This Apollo 17 T&D cue card was an important tool during the outbound journey from the earth to the moon. It was used to ensure the correct sequence of maneuvers to execute the transposition and docking of the Command /Service Module (CSM) with the Lunar Module (LM) which for liftoff had been located in the […]
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My friend and fellow Apollo enthusiast Richard Jurek and I wrote a book to be published by MIT Press titled Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 Commander and the last man to walk on the moon wrote the foreword to the book. Rich and I have been
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My wife Yukari Watanabe Scott and I commissioned this fantastic painting from Apollo 12 astronaut and artist Alan Bean. “Boy, you can sure move on this surface” Here is the story that Alan wrote describing the painting: Prior to our Apollo 12 mission in November 1969, Pete Conrad and I talked with Neil Armstrong and
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This flown data file clip was originally from the collection of Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin and was used on the historic Apollo 11 mission. The clip is 1.75″ x 2.25″ x 0.75″ and made of lightweight aluminum. It would have been used to hold charts and checklists during the mission. In the
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The Marquardt R-4D was developed as an attitude control thruster for the Apollo Service Module and Lunar Module. Sixteen engines similar to this one were mounted on the exterior of each lunar module in four quadruple clusters and sixteen on each service module. Because both the lunar module and service module were jettisoned during the
Marquardt R-4D Apollo spacecraft attitude control engine Read More »
This bracket was carried to the moon and used aboard the Lunar Module Snoopy during the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969. The L Bracket was the connection between the 16mm Maura Data Acquisition Camera and the LM Utility bracket. The bracket attached directly to the camera and the LM Utility (which could hold either
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At the Apollo 13 40th anniversary celebration at The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, I had an opportunity to meet and share a few words with “first man” Neil Armstrong. I wanted to memorialize my meeting with a photo, but there was nobody near us to snap it. So like a teenager, I shot a
My selfie with Neil Armstrong Read More »
For most Apollo missions, the stowage lists show that each astronaut carried a Garland mechanical pencil. According to Chris Spain’s excellent Space Flown Artifacts site, despite the worldwide fame of the Fisher Space Pen it is probably the humble Garland mechanical pencil that was the most heavily-used writing instrument on the Apollo missions. In total,
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The slow-scan, black-and-white television system used on Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 shot only 10-frames per second with 320 lines of resolution. In comparison, had the American NTSC television standard of 1968 been chosen—525 interlaced lines, 30 frames per second—ten times more bandwidth would have been required. Futuristic by 1968 standards, the ease of the
Apollo 8 RCA slow scan TV camera training unit Read More »
The off-the-shelf Exer-Genie personal exerciser was perfect for spacecraft use because of its small size. Prior to Apollo 7, the astronauts were charged with finding a way to stay fit. For my book Marketing the Moon written with Richard Jurek, we interviewed Walt Cunningham, Apollo 7 astronaut, about how the Exer-Genie was selected for space
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