[X] My Assistant

[climber]

A few days before Phoenix launch, as I knew I was going to be away from the internet, I tried to find out the phone n° @ Nasa I used to call to follow launches on the phone. I've got some reactions here about the interest of listening only without actualy watching and I guess this deserves its own topic.
If the moments of lift off up to probe release are exiting, what I realy love myself is "before" and "after". I mean, I don't take pleasure only during 9.8 seconds watching a 100m race. I realy love to know what is gona happen, I listen to the differents coms, go's, status assesments by Official speaker, and so on... In my mind, listening i.e. imagining what is going on give me a stonger feeling than images themselves. I guess that, if I was to watch a launch from the Cape, I'll be very frustated not having real time informations.

Landing is something a bit different since...there's NO images at all. By Apollo's flights my English was not good enough to understand in the text what was going on. By MPF, I had to rely on a dial com which I had to reboot after each information was coming down (very good feeling up to now thou ). By Spirit landing I was in Pasadena with the TPS sharing not only JPL's coms and images but also sharing with 2000 people in the same room. Another
I'm sure each of us here has some feeling and/or souvenirs to share on this topic...

[dvandorn]

In the sixties, I watched the countdowns for the Mercury and Gemini flights, enraptured. I also enjoyed the coverage of the flights themselves, but until we got to Apollo, there wasn't all that much to see while the flights were in progress -- just animations and artists' renderings. And even the entry and splashdown phases weren't all that visually interesting at first -- it took until the middle of the Gemini program before there was live TV coverage from the recovery vessels. I can still recall that the very first live, on-the-scene images from a Gemini recovery was for Gemini V, and it wasn't TV coverage. The press had set up a photofax link by which photographs were taken, quickly developed and printed, and then scanned and transmitted back to the shore. The very first close-to-live images of astronauts on the carrier deck were still pictures of bewhiskered Cooper and Conrad.

Of course, Apollo ushered in the era of live television from American spacecraft in flight, and that changed a lot of things. The very first TV shows from Apollo 7 held me in complete thrall, especially when they pointed the camera out the window. Then, of course, came Apollo 8, and the wonder of live (if crude) TV images from the Moon. It excited my sense of wonder like nothing else ever had.

But the countdowns... those were the best. When the flights weren't scrubbed, anyway. I remember a lot of scrubs, in specific the various scrubs of Gemini VI (once after I had enjoyed the Atlas launch of the Agena that never made it into orbit, another after the shutdown on the pad), and the multiple scrubs of Gemini IX and IX-A. I can recall very, very clearly that I spent a hot and muggy June day at an aunt's house because I was visiting with my grandmother, who had no TV set, and I *needed* to see the Gemini IX launch. So I agitated to go to my aunt's house, where there was a TV (but where there was also an aunt I didn't particularly care for) so I could watch the launch. I saw the Atlas launch, but then the Agena failed on its way into orbit and the Gemini launch was scrubbed. I felt so cheated that day... *sigh*...

The perils of Tom Stafford notwithstanding, however (he who ended up involved in more Gemini scrubs and Atlas/Agena failures than any other pilot in the program), Gemini was the best for a countdown lover. I got two countdowns and two launches (first of the Agena, second of the Gemini) when things went right. And they did go right on four of the flights; for Geminis VIII, X, XI and XII I was treated with dual-launch spectaculars, and I truly enjoyed them.

I don't want to get into the Apollo 1 fire in any great detail, except to say that if it had not happened and had Apollo 1 flown as scheduled, the next mission (which might not have flown for more than a year afterwards) would have been another spectacular dual-launch, with LM-3 being launched by one Saturn IB and CSM 101 (the first of the Block II CSMs) being launched by another, roughly 90 minutes apart. With the exception of the dual IB launch, this would have been pretty much the exact mission eventually flown as Apollo 9. And while I enjoyed every single Saturn V launch I ever watched (none in person, drat the luck), I would have enjoyed seeing such a dual-launch spectacular in Apollo.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy unmanned spacecraft launches, too -- I've especially enjoyed the Delta II launches which feature the live camera feed from the nose fairing. But those halcyon Gemini days still bring up fond memories.

-the other Doug