the school very kindly allowed those kids like myself who went home for lunch to remain at home until the great deed was done. Those who were at school had normal classes suspended so that they could watch it on the school’s TVs.
Here’s another recollection from that period.
The value to science may have been miniscule, the costs probibitive and the whole thing may have been little more than one big rasberry directed at the Russians in the never-ending game of Global Political Ascendancy, but……..
What a magnificent achievement.
Hats-off to NASA for pulling it off.
Happy birthday, Razor.
I’m not sure the New Scientist is being entirely fair here. The Saturn rockets were designed as satellite launchers, originally, and predate Kennedy’s famous promise. The satellites that were an equal part of the effort to walk on the moon are amazingly scientifically useful.
That said, it’s true that the space program itself was only a sideshow to the real engineering challenge of the time: delivering accurate payloads to distant targets on this planet. As I commented at viv’s blog earlier this morning, the more historically significant anniversary for space exploration was yesterday.
Wagged school, bought a flagon of Wynvale rough red, via a derro hanging out at the local pub (we were severely underraged at the time), went to a friend’s house and noted that the pictures from the moon looked like an out-of-focus, boring, black and white larva lamp.
Got pissed.
Never watched another boring minute of crew-cut doofuses scuffing up the lunar surface.
BTW, that single picture of that limpid blue marble hanging in space was worth every cent of the NASA budget X 1000.
DI(nr) I’m shocked to hear you skipped a MATHS lecture
At Monash they cancelled all classes for the duration of the telecast. At another Melb university the physics dept had a TV set up for all to watch, but classes weren’t generally cancelled. It was a glorious day to be alive. TV was B&W then, by the way, ye youngsters.
I just heard a bloke from Parkes Radio Telescope saying that two dishes received what was expected to be a very weak signal: Goldstone (California) and Parkes (NSW). NASA watched both, and the Parkes feed (via Sydney) had far better resolution, so about 9 minutes after the moon rose for Parkes, the TV viewers of the world saw the Parkes-relayed images.
cool, another rock out with yer cock out thread.
zzzzzzzzzzzz.
You’re in good company, Robert. Almost two-thirds of the people living today weren’t born then.
It was a cold clear day in Sydney. Our school had one television for every three classes, so for the first hour or so there were about 100 of us (big classes in those days) crammed into one classroom. After a while we were allowed to go home, where I found my parents glued to the TV screen, and the family watched the rest of the telecast together.
On that winter afternoon the whole world was completely fixated on this one achievement. I remember it as a day of great unity and great hope.
oops, forgot to put the quote I was replying to:
“Those guys had balls the size of elephants. All astronauts do.”
Katz
I happened to love astronomy and orbital physics at the time anyway; but many people have told me over the years that
that single picture of that limpid blue marble hanging in space
changed their worldview, their cosmology, their sense of the globe and its creatures, in profound ways.
Damn you Katz! Pissed you may have been on the big day, but you’re right again.
Those guys had balls the size of elephants. All astronauts do.
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No wonder those capsules were so cramped.
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cool, another rock out with yer cock out thread. zzzzzzzzzzzz.
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Give up guys. We try and we try and we really try. But there’s just no impressin’ ‘em.
Well, Ambigulous, I was young, it was the summer … err … winter of lurv, what was a young bloke to do?
It wasn’t the only maths lecture I missed, btw.
Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.
Maybe we could all remember what we were doing when Kennedy was shot.
Problem is none of us was doing anything very interesting, with one notable exception of course.
The so-called moon landings were faked.
Some years back, a colleague sent me an email that was doing the rounds of Saudi Aramco (state-owned oil company in Saudi Arabia). They don’t believe that the Americans ever landed on the moon. They think that it was too hard, but it would have been too much loss of face to tell the world, so the US fudged it.
Specifically, they think that the rocket took off and circumnavigated the moon, and meanwhile the images were patched-in from a pre-recorded acting effort in the US desert somewhere.
The Arabs had photos from the video clip which supposedly proved it, including one of the US flag flying in the breeze. Umm, no breeze on the moon. The indignant response of an American to this was that a limp flag wouldn’t look right, so they wired it to look like it was flying.
We could probably expect a triumphant new email doing the rounds of Saudi Aramco, saying “No record kept of the event??? Yep. Told you it was fudged, now they have lost the evidence.”
There is one small fly in the ointment, however. It would have to be the mother of all coverup operations. How many people were in the NASA control tower, monitoring the moon landing? They would all have to be in on it, AND they would all have to be pursuaded not to sell the story and make their fortunes.
Still, losing the tapes is not a good look.
The moon landings were a gigantic waste of money as far as I can see. They didn’t even have the saving grace of actually providing something worth actually seeing, unless the grainy shots of a coupla fuzzy astronauts lurching ungainfully across an almost totally featureless colourless surface is something to go like ‘wow’ about.
No, the whole exercise was a desperate attempt by an under siege imperial empire to try and distract attention away from the world wide revolts of youth, Blacks, women and oppressed nations founded in profound social and political rejection of a system that had squandered so much of the post-war wealth on an arms and space race to intimidate the Soviet Union and insurgent peoples everywhere.
Huh?
