Apollo 11
 

I just got back from it with the family. Incredible documentary. No narrator, just raw, ultra high quality (for 1969) footage, most of which has never been seen by the public. Highly recommend it if you live near a showing. The sound at blast off was intense. And seeing Johnny Carson strolling around in the crowd was kind of surreal. IMAX only runs until Thursday I believe.

Also this was my first time going to one of the new laser IMAXs. Definitely worth the extra drive time. Look for the triangle icon below.

https://www.imax.com/movies/apollo-11-2019

Just wanted to share, figured this crowd would enjoy it!

Just returned from seeing this on a "regular" IMAX screen.

It was amazing. Anyone who's a pilot and was born before 1980 is going to love this.

A must see on the big screen. Thanks for the rec.

So I guess I won’t see it being born in ‘82.

No it never happened. I have socks older than you.

Wonder why 1980.

Thanks for the heads up. Big Apollo fan and yes, I was born when Kennedy was promising the moon. Vary sad that Millennials have no clue what an achievement this truly was.

My new neighbor is Al Worden Apollo 15 CMP.... pretty quiet guy.

:cool:

You sound like a gem.

You are a vary sad person.

Born after 1980 and I appreciate greatly the entire Apollo project. Also the Gemini project. Also the Allied victory in WW2. Also the American victory in the revolution. Were you even alive then?

He probably was.

https://memegenerator.net/img/instan...ff-my-lawn.jpg

:rolleyes:

Wife and I took my two boys, 13 and 9, to see it and they were both spellbound from start to finish....

Guess they aren't milennials.....

Fantastic film. The quality of the footage really is amazing.

A true legend in his own mind:rolleyes:.

They aren’t. The oldest Millenials are in their mid 30s now. The youngest would be young adults.

Well that was a stupid post.

Apparently I need to work on my sarcasm....

Gentlemen/Gentlewomen/Zims/Zers,

Apologies. I was less than 100% articulate. A common failure of the existant medium, and a reason I've backed WAY off the interwebs.

Pilots born pre-1980 MAY/SHOULD love this film. Pilots born AFTER 1980 MIGHT like this film. Your mileage may vary.

Based on a completely unscientific review of the movie goers around me at my personal viewing, I'd say that movie goers of a "certain age" seemed enthralled.

Others, with their kids (and their constantly referenced "smart" phones) in tow, seemed bored beyond belief.

I plead "middle age". If, as a child, you too looked at astronauts, navy pilots, model rocketry, engineering, nerves of steel, and nigh-unsurrmountable technical challenges as amazing things....you will enjoy this movie.

(Imagine a "Master Warning" on a multi-billion dollar US prestige mission whilst running low on fuel and descending onto the surface of the moon A QUARTER BILLION miles away from your home base...in real time....WWYD?)

If you enjoy Marvel (TM) movies, insta-tech, virtual worlds, and computer generated wizardry, this may not be your movie. NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. The world moves on, all hail the brave new world, etc.

For a documentary that shows men putting everything on the line, supported by their huge teams of faceless men and women, it's an amazing show. I choked up at several points.

Highly recommended. IMAX or nothing; the "countdown" pre -Saturn V launch was riveting. As was the actual lunar module landing.

What a time to be alive. What a time to be an American.

Dragging the wife in tow to see this again tomorrow before it goes to video. WOW. It's that good.

And every generation will continue to look at the younger generations as degenerate failures who fall short of all expectations with no respect for their elders, etc etc. Irony is that much of the generation who is old enough to remember the Apollo missions also managed to be the downfall of society in their WW2 serving fathers' eyes.

I saw Apollo 11, and enjoyed the heck out of it. Incredible what an accomplishment it was, given the limitations. It doesn't take a generational membership to appreciate that.

And to think, I was born AFTER we lost the Challenger, and now I'm flying a wing designed in the same decade the Apollo capsule was.

Also worth noting: the average age of the engineer team at space X is late 20's.

Can you imagine trying to fall asleep on the floor of the Eagle? Or being completely alone on the Columbia just zoomin around moon? Incredible stuff.

Glad you all enjoyed it!

I took no offense and figured it was just a social media communication barrier. But one can never miss a good opportunity for humor.

I love history and anything to do with humankind’s innovation/daring/courage etc. If you have Netflix, be sure to check out Medal of Honor. My 10 year old son binge watched it.

Maybe photoshopped but......

GO SEE THIS MOVIE!

It is incredible. They found and sync'd the audio from the experts and specialists, through to mission control, through to the