Check out this video of a Saturn 5 lifting off. Great sound and picture quality. It is amazing that a hairless, talkative primate could have the imagination and creativity to build such an amazing machine.
Abso-friggin-lutely amazing [:)]
What are all those white pieces falling off?
Frozen liquid oxygen and frozen condesation formed on the outer skin of the stages. WOW that was cool.
1.5 million lb thrust from EACH of the five Rocketdyne F-1 engines at liftoff. [:|]
What a ride that would’ve been!
Back when NASA got things done in a timely manner…
…and they did it with a slide rule, pencil, and paper instead of “super computers”.
We went to Florida to watch one of the Apollo launches. Wow, the feeling was awesome- it really shook the guts. I was stationed at Vandenberg for three years and saw and felt the shaking (even got to launh an ICBM myself). I was familiar with the gut and lung shaking, but the first stage of the S-V was something else again!
They had computers. Not personal desktop computers, but mainframes.
Yep. My company (McDonnel Douglas) didn’t have a supercomputer, but it was a facility with a couple of top of the line mainframes,
They were something to see when they went up. Even during the Mercury missions we could watch them at school. Everyone would be gathered into the gym/auditorium/ cafeteria room to sit on the floor to watch the launches on the school’s B?W tv. By the time the Saturn rockets were going up many people had gotten teh new color tvs and I had a chance to see one at my Grandmother’s house. There’s a star trek episode where they go back to the 1960s and they show fome film from a launch. NASA had their part in the show and i used to have a picture of GEne Roddenbury in the control room at the cape.