At least two people were doing something very interesting. And Governor Connally was doing something more than averagely interesting, to wit, almost bleeding to death.
Yep, did you know Elvis assisted in faking the moon landings?
Might I suggest that your friend’s colleagues at Saudi Aramco borrow a laser and bounce it off these mirrors left by Apollo.
Robert @20: A bugger about the mirrors.
Ruins a perfectly good conspiracy theory.
Must have dropped them off while circumnavigating?
The other thing is, now I know this is not an original point, but women everywhere can relate to it: the whole moon landing thingy was a mammoth exercise in attempted compensation from an undersiege and highly threatened patriarchal masculinity. The shape and size of the spaceships gave the game away entirely along with the all the hoo-haa about takeoff and the thrusting ever upwards into regions no man (sic) has ever been before.
As I said, ho hum, it didn’t work fellas, you found nothing, proved nothing and you still have been able to launch your own men’s liberation movement back here on Earth!
…still haven’t, i.e., have failed to…
If you can, download and listen to this fabulous edition of the science show on this topic. Australian scientific and techie staff had a lot to do with the moon landing. Very well produced – It’s riveting stuff.
…Day-yum! forgot the link…
the whole moon landing thingy was a mammoth exercise in attempted compensation from an undersiege and highly threatened patriarchal masculinity.
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Was this masculinity threatened in the 50s when the space prgram was established? Or in the early 60s when the moon shot was okay’d?
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The shape and size of the spaceships gave the game away entirely…
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Or perhaps something else? ye cannae deny the laws o’ physics, laws o’ physics, laws o’ physics Cap’n. Still you’re right everything we do is sexual.
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..along with the all the hoo-haa about takeoff and the thrusting ever upwards into regions
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Methinks you’d better lay off the Freud for a while there old bean. It’s gettin’ to ye. When I first read him I saw pussies and dicks everywhere. Most distracting.
Yeah, Phil, and them dab-gumb auto mobile things what got builded a few years back, why they ain’t nothin’ on a horse-drawn cart. Just lookee here, they measures the power in horses, don’t they? It’s all just a desperate attempt by a imperialistic bunch o’ horney menfolks what are in a hurry to take over as much land as they can gets to in the name of Manifest Destiny while also providing a bit more upholstery for procreatin’ activities after they gets to the drive-in picture shows. Why, back in my day. . . .
And the other thing of course is that everyone was supposed to be blown away by the technological brilliance of this feat and bow down in admiration at the American Technological Male God which implicitly and explicitly was positioned in all this as the hargbinger of endless science-based marvels that would be capable of solving humanity’s problems from world poverty and hunger to life-threatening diseases and environmental degradation.
This was another big furphy too.
Phil @22: “The shape and size of the spaceships gave the game away entirely…”
Reminds me of a “discussion” with a feminist back in the early 80’s (more like a spirited monologue, actually), who maintained that chemical plants were designed by guys with masculinity challenge, so to say.
As one of many example, she cited distillation columns in the refineries in Melbourne. Long, upright, shiny phallic symbols by her estimation!!!
Not being versed in the sciences, let alone engineering, she didn’t consider that it might just be the most efficient design configuration at the time. Never let practicalities get in the way of a good theory, though…
heh.
When is it ever?
Great post, and what a fantastic image. If they were going today, it’d probably be some DLSR with a tiny CMOS sensor, not a camera with such gloriously generous negative real estate like that.
For fuck’s sake.
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Rockets may well please those with a fetish for phallic monuments but they are shaped that way for very practical reasons. This sort of discourse is really useful to anyone who wants to present feminists as batshit.
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Hello?
Razor @ 2: Except the women.
Those Parkes people always omit the role that Honeysuckle Creek ground station played.
There was only one good thing about the moon landings. And if it is meaningful indescribably beautiful images you want at that price and to emphasise the real point, which we didn’t really need to go into outer space to know, then rather than the cliched, exclusionary picture of the lone heroic American astronaut, infinitely more valuable were these images:
http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/earthrise-kaguya.jpg
I recall cramming into a small classroom at Ryde Public School on an unusually warm July day — along with practically the whole school and llooking at those famous grainy images from about 40 feet.
It does seem an oddity that NASA has taped over the footage. You’d have thought they’d have known even then that good quality images of this event would be valuable. It’s even odder that the Australians who had some didn’t send a duplicate and hang onto the original
All those resources and so little sense …
I missed this, but can’t let it pass
Right on, Adrien. FFS, Lacan wasn’t talking about real, existing phalluses.
Adrien thinks all feminism is batshit.
The poets forever understood the real relationship.
THE EARTH
I spin beneath my pyramid of night
Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
THE MOON
As in the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
Full, oh, too full!
Thou art speeding round the sun,
Brightest world of many a one;
Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour,
Borne beside thee by a power
Like the polar Paradise,
Magnet-like, of lovers’ eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden,
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
Maniac-like around thee move,
Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side,
Like a Mænad round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
In the weird Cadmean forest.
Brother, wheresoe’er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
Of thy soul from hungry space,
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty and might,
As a lover or a chameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
As a violet’s gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a gray and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
Athwart the western mountain it enfolds,
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow.
from “Prometheus Unbound”
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I recall hearing coverage of the moon landing on the radio. No TV on the Solomon Islands in those days.
