I can faintly remember once reading something by Isaac Asimov about the moon landing. He was making a point about the predictive power or lack thereof of science fiction. He wrote that of the dozens of hundreds of stories written pre-1969 about the first moon landing, not a single one featured the event being televised live back to earth.
So where did he write this? Or was it someone else who made the point?
posted by LarryC
on May 11, 2013 -
8 answers
1) How much memory did the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) have and 2) when was the first cellphone with the same amount of memory introduced to the public? 3) Where there any other publicly available products that had the same amount of memory? 4) If so, when were they introduced to the market?
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posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Nov 30, 2012 -
6 answers
I was told a possible apocryphal story by my father, that at a press conference about the Apollo missions a British reporter stood up and asked Wernher von Braun something like "How does it feel to be aiming rockets at the moon rather than London?", at which von Braun stormed out. Googling has failed me. Did this happen? If not, is there a likely source for it?
posted by Coobeastie
on Aug 9, 2010 -
8 answers
May I trouble someone in the U.K. to search the
BFI download page and store, and tell me if they offer
Project Apollo: Manned Flight to the Moon for sale or download? The site doesn't permit access to those pages from the U.S. I'm not looking to commit some kind of international copyright conspiracy; I just really want to see that movie.
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posted by Chinese Jet Pilot
on Aug 1, 2007 -
5 answers
'Moon trees' were trees grown from seeds that orbited the moon onboard Apollo 14. Two trees were given to each US state to honor the bicentennial festivities in 1976 but no list of locations was kept. Now a NASA scientist is trying to
track them down. I'd like to find one in Rhode Island but he's missing quite a few. Anyone know of one not on his list?
posted by jwells
on Jul 7, 2004 -
11 answers
Something I've never understood. It takes a giant rocket to achieve escape velocity and leave the Earth. The Apollo mission made it all the way to the moon. But in all the pictures I've ever seen, the only thing they've got on the moon is a
lander, a small capsule on legs. Where's the rocket they used to get off the moon? How did they get off the moon? I know the moon is much smaller and has almost no atmosphere, but is leaving it really as easy as firing a few booster rockets? Why is the rocket to leave the Earth so much bigger?
posted by scarabic
on May 18, 2004 -
29 answers