On Tue, 27 Nov 2018 20:49:07 -0500, John H.
wrote:

On Tue, 27 Nov 2018 15:30:20 -0800 (PST), Its Me wrote:

On Tuesday, November 27, 2018 at 3:07:57 PM UTC-5, John H wrote:
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 15:06:28 -0800 (PST), Its Me wrote:

On Monday, November 26, 2018 at 5:01:52 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 14:56:53 -0500, Keyser Soze
wrote:

On 11/26/18 2:54 PM, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 11/26/2018 2:42 PM, Mr. Luddite wrote:

Live streaming Mars landing right now on the NASA website ....
scheduled to land at 3pm EST.


WOW!Â* They successfully landed it on Mars.

All I saw was a bunch of people in a control room wearing maroon shirts...

What, you long for the days when they all wore white shirts with a
skinny tie and a cigarette in their mouth?

The last time I was at Cape Canaveral, they had a recreation of the Apollo mission control room, complete with the ash trays and a couple packs of Lucky Strikes laying around. That was a proper rocket! Wish I could have seen the launch of one. Had to settle for a shuttle launch. Still pretty cool, but the ground doesn't
shake.

I was working at Cape Canveral when two Saturns were launched in early 1965. We lay down on the roof
of our office (US Coast and Geodetic Survey) and had a great view. Yes, the ground shook, but we
were right there on the base.

Saturn V's had 7.5 million pounds of thrust. The space shuttle didn't beat up the astronauts nearly as bad as a Saturn did.

The guy that started the company I work for was working at NASA in the early days. He says they announce a launch, then he and his coworkers would walk outside. A rocket would go up, blow up, and they would go back inside and get back to work. It took a while, even with the confiscated V-2's to learn from, for NASA to get it
right.

Rocket Science is real, and Germans make damned good engineers.

I worked there during late '64 and until June '65. Didn't see one rocket blow up. Did see a bunch go
up though.

Musta been a sweet spot in the space program. ;-)
I grew up with Vanguard. (my dad was a navy guy then)
I agree, the reason it took so long to get to the moon was safety
concerns and they actually did pretty damned good considering.
Even with a catastrophic failure the NASA system and the hardware
brought them home.
I might sound like Harry but I wouldn't mind more DoD money being
spent in space. The space program has always piggy backed off DoD or
CIA dollars.
There are a few Hubble telescopes. Only one is pointed up, (Maybe why
the original mirror was nearsighted). ;-)
I do think robot probes are the way to go until we answer a whole lot
more questions. We should really know more about where we are going
before we actually put a man in a rocket. It really looks like Musk is
working on keeping people alive. He is our best hope for that near
earth orbit thing (that we buy from the Russians). NASA should keep
looking from here and perfecting the trick to live there. We are way
far away from that and a weekend on Mars is a waste of everything.