It hardly seemed real, more like sci-fi, which was my staple diet at the time.
And now the buggers have lost the tapes, so I’ll never get to see it properly.
How careless can those guys get?
It was very much something of its time and place. Getting to the moon with 60’s technology is as hard as getting to Mars is for us in 2009, but we are more aware of pressing issues back on dear old Mother Earth, and we are more cynical so a Mars shot would not have anywhere near the ‘wow’ factor about it.
I personally am not in favour of a Mars attempt, and I doubt I would approve of the moonshot had I been around but I do credit NASA with doing a great feat of engineering.
I can think of no good reason for attempting further space travel at this time. Sure look after the satellites, but beyond that? Nope.
Hi Zarquon,
I was just pointing to the actual “one small step” broadcast. The bloke certainly did NOT omit mention of Honeysuckle Creek, Tidbinbilla. It was my omission, sorry.
Elise, on the TV news tonight they showed digitally cleaned-up video, with much sharper images. Very impressive. Like taking the hiss and crackle out of old 78 records.
Elise, the Aramco rumour is illfounded. In addition to Robert’s mirror evidence, plenty of radio amateurs listened in to the astronauts as the spacecraft travelled from E to M. They noted the ‘delay’ lengthening as the distance to the spacecraft steadily grew. Since the speed of light in vacuo is a physical constant, this can’t be faked; regardless of how many thousands of employees NASA [and CSIRO] may have had.
The mission was touch-and-go all along (as Apollo 13 later showed us, and subsequent Space Shuttle crashes).
Remember the moon landing very well. Our TV went bung about an hour before and had to rush off to hire one. Made it back in time, just, to watch the historic event. It was breathtaking to think we were watching someone on the moon. That night the moon had a rather special meaning!
1. I feel one big mother of a stoush coming. Maybe not on this thread but it is coming. I strongly urge those throwing peanuts at Freud and Lacan to arm themselves with the biggest phallic weapon they can find and Ripley’s brain. I say this as a public service.
2. “Dark Side of the Moon” – a mockumentary (French production) on how the moon landing was produced by Stanley Kubrick here on earth. It has Donald Rumsfeld, and from memory, Kissinger, and presents as a serious doco. It gets increasingly insane as the program progresses until you are laughing so much you are crying. The thing is, it was screened on SBS a few years ago and the amount of calls we got from people who didn’t get it and thought this was the definitive proof it was a fake was extraordinary. Hundreds of calls. So many people still don’t believe in the reality of
phallocentric discoursethe moon landing. Anyone seen it? It’s amazing.Its on You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7Ge8KiaWTA
I was too young to remember the landing itself but I do remember those expressions of hope that began with: “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can …”. I miss them. I saw that picture after watching the news from Jakarta and thought: here was something that was done by people that was not appalling, or mundane.
Curing cancer isn’t just about the science either, and you can bet there are some scumbags who deserve nothing better than a polyp or two, and you can also bet there’s a dollar to be made in treating diseases that won’t go away – for all that, it’s still worth doing.
So do I – though the Apollo analogy often gets misused by American progressives to assume that the best way to make renewable energy feasible is to throw a bunch of government money at their particular favourite technology!
We will always have problems back here on Earth. Shit, it’s not like there were any shortage of them during the 1960s. But space exploration inspires a lot of people like few other challenges, and, when you compare it to the amount the US spends on building F-22s or nuclear subs, the costs are chicken feed.
And it’d be an order of magnitude cheaper if NASA was run along more rational lines.
Casey,
Yes we saw that doco: but it took us a few minutes to recognise the spoofishness. Damn fine work. Friends saw it & agreed it was hilarious. Good on you.
Oh, yeah, that was a laugh a minute. Wasn’t one of the interviewees “Dave Bowman”?
Hello jinmaro. Back again, are we?
And Robert Merkel,must be an expert on Lasers of the early 1960s and what powered them.Can you give me a hint Robert besides Wiki!?I am in the Sam field. A old bloke up the road from here,and made a door for ANSTO as it was, because all the nuke scientists freaked out because their aluminium door on the nuke reactor was melting,and he of two could make it,had a name,a last name of a well known publisher of an American Science Journal!He told me he had developed some tube electronics for re-entry .but the Americans went over to your field of endeavour.[ I have a Magazine of the early sixties with an Australian Electronics display full of things that look like cube flashlights,but the production work of an Australian electronics manufacture.]He worked on the Nomad Aircraft at Fishermens Bend Victoria..with a man that later became head of A.S.i.O. Truth time Robert!What powered Lasers in the 1960s.
* I reckon the definition of baby-boomer should include “old enough to remember Apollo XI” (and I can remember the Gemini program – especially White’s walk, as well as the tragedy of Apollo I)
* The best named modules in ALL of the Apollo missions (to a kid): “Snoopy” and “Charlie Brown”
* On the “if they can put men on the moon….” meme…. without NASA and the massive cold-war spending on the space program, would we have enough data to recognize climate change?
