[X] My Assistant

[belleraphon1]

Well said Stu! I had the same thrill from Voyager and Galileo. And on top of that there is Ganymede and Callisto... forgive me folks, but there is something very intriguing to me about the sublimating seltzer surface of Callisto, and the tectonics on Ganymede...... and how the freak does Callisto have an ocean when it formed too cold to differentiate.?

We stand to learn do much...

Craig ... 72 in 2025

[vjkane]

Craig ... 72 in 2025

I wonder if this board has a bi-modal age distribution? Those of us in our 50s who got hooked with Viking and Voyager and those in their 20s & 30s who got hooked with the recent wealth of missions.

[Greg Hullender]

Stu: If you watched an Apollo splashdown, it was almost certainly Apollo 17 -- the last one -- since I think that's the only one where they managed to film it before it reached the sea.

I watched it too. :-)

--Greg

[dvandorn]

Stu: If you watched an Apollo splashdown, it was almost certainly Apollo 17 -- the last one -- since I think that's the only one where they managed to film it before it reached the sea.

Ummm... no. The only Apollo flight on which there was no live video of the CM descending on its parachutes was Apollo 8, and that was because it splashed down in the pre-dawn darkness (a consequence of designing the flight to reconnoiter Apollo Landing Site 1, in the eastern Sea of Tranquility, rather than the eventually selected ALS 2, where Apollo 11 landed). Apollo 8 could have had a daylight splashdown if they had orbited the moon 12 times instead of 10, but Frank Borman was adamant that he would rather splash down in darkness than spend one more second in lunar orbit than absolutely necessary.

Heck, on Apollos 14 and 16, they had live video of the CM on its two drogue chutes, before the three main chutes were even deployed.

-the other Doug

[Greg Hullender]

The only Apollo flight on which there was no live video of the CM descending on its parachutes was Apollo 8, . . .

Are you sure they were live, though? Admittedly I'm relying on the memories of my then-14-year-old self, but a) I remember thinking "THIS is new" during the Apollo 17 splashdown, and I'd swear the news guys said the same thing. For previous landings, I remember seeing footage from the aircraft carriers that picked them up, but, again, in my recollection, the first we'd see of a capsule was when the helicopter deposited it on the flight deck.

I can believe NASA or the Navy took videos of the splashdowns -- I just don't remember them sharing them live.

Anyway, the Apollo 17 splashdown is the only one I remember seeing live on TV -- and I tried to watch all that stuff.

Was there something special about that splashdown? (Second-guessing myself now.) Was it the only one in color? Or the only one close up? The other thing I'm thinking is that only one network bothered to cover it live -- maybe NASA let them put a film crew on the chopper so they had their own feed?

--Greg

[dvandorn]

Are you sure they were live, though?

I'm absolutely sure. They were running live coverage of splashdowns since Gemini. There was nothing especially special about the 17 coverage, it was from a helicopter, but that had happened many times before.

If you do a cursory search for pictures from Apollo 13, for example, you can see the image of the MOCR in pandemonium, while the huge eidaphore screen at the front of the room shows the live image of Odyssey descending on her three main chutes...

-the other Doug