Designed to protect men? That was a little startling. Was she trying to be period-authentic or something?
I want to believe that there were at least a couple of times that astronauts or other NASA workers used the twisty slide just for fun. Yes, the context takes a little bit out of it, but, come on. Somebody had to test the thing.
That’s some pretty annoying linkbait.
“Watch my video to learn about the rubber room, wherein the only thing I really tell you is to go visit my blog to see pictures. Once you get there, you’ll find I only have a few low res cell phone images and instructions to go visit my article on discover.com to see even more images (which is actually just a single image of a door)!”
It was a safety measure that was only in place during Apollo, when astronauts were all men. Given that, it didn’t seem particularly jarring to me.
At least in her comments section someone links to an actually useful page with real pictures of the room.
I too was annoyed by the lack of good pictures.
So I googled it for some better ones.
This site in particular has some absolutely drool-worthy pictures for the space-porn aficionado , including a link to a 360 degree panorama of the blast room.
National Geographic has an article that has unfortunately dates itself quite badly by referring to Lost a few too many times.
And a particularly cool site that includes some helpful illustrations in isometric and top-down views
Typo in story?
1048’ fireball (boingboing) vs 1408’ fireball (video)
You shrank the fireball by 360 feet!
Comically, that last link contains photos that appear in the discovery.com article about the rubber room, the blogger didn’t even use her own pictures for the article.
Obviously Neil Armstrong was a misogynist, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.
The crank mentioned by the blogger is probably part of the ventilation system. I bet they just reused a typical bomb shelter design of the period, mod it slightly. And reuse the data for having x amount of people stuck in a room of such size.
Google fallout/bomb shelters of the 50s-60s era and you’ll find that crank, filter, candle instructions.
Wow! what a poor report!
In addition to the poor, unoriginal photos (mentioned by others), and the cloying references to “knowing the right people” and “some of the more comprehensive historical documents I have” it gives no new information and makes the following ridiculous suggestion:
“made entirely of rubber ostensibly to cushion their speeding arrival” Huh? That doesn’t make any sense at all. How soft is that rubber? Were the astronauts expected to arrive so fast that they’d be bouncing off the walls?
In fact, the nickname “rubber room” only refers to the fact that the structure was isolated from shock waves by being placed on rubber cushions. The room itself, like other blast-resistant structures was made of concrete and steel, with a steel dome to resist blast forces from above. Didn’t she notice that the entire interior of the room was of normal “hardness”?
Poor.
Well he spoke those words in the 1970’s, when they were absolutely the norm. They no longer are, and an explorer who said that today would sound like he had an agenda. That’s why I was startled by a speaker using exclusive language in… I assume it was this year. Most of us no longer speak that way, and the few who do are mostly trolls, such as yourself.
I was just happy that NASA can calculate a fireball diameter to four places of accuracy. And still uses Imperial.
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