* The Editorial in Nature this Week points out that the (northern) summer of 1969 points out just how important peopled missions were to recruiting children to science, but also points to the other, perhaps more important, “Space Travel” event of (northern) summer 1969:
And silly me…. I then thought it would not be long before Woomera would start doing some heavy lifting, while now it is best known for a concentration camp.
Jesus Christ.
I’m a stoush-about-anything kinda guy, but what the fuck?
Is it posited that going to places to see what’s there instead of staying where you are is “phallic”?
Seriously?
Talk about instant nostalgia. Like watching Keith Moon on YouTube. But the surprise for me was Katz’s Van Zandt-like line at #7
I grew up next door to the Wynn Vale vineyards: they were important landmarks in my childhood universe. Strange to link the soil that I knew and the sun and rain that I experienced with Katz’s under-age world.
The vineyards are long gone now, bulldozed during the early 70’s for real estate; the old vines being pushed into large piles, left to dry for a year, then set alight. They burnt for a fortnight. When I dream of those years, I don’t dream of Armstrong or the moon, but of grape-pickers and pruning, of watering in summer and the yellow foliage of autumn, and of how it was sacrificed to a dull suburbia.
Sweet evocation of temps perdu there, Feral Abacus.
But to tell the truth, it may have been a McWilliams flagon.
It is forty years (and many flagons) ago.
Coupla points:
1) Isn’t deep oceanography generally regarded as a more difficult and more scientifically rewarding feat of engineering? At least, that’s what a deep oceanographer told me.
I’m sure Casey and Phil can find plenty to object to about deep oceanography as well. All that deep exploration of secret, warm, wet crevasses never before seen by the eyes of man. Those little submersible vessels that swim, swim, swim against the current in a hostile environment. The discovery of warm, upwelling vents that birth fantastic and rare new life out of a biochemical soup. Heady stuff. It’s enough to make one reach for the nearest megaphone to loudly denounce men’s folly!
2) The funniest fake-moon-landing site I ever came across used a lot of stills from the Star Trekkin’ film clip, complete with puppet aliens poking their heads of out moon craters. See! Everyone knows that the moon is made of cheese and those aliens would’ve died from cholesterol years ago! It was all FAKKE!!!111!
And I hate to be phallocentric about it, but unless we’re prepared to thrust out into the universe from our little nourishing orb this Earth and seed as many heavenly bodies with new life as we possibly can, we’re only one comet impact away from oblivion. Ain’t Mother Nature a vengeful bitch goddess?
Look Mercurius
there’s no need to seek phalli in space or the deep oceans.
They abound. Pencil, pen, knitting needle, chopstick, wizard’s wand, candle, candlestick, rod, pole, broomstick, tree trunk, gear stick, garden tool handle, wooden spoon; lipstick, chap stick, walking stick, stick, golf club, netball pole, may pole, polo club; all of them deeply implicated in man’s domination; none of them of any use or interest to women; all of them hugely expensive “boys’ toys”; it’s all rigged…..
I can scarcely bear to LOOK at some of these.
Hey! I was simply observing the goings on with Philro and Adrien (and Woulfe – why the greek chorus – will you nevr integrate?).. I did not say I thought the sudden thrust into virgin space in any way reflected the poor old flacid phallus of the patriarchy looking for young new places to lodge itself. I did not say that, though come to think of it, it sounds good now. Now if you said it was an imperialist enterprise which went nowhere, I would agree. There was a good reason that American flag flapping in the breeze was lodged in the moonrock that day. Even if there was no wind on the moon to make it flap. Now a post colonial take I can go with. Look, I watched the Kubrik version. It brought tears to my eyes too you know. The water is indeed the feminine space Merc. You are spot on. Many men have been taken by sirens on the high seas. The sea she’s a bitch too, one big vagina dentata.
dk.au is spot on, on a number of occasions on this thread: it’s never just about the science; and phallocentrism isn’t just about penises or things that are shaped like them.
That sort of prurience is pretty much in line with a long tradition of everyday misandry (aimed particularly at ‘analysing’ male motivation or domestic stupidity) coupled with a juvenile form of sexual humour, and has little of substance in common with psychoanalysis or feminism. It’s a shame that those who avow both psychoanalysis and feminism can’t see this.
“I did not say that, though come to think of it, it sounds good now.”
It’s luvly work Casey. Just one minor technical point, though. The “poor old flacid phallus of the patriarchy” would actually be incapable of a “sudden thrust into virgin space” at the same time.
It seems to have been established here that in a Matriarchal society this whole silly and wasteful space business would never have been given the go ahead. Left as we are now, with nothing but a spent film canister.
Still, one cannot help wonder what the design of a spacecraft built solely by females would resemble. I might just go back to work on the house spouting and while doing so contemplate this image a little bit.
Ps.. thanks for the reminder about sbs doco. We plan to watch it in full tonight.
Yes correct you would be. You will love the mocko Joe2.
This fillum should have been a hit or got a wider release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind
It screened at the 1989 Film Festival. The actual 16mm NASA full rich kodachrome footage blown up to 35mm, up on the big State Theatre screen. Row EE etc.
Besides the awesome moon/space footage and the footage of the astronauts talking, working & walking etc, some voiceovers from interviews with the astronauts recorded for the film, about what they were feeling and how profound & “spiritual’ the whole experience was.
