Another Mercury 7 Astronaut passes

For those of us who grew up wanting to be astronauts.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/0...bit/index.html

Sorry not car related but I felt impelled to mention this.

The only Astronaut to fly Mercury Gemini and Apollo.

Godspeed Wally.

Gordo Coopers ashes went to space this week along with "Scotty" of Star Trek fame a fellow Canadian.

Stu

Well the name is Ford related. Also transportation. Hard to think that these guys are old. Time marches on and the ones from tv never age or seem not to since we only see them in reruns and documentaries etc.
I knew Scotty's went but didn't realize Gordo's went also. Wonder if Wally had such a wish also?

Deke Slayton is the fellow that is running the "Space Services" company that launches the ashes into space so it would seem to me if Wally wanted it he would get the service too. The remains of 200 other people went up in that launch. Hmmm I wonder if the price will come down eventually. I think that would be cool... We are stardust... we are golden.. sorry I'm having a flashback... weird I've never even done drugs! Stu

time marches on...old Scott Crossfield (x15 test pilot)passed away last year too- he was always someone I thought was 'too cool' as a little kid...funny look how far cars have advanced since the 60's, yet they still had things like SR71, XB70,x15, saturn V/apollo, and so on...yet all the records/achievements were done with sliderules or computers that wouldnt hold a candle to todays calculators...the only things really 'still active' from most of those programs might be the yaw rockets(think originally developed on x15) and main engines(think offshoots from saturn rocket) on todays very old shuttle...a lot of aerospace tech surely filtered into automotive stuff, just seems that 'market driven' really kicked automotive development into high gear, where budget cuts resulted in...well the SR71A was designed in '63 and still the fastest thing we've got? (officially anyway)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ford4v429 on 5/4/07 11:27am ]</font>

Sorry to hear that. I watched all that stuff on the TV, I was real rocket guy. We did some scary things with nylon slide rules, wire and bits of aluminum. I've seen up close some of the pieces used in those programs and worked with similar engineering. Compared to what we take for granted now, it'd freak you out. And guys climbed up on the things, lit the fuse and rode them out to where nobody could get to them if there was trouble. You've have to "grow some bolts" to do that, for sure.
[addsig]

As one astronaut put it, they were flying into space in a machine consisting of 450,000 intricate parts, every one of which was supplied by the lowest bidder.

The average car nowadays has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft had. An article in Omni magazine gave a retrospective on the Apollo program, and one of the Apollo 13 astronauts recalled having to calulate the burn for return to Earth in longhand on paper because pocket calculators hadn't been invented yet.
[addsig]

It was Gus Grissom that said the line about the "lowest bidder" and you're correct. A good scientific calculator has more computing power than the Apollo CM did. I just bought one the other day at the dollar store. Those guys had 'nads of brass. Stu

I think the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were my first heroes. Like most of you have said, it takes a bit of gumption to strap yourself to eight million pounds of thrust and go hurtling 186,000 miles away. It's sort of akin to putting yourself in a leaky pine boat covered in tar and put yourself at Mother Nature's mercy in hopes that you find a new world at the end of your trip.

We are all amazed by what they lacked back then - but what I find equally amazing is what they did have. Proton exchange hydrogen fuel cells were pioneered for the space program. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators, heat shield technology, advances in low and high gain communication, scanning, and tracking technology, the list goes on and on.

It was an amazing feat and it saddens me that flying into space, going where humans, by all rights, should not be able to, has become such a commonplace thing. Exploration is part of being human, and with the entire globe mapped, scanned, quantized, digitized, and probed, there isn't much left here to explore aside from the deepest oceans. While there are things to fix here, you have to see a future to work for the present.

It seems like there is one thing that gathers everyones' attention, no matter who, and that is the unknown. Space is the ultimate unknown. It is so foreign, so alien to what we have here, that I find it amazing just to sit and think about the complexity - in fact, to fail to understand the sheer enormity of it.

These astronauts charted the territory as they went, straight into the history books. There's a line in Apollo 13, "Christopher Columbus, Charles Lindbergh, and Neil Armstrong. Ha ha, Neil Armstrong."

But it wasn't so different - what those few did allowed us to feel as most of us do today - space flight is commonplace, old news, of a bygone era, but I think it has just begun. The more we know about whats around us, the more we realize how very much more there is to learn.

I think we owe a lot to these men and women, from the astronauts who flew the machines, to the techs that installed the cabin air filters. They were part of something great, and something that hasn't yet reached the peak of its greatness.

The stars are out there, all we have to do is reach out and touch.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: thekingofazle on 5/5/07 2:16pm ]</font>

That was extremely well said. Stu