#apollo day

[hellenicdreaming]

I'm trying to make sure I keep up with something for Apollo every Sunday. I started to illustrate these herbs that im gonna add to my book all about him. Also, in the earlier part of the week, I brought him this little cow statue 💕

[kimnowls]

Happy Moon Landing Day! (July 20, 2023)

[reno-matagot]

Happy Day of Apollo!

''Having spoken thus, the long-haired Archer Phoebus descended to the land of broad paths, and all the immortal women were astonished, and Delos covered herself entirely with gold, seeing the offspring of Zeus and Leto; and she rejoiced, because the god had chosen her for his dwelling among all the islands of the mainland, and had preferred her; and she blossomed like the peak of a mountain under the flowers of the forest.''

Homeric Hymn to Apollo (extract)

[theoiandtea]

Apollo Day!!!!!

Going to be a stretch to get everything done day but it's for you know who so I'll do it!!!!

[hellenicdreaming]

I'm trying to make sure I keep up with something for Apollo every Sunday. I started to illustrate these herbs that im gonna add to my book all about him. Also, in the earlier part of the week, I brought him this little cow statue 💕

[theoiandtea]

It's Sunday!

It's Apollo Day!

I'm so excited to talk to Apollo again!

Also:

Today is the day I tell my best friend I am Hellene. Wish me luck!

[theoiandtea]

Apollo Day!!!!!!!!!!!

I love him. I love him so much.

I still have so much to do today.

I love Apollo Day.

[onsomekindofstartrek]

It’s Moon Day Once Again

Apollo 11 was truly an incredible moment in history, and I think people now don’t really conceptualize how difficult and objectively unwise what these men did was.

Like, riding a motorcycle on the freeway is unwise. You’re basically a human with a little bit of metal accelerating you to speeds you can’t fully deal with, around much larger machines that wouldn’t be terribly damaged by smashing into you, also going at extreme speeds.

Going to the moon in 1969 was a lot like that. By April 1961 a man had orbited the earth. That was already very difficult at the time. Computers were rudimentary. Rocket technology was still very largely being designed around ideas that German scientists developed for Hitler’s V2 missiles, in both the East and West.

Now, the one good thing about being in orbit is, it’s not that hard to come down. You lose a certain amount of momentum, and suddenly your ballistic trajectory is no longer an ellipse but a parabola that intersects the ground. With parachutes you can even survive that intersection! Sometimes.

To get to the moon, for most of the way, you can be in a free return trajectory. That means you’re in an trajectory that would make an incomplete figure-8 before intersecting the atmosphere, which would rob you of enough momentum to bring you safely in to an ocean landing. You could lose main power and as long as you could keep the life support online and not freeze, you’d be fine.

As long as you didn’t step one foot (metaphorically) out of that trajectory. If you do, if, for instance, you want to orbit the moon and land there, then you better damn well hope you can put yourself back in a return trajectory or… you ain’t coming home.

For the first time, humans were flying so high that what went up might not come down.

Theoretically if you lost the ability to deorbit while still in a circular orbit around earth, they could have probably found a way to save you even in the 60’s.

But if you were going to the moon you had to be damn sure. You had to be motherfucking confident that your engine would re-ignite and put you back in an orbit that would lead you back to Earth, or else once you left the path, there would be a potential of getting stuck where nothing you could do would save you from a cold, choking death. This happened to some guys, by the way, and they lived, by the most stunning feat of engineering legerdemain in the history of space travel. There’s a film about them.

And things weren’t looking good. The first Apollo spacecraft ever built killed the three men who were supposed to fly it, on the ground in a goddamned dry run. In a pure oxygen environment, the Velcro they were planning on using to keep pens from floating around became extremely flammable and something caused a spark, causing it to go up like gasoline. The fire increased pressure in the capsule and the door, which opened in-wards, could not be opened against that pressure. They choked to death before they’d even left the ground, then burnt hideously leaving only charred wristwatches, bones and melted rubber. At that time it was very conceivable that the entire program would be halted. I have visited the exhibit, no, the shrine where their watches are kept. Their names were Grissom, White and Chaffee.

Somehow they persevered, and three people were brave enough to get in the Apollo 11 capsule, take it out of the free return orbit and then climb in a landing craft made partly of tinfoil, land on another world and… do a photo-op? Plant a flag? do geology?

Like, it’s easy to forget that, as far as the people funding and fighting for this program were concerned, this was colonial, geopolitical dickwagging. This was to show the Soviets who was the goddamned alpha male of the world. James Webb, for all his flaws, had to fight for the science to even be considered, to even get funding allocated for it, and that only by his feverish efforts to convince the president (another catholic moderate democrat, at that time) that the science was necessary to make the mission safe. The president did not care, he wanted the colors of the Yankees to be planted on the moon, and he wanted it to be ideally before the People’s Flag of the Soviet Union was planted there by the Soyuz program. The science, he said, was incidental.

What does it say about us that the most incredible scientific achievement of our species was an exercise in symbolic colonialism; a proxy war alongside other more bloody proxy wars against the Soviets, in Korea and Viet Nam and later in Afghanistan; a show of force that proved nothing but that we had money to throw away and men willing to give their lives for our cause.

But the science was there. While in chains, science prevailed. Humanity’s knowledge was materially advanced, despite Kennedy and Nixon doing their best to keep the dickwagging at the forefront. We learned so much from that period from the sixties to the nineties when space travel was actually funded. We can thank them for GPS and many other things.

And whatever we might think of their motives, you have to respect Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. They got on that damned rocket knowing that it was like riding a motorcycle with no brakes on a freeway with hell on one side and hades on the other, and knowing that the best astronauts they knew had died when the same kind of ship decided to become an impromptu gas chamber. And they went to the moon, goddammit. That’s the kind of guts I wish I had.

And that flag, that it was all in service of? And the others like it, from the six successful lunar landings? The flag that it was so fucking important to plant in the regolith before the Soviets could?

They’ve all bleached to white, un-ruffled in a place where no wind blows, in a surrender to the cosmos. In the furthest outpost of humanity, America surrenders.

I think that’s beautiful.