If you ever see it on somewhere, def. worth the ticket price.
Home from school in front of the telly. I loved that old telly, you could lie under it and look at the valves all lit up.
Adrien thinks all feminism is batshit.
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Indeed.
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Except Germaine Greer, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Camille Paglia, and Mary Wollonstencraft, and Anais Nin and…
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But apart from all that.
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Hey I even dig Valerie Solanis. Before her time.
Casey – I did not say I thought the sudden thrust into virgin space in any way reflected the poor old flacid phallus of the patriarchy looking for young new places to lodge itself. I did not say that, though come to think of it, it sounds good now.
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It appears to me to more resemble a tiny sperm escaping the egg and then coming back again.
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Even if there was no wind on the moon to make it flap. Now a post colonial take I can go with. Look, I watched the Kubrik version.
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If Kubrick had done the moon launch we wouldn’t've seen it until 1978. You know how long he took to do everything. The once small step routine would’ve required at least 300 takes.
Ambigulous@57
you might look at the common etymological provenance of pencil and penis and although the etymology doesn’t endorse this as cognate, I find it hard to escape concluding that penetrate wouldn’t also be in the same family.
If you look at the next entry after penetrate above — “phallus” the note is also interesting.
It’s all a lot of fun, not because it proves anything about contemporary building and engineering — doubtless if someone could make flying saucers or something looking like a vagina into a superior vessel for navigating the skies, it would be done — but because there’s nothing so likely to get the attention of large numbers of people as sexual allusion.
I note with interest a NASA engineer talking to someon at the BBC this morning about what things could be done in space that couldn’t be done down here on Earth and he began talking about “probing the backside of the moon”. I kid you not.
Deep oceanography is technically difficult and rewarding, but there’s no point in putting a human there because we’ve got real-time contact with whatever robotic gadget we put down there.
Once you get beyond lunar orbit, this is no longer true.
Another little piece for the big blue hanging limpid marble puzzle, and it was more than likely from the interviews in the film I linked to above.. the astronauts on 11, said they all watched 2001: A Space Odyssey to prepare for the mission, so that they would feel like they had, or it had already been done before.
Obviously, NASA weren’t worried about what was in their testicles but in a more vital organ.
Twas indeed a mind blowing event. And I can’t help reflecting that with the 600 or so billion dollars the US has so far spent on the Iraq invasion they could have funded four complete Apollo programs. I guess it all boils down to priorities.
It does indeed Zoot@68 but frankly, four Appollo programs would not have been as appealing as, say, 225,000 ecologically sustainable dwelling donated to people who were on the wrong end of the subprime meltdown.
Now that probably wouldn’t have been the best use of the funds either, but I can’t see Apollo making the top 50 or even the top 100 best uses of funds.
I heard that echinda spines were a marvel of natural engineering…something about being amazing acoustic receivers or some such thing…I say we should try blasting some monotremes out into space and see if we can pick up some alien signals.
The monotremes might not care for it, furious.
You’re right, David, echidnas are quite meek and they don’t have balls the size of elephants…bandicoots however…now they are well-hung.
The curvature of the moon,somehow avoided me last night and for most of my life really! So how did man back on Earth,in the late sixties, fire his laser and not only got it to fire into the moon as it cycles around Earth,but,hit the bloody reflectors where-ever they were in relation to the latest photos of that ,um,historical event!? It is worse than Menzies famous saying about the Queen!? I did but……..
Watched it at primary school on tv. It’s kind of sad remembering it. When we are young we get our normality from what goes on around us. Men on the moon? Wow! Must be completely normal. Ordinary even. The sad part is that it seems now like the peak of human achievement and that it’s been downhill ever since. I expected us to be permanently on the moon and mars by now.
It would be hard to imagine the same level of international goodwill such as it existed extended to the American technological triumph today. In the intervening years America has squandered whatever good currency it had to such an extent that significant numbers today either think or want to believe the moon landing was faked and/or link NASA’s achievement with the military-industrial complex’s development of weapons of war, most recently and widely on display in Iraq, designed to melt human flesh.
and we are more cynical so a Mars shot would not have anywhere near the ‘wow’ factor about it.
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I wonder if that would be true? It would be a whole other planet. We could see sunset and sunrise and weather on a whole other planet. Another planet? I demand the ‘right’ to take my holidays on another planet.
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I’ve seriously never understood people who aren’t thrilled by this stuff.
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The only question is one of decoration. Will we want to standardize? If so, will we be making Mars look like Earth or Earth look like Mars? The Bolts of ‘Straya have made their choice.
And to continue the sexual metaphor, the patriarchal male imperialist projection which was the aptly named Apollonian moon landings ended as they always must in sagging fortunes, for all such projections are transient and end in withdrawal and decrepitude.
Pffft. The Old Ones travelled to the moon and back thousands of times. And they didn’t need rockets or modules, neither.
Phil, I suspect that you ain’t run wild with the other ladies of Dyonisus for some time now. Go on. Go out, get drunk on purple wine, run naked, kill men and eat them.
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It’ll make you feel better.
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PS Pagliam was wrong when she asserted that the Knight in armour was the most Appollonian thing ever. It was the Astronaut.
