Marketing the Moon 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 […]
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Alan Bean painting “Boy, you can sure move on this surface” 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
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Apollo 11 flown data file clip 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
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Marquardt R-4D Apollo spacecraft attitude control engine 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
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Apollo 10 Lunar Module flown right angle camera bracket 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
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My selfie with Neil Armstrong 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
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Apollo 9 flown mechanical pencil 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
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Apollo 8 RCA slow scan TV camera training unit 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
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Flown Apollo 9 Exer-Genie Astronaut Exerciser 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
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Apollo 9 flown Command Module Star Chart Panel This star chart panel was one of the metal guidance and control panels used at the navigation station in the lower equipment bay of the Command Module. This particular example was flown on Apollo 9 and comes from the Jim McDivitt collection. These panels were a quick
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