Well, ya’ got me… pretty much.
But what about this one…
If you’ve books to recommend, I’m in.
Hell, even the French and the British have collected their share of German engineers and prototypes !
I read about that in other parts of the internet too. It’s quite funny to witness. Defenders of the film argue the von Braun angle - how american was the whole endeavor when a literal nazi constructed the rocket?
The 'muricans counter-argument is usually: “But he became a citizen in '55” and “He wasn’t a SS officer by choice, everyone had to do it.”
Watch those 'muricans then talk about Pope Benedict XVI later → literal nazi because he joined the Hitleryouth
I am pretty sure that Mrs Gorsky would have found a way out of that one.
About the trailers: I dislike the way they conflate the Gemini and Apollo flights.
About the movie: its probably the only movie I will see in the cinema this year. Watching it with my son, some time in October.
Changing the subject a bit here but I think the pristine nature of the lunar surface tells a lot about the universe. There isn’t a beach on Earth which is free of garbage. But the only garbage on the moon that we saw, was ours. For me that suggests that there is nothing like us which was ever close enough to visit our solar system. There were no ancient astronauts.
Oh, surely this is about due for a remake?
but I keep hitting London!
I hope this movie doesn’t make Armstrong out to be something he wasn’t. He was a fine pilot and commander, but so were others and others even more so than he. His selection as commander of the first lunar landing had a lot to do with how the schedules were shuffled around as NASAs mission goals were met, or not. For example, the failure of Apollo 6 prompted a change to Apollo 8’s plan, which caused Jim Lovell to be pulled into the flight and out of his probable Apollo 11 berth.
The little green moon men would disagree!
I dunno where that myth came from, but really we got Teflon from the US nuclear program. They needed something to protect the pipes from the uranium hexafloride gas that was produced in the enrichment project, and Teflon fit the bill nicely. It wasn’t invented for that specific purpose, but it was the first large scale use, and scaling up from bench-work to industrial production is the hard bit about inventing a new material.
You’d hope that Yuri Gagarin would get a film about him, but the US does it’s best to forgot that it lost the space race several times over before reaching the moon.
And DuPont charged the Manhattan project $1 for developing Teflon so they wouldn’t be viewed as war-profiteers.
I’d pick some of the 20th century’s great artists. Maybe The Beatles or Elvis. Also, maybe Hitler, but not because of his art.
No, there really was, among the general public. It was SOLD with “in peace for all mankind” sentiments, all the news shows and papers talked it up. NASA was a civilian agency, everybody kept repeating. It was just a few years after a nuclear test ban treaty forbade use of nukes in space, which was everybody’s big fear about space rockets, that you’d have orbiting nukes ready to drop on you with 5 minutes warning. So all the talk was about how in space, we’d leave behind the militarism and armaments. “Star Trek” was in full swing then, with emphasis on peaceful solutions and how Star Fleet was about exploration.
The underlying FACTS were just as you say: it was a demonstration we could put rockets with massive payloads anywhere with total precision. And the first words were “The Eagle has landed”, with Eagle obviously a metaphor for “America”.
But it was an odd combination of a chilling military demonstration in FACT with a peaceful intent in all the TALK. The fact of it had to speak for itself.
OOh, yeah, forgot to mention: there was quiet controversy about whether Armstrong had been angling for a higher position by resigning from the military. When you pass plaques at the NASA tour of launchpads and there’s a list of names that launched there, it’s Col. this and Captain that, and only Armstrong is “Mr.” from the whole astronaut corps.
NASA adamantly denied that they especially wanted a civilian captain, because the astronauts were sooo competitive and they didn’t want the message that staying in the service screwed your chances of advancement.
But, like the program itself, the fact remains. Armstrong wouldn’t have gotten the top job without his amazing performance on Gemini 8 when it got into trouble (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/geminis-first-docking-turns-to-wild-ride-in-orbit ) but its sure his civilian status helped with the effort to sell the mission as peaceful exploration “for all mankind”.
A lot of papers did go with the flag-saluting picture, but many more went with the fuzzy image of the First Step.
That’s called “raising the bar” and raise it quite a bit we did!
Exactly. I was mainly referring to those who signed the documents authorizing moonshot et al. How it was sold to the public, and the very valid sentiments therein is another matter.
People evoke Rodenberry in this discussion as an example of how the space race inspired an altruistic flourish in arts that depicted space travel, but the fact is that Starfleet is basically just Space Navy. Militaristic, colonialist and working toward furthering the interests of Earth and her allies. The Prime Directive was just guidance.
Again, I don’t think history changes if Neil Armstrong catches a cold on July 14th and Jim Lovell as backup CDR is the first man on the moon – in which case Jim Lovell is the man we’d all remember. It’s not Neil Armstrong was uniquely qualified to be the first guy, only that he was the first guy. In other replays of history, it’s Conrad or Lovell or Leonov.
“Raising the bar” or “moving the goal posts”?
Hidden Figures didn’t exactly gloss over that point. The opening scene of the movie is a bunch of NASA guys nervously monitoring an orbital rocket launch—only to reveal that the rocket was the Soviets’.
Obviously American cinema tends to tell the story of the space race from an American perspective, but that’s hardly surprising. How many Russian movies tell the story of the Apollo missions?
As for Yuri, he got a movie as recently as 2013:
I mean this is good and all. But a movie about Chris Hadfield would be so much better!
https://youtu.be/KaOC9danxNo
Will there be an alternative ending for the conspiracy peeps?