Phil, Please stop humiliating yourself and trying to make feminists look like nutters. I’ve visited many blogs in my time but two of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read have been on here. Phil and his/her phallic obsession and another extreme feminist who claimed high-heels were invented by men for women because it makes them easier to catch and thus rape.
Ah, the Adrien and John Greenfield (aka Adam) duo. Hah!
I know I’m doing my job if I’m getting to those two limp ones.
Thanks for the advice and reprimands, boys.
But I go places you will never know.
Eat your hearts out, Apollonian fizzers.
John Greenfield and Adrien are the same person I think.
Are there any Zionist rocks with the mark C on them!? On the moon,I mean!?
It is the manner of men first to wonder that any such thing should be possible, and after it is found out to wonder again how the world should miss it so long
– Francis Bacon, after Titius Livius, Valerius Terminus (1603)
Robert – excellent post – I’m also jealous of those who got to see it live…
Apollo 8 – “that photo” has done more for the environmental movement (IMHO) than any demonstration in the last 40 years. The planet we live on is indeed a small blue ball, surrounded by hard vacuum, occasional solar flares, and a lot of space. It is quite clear that this planet is all our species has (at the moment).
For the “phallic symbol” crowd – learn some physics – and get more het up about Lise Meitner.
For the conspiracy theorists – see http://www.clavius.org – if anyone wants a demonstration of how a flag can “wave” in a vacuum I’ll be more than happy to do this.
For all the tens of thousands of people who made it happen – well done – our world-view will never be the same…
Liam – good point about Trinity.
The two quotes of the twentieth century:
“And now I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds”
“That’s, one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”
An opportunity was missed further up the thread to make a polemical point about the centrality of trains to the development of capitalist industrialism, and the symbolism of their shape and size and frequent entry into tunnels.
The moon landings never happened becuase the NASA boys could not get it up.
They were actually filmed in Sudbury Canada, go there and you wll know why.
Unfortunately the part of the original tapes clearly showed the huge smelter chimney in the background.
So they had to “lose” the original tapes.
A guy from Parkes told me this so it must be true.
Huggy
This confirms my theory.
Sigmund,
your main problem (or good fortune) is that practically everything confirms your theory.
An essay I saw circa late 70s suggested you were very cunning, Dr Sigmund. By making sex central to your writings you ensured most people would sit up and take notice.
Now that we’ve covered rockets, trains, submarines and pencils, I suggest we move on to discuss symbols of womyns sexual bits.
Because womyns are far more attractive than mens, there are going to be more lists. In no particular order, we require lists of breast-like, thigh-like, cute-bottom-like, flowing-tresses-like, sinuous-curve-like, radiant-smile-like, etc etc constructions or natural phenomena.
OK, I’ll start with: the silvery moon, the planet Venus, curvy sand dunes, a ripe peach, smoothly curved hills seen from a plane.
Southern Cross Station roof
Now let’s not be hasty. We haven’t covered boats, whales, harpoons, masts, spars or C19 prosthetic legs yet.
Pfft, not in this timezone it won’t.
@20
Yes well of course the “Arabs” would think that wouldn’t they? After all they are “Arabs” and probably “Muslims” to boot. Fundy Christians would never believe anything like that.
Some people … sheesh …
John Greenfield and Adrien are the same person I think.
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Uh no.
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An opportunity was missed further up the thread to make a polemical point about the centrality of trains to the development of capitalist industrialism, and the symbolism of their shape and size and frequent entry into tunnels.
.
So that’s why little boys like toy trains so much.
“John Greenfield and Adrien are the same person I think.”
Wow, now that’s got to be a hell of a wake-up call.
Wake up to what? The fact that Manichean secular theology has the same effect on peoples’ minds that cholesterol does on arteries? I knew that already.
Well beats me Ambi. I had a look and it seems the boob infested roof you have chosen to begin your gyno list with, makes people sick. Must remind them too much of mummy. Having disavowed her in order to seek an illusory unity in the phallus, the symbol of which is reproduced within a phallogocentric discourse ad nauseum to remind yourselves of yourselves just in case you all forget yourselves cause you are all so important and unified (and you have proven this importance and unity by dismissing a whole history of cultural analysis from Derrida, Lacan, Irigary & Kristeva to name a few, without having read much of it by the looks of it) – what do you make the one femine construction you have come up with and its ability to sicken? I suggest all these mammaries must be raising up all those fears of maternal engulfment youse are all terrified of. What else could it be?
“SOUTHERN Cross Station’s wavy roof — the centrepiece of its $700 million redevelopment — is trapping fumes from diesel trains and causing a string of illnesses ranging from vomiting to runny eyes, say concerned staff.”
My God that seems to be one scary mother. See what happens when you reproduce the feminine? It makes you vomit. Better stick with your linear designs. I like Anzac Bridge myself. Reminds me of Madonna’s pointy bra phase. A fusion of gyno and phallo. Breasts that can penetrate. Just as well they are pointing up though. The world which runs itself on a phallologocentrism which disavows its own existence when exposed – ( and it does this with a devastating resposte which involves listing all the phallic symbology of itself as evidence of its non existence!!!) – also doesnt handle hermaphrodites very well does it?
Can I do gyno poetry now?
I think that I’ll skirt around the symbolism of this particular dwelling.
I do not believe that Adiren and Greenfield are one and the same. However I will take a punt and say that Phil, J-ro, Woulfe, Bridie, Sadie, Mary, Canary and Fanny and Posey might be. But that ’s just a wild wild guess.
And let’s not forget that it was the APOLLO Mission.
You know, MALE god, a caduceus — a STICK entwined by SERPENTS.
HELLO…
And it was APOLLO ELEVEN.
What is 11? Not one PERPENDICULAR DIGIT but TWO.
When is enough enough?
Houston really did have a problem.
Not to do with the moon landing per se. Just an excellent p*sstake on space exploration TV excitement.
http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/algon.htm
Patrick B – I’ve just re-introduced coffee to my keyboard thanks to you!
Brilliant
Sorry Casey
I don’t think it was the shape per se that made people ill. I had a quick look for photos and that poor specimyn was the first I found.
Plenty of curvy non-linear buildings etc. are erected (sorry) and enjoyed (sorry) and gazed upon (sorry) and entered (sorry).
Let’s call the whole thing off.
It’s pointless (sorry) though your comments were pointed.
And Madonna did for pointy bras what she did for the word “madonna”.
… and music, Ambigulous.
yes, good point, unrelated David!
@20 The Soviets put some mirrors on the moon as well. Two of them, and one of them will still bounce a laser signal back. Not sure what the problem with the other is. Maybe the location is uncertain?
So far as I know, no cosmonaut ever set foot on the Moon.
Not that I have any doubt the Apollo 11 mission succeeded in putting two meat sacs on the moon and then getting them back to Earth. Just saying, is all.
Gyno pantheism, the earliest pre-patriarchal religion saw the female presence in every part of the cosmos. The sky was female and of course the moon one of the first objects of nature-worship was the Virgin-Mother-Goddess whose power influenced tides, the seasons, fertilisation, harvesting, and of course women’s monthly cycle.
It’s been quite a counter-revolution. But we don’t forget. And nor of course does Mother Nature.
The words for mother and mud, clay, dust, i.e., earth matter, are very close in many languages. The American flag fell over into mother/mud as Apollo 11 took off. That was her lofty judgement of NASA‘s hubristic sabre-rattling exhibitionism.
The Moon is so yesterday…….MARS bitches!!!
what was I saying?
It is the manner of men first to wonder that any such thing should be possible, and after it is found out to wonder again how the world should miss it so long
Elise @39, it was 40 years ago; I lose things I had 40 seconds ago.
Apparently the Mythbusters busted the flag and several other moon landing myths some time ago.
I also agree that there were far too many people involved for the landings to be faked and the secret kept. Bit like the Diana conspiracy theorists. Having her married off and whisked off to sharia heaven in Pakistan or somewhere would have been far better than a martyr’s death as far as the royal family was concerned, I would think.
Not just the number of people involved, jane: there was contemporary physical evidence (e.g. radio amateurs listening in to the astronaut’s transmissions, the mirrors left on the Moon’s surface that Robert mentioned).
Dodi was Egyptian and had a business base in London, jane. Were you thinking of Jemima Goldsmith and the Swashbuckling Heart-Throb Cricketer?
Was it on the moon landing that the Astronauts read an extract from genesis, essentially comparing themselves to gods? Or am I getting confused by the voiceover of a VNV Nation song?
What not re-enact the moon landing in the comfort of your own home with a blisteringly fast 4k of ram at your fingertips?
To celebrate the anniversary, I just reread Mailer’s ‘Of A Fire On The Moon’ which still holds up very well indeed as a wonderful piece of prose. Not to mention that Mailer really did his research to the point where he could clearly describe in technical detail for a layperson audience stuff like how to work the DSKY and what went wrong exactly with the AGC on final approach.
And his musings on the whole patriarchy thing are a lot more thought out and funnier that some of the observations expressed here.
sg@112. It was onboard Apollo 8 while orbiting the moon.
Perosnally I preferred Apollo 7’s approach where they took premixed martinis up with them for a CMB (Command Module Bender)experiment.
Nabakov, there was a “Moon Lander” game for the Hewlett-Packard programmable calculators, IIRC. It was a bitch to type it in, but quite satisfyingly frustrating.
“And his musings on the whole patriarchy thing are a lot more thought out and funnier that some of the observations expressed here.”
But of course. One of the most risible sexists in contemporary literature was way more funny than present day feminist Australian oiks, eh Nabs? LOL!
So Phil, which bit of the word “some” don’t you understand?
Would you like me to also explain why reading a book before passing judgement on its observations is generally regarded as a useful exercise?
Not interested in talking to you until you learn some manners, Nabokov.
You just did, pouty boy. And I’ll bet you’ll be back soon to have the last word. Again.
Anyway my view on this whole Phallus 11 thang is that rockets and dicks look the same because it’s form following function. They’re both designed to minimise resistance and store fluids that are transformed into heat and pressure in order to deliver a (surprisingly small) payload to a precise location.
Of course on one hand you have blastoff followed by ascension whereas on the other hand it’s vice versa.
One day I’m gonna grow to be an astronaut and visit heavenly bodes as captain of Innuendo 11.
#94 At any rate, “John Greenfield” is a serial sockpuppeteer.
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/07/26/sockpuppet-ban/
Even by the blogosphere’s admittedly low entry standards for the socially challenged, Greenslime’s constant attempts to catch the attention of even those he affects to hate is startlingly pathetic, unbalanced and needy.
You can just see him muttering over and over again “luvvies…bitchslap…revolver” while fondling his ring.
Robert Merkel says:
The Space Race to the Moon was a very, very good investment from a strategic point of view. THe USAF’s landing on the moon was, as Russian space experts now admit, “a defeat for the Soviet space program“:
The Space Race was, as the name indicates, a sub-set of the Arms Race bw USA and USSR. The USA’s victory in the Space Race was a major aspect in its victory in the Arms Race. This Arms Race victory in turn was a major factor in the USA’s victory in the Cold War.
The USA’s victory in the Cold War created a Peace Dividend. So the US victory in the Space Race did, in a significant way, help to promote the global spread of peace and prosperity over the nineties and noughties.
Right now a new Space Race is brewing in NE Asia, as industrial giants of the East look to stake a claim on the Moon. This is largely in response to the discovery of ice in lunar craters. A sufficient supply of ice would allow the powering, atmosphering and hydration of a lunar base. Most likely such a base would be heavily “manned” by robots or AI devices, reducing the need for organic supply.
A self-sustaining lunar base could come in handy for launching cheap satellites or manafacturing installations. Popular mechanics indulges in a bit of lunar economic forecasting:
All this shows that peaceful competition bw nations, based on technological metrics, can be a real boon to humanity. At any rate it looks good on a nations CV.
“At any rate it looks good on a nations CV.”
Nice observation there Jack. Never underestimate ego and prestige as driving forces in human affairs.
“From a purely scientific perspective, Apollo was a lousy investment.”
Are you kidding? The Apollo program greatly drove the technology of putting hi-tech stuff into space and then controlling it there. Like the satellites which hook up our communications and watch our weather, beam entertainment into loungerooms, allow GPS to find us and monitor the earth for ecological, economic and strategic hot spots. How much do you currently pay for a few hours goggling around Google Earth?
Admittedly a lot of these benefits would have been realised eventually but thanks to JFK’s deadline, they got to us faster.
And let’s face it, if we didn’t indulge in grand, imaginative, indulgent, expensive, inspiring, dangerous, unpredictable and gallant gestures from time to time, we wouldn’t be the human race we know too well and often love.
Nabakov said:
We might be rather more sustainably loveable — and more equitable in our conduct.
Fran
“We might be rather more sustainably loveable — and more equitable in our conduct.”
For whom?
My point is not that the Mercury/bunch of Russkie Korolev-infused stuff/Gemini/Apollo missions were not good or bad in themselves but rather that there’s no way you could have stopped humans from behaving like that at the time.
It’s too late to complain about what should have happened so you might as well sit back and chew over what really happened.
Which is that the US Government spent the equivalent of a few bad years in Vietnam or Iraq on throwing to the moon, and bringing back, a bunch of supreme products of the US military/industrial/entertainment system – who all somehow turned in one way or another to be somewhat mystical on their return.
The first man to set foot on somewhere on other than earth now spends all his time flying gliders and avoiding interviews. All his moon walking colleagues are not that easily accessed for open comments either.
Look at the Apollo program this way. The US used everything at their disposal over nine years to beat the Russkies to the moon. And what did they get back?
Enough data to make it clear the moon was not made of anything economically viable ((BEEP) ah…Houston…we have a (BEEP)..ah..gusher (BEEP)…ah.. no…(BEEP)…that’s a negatory(BEEP)..I say again…negatory..er…not oil
Houston(BEEP)).
The undying admiration of the world for a short while.
And a bunch of superbly trained pilot/engineers who all returned from the Moon in a very Zen state of mind.
Sure the whole things sounds today like lunacy. But you’ll never ever know if you never ever go.
Well all I can manage now when I reflect on the whole loony thing Nabakov is … meh … what a waste.
Never get between a prepubescent or even an adult warmongering male as his war toys and rockets, Fran.
The rest of us knew and know it was all about male glory, a pissing competition between two unequally matched oppositional world powers in which the real and only superpower Mother Nature had the last laugh.
Heaps of people at the time thought the moon landing was a crock and still do for the very good reason it was carried out by the most bellicose murderous military power in world history which was still in the throes of napalming the people of Vietnam and Cambodia. In response, 1968-69 was the height of a worldwide anti-war movement and student and youth radicalisation whose principal raison d’etre and focus was to end the US-led assault on these countries.
This was achieved. The greatest achievement of that era. That’s the lesson, the main lesson worth remembering and celebrating.
So much dick-swinging and fem-bashing on this thread and hardly a woman, let alone a feminist, to be seen. I remember thinking at the time, and still think, this is what blokes should be doing. Getting out there and exploring space and time, dicks at attention, instead of banging each other to death here on earth. Breaking the boundaries is what men are made for, and what women admire men for. War is easy, and stupid. Exploring the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars is da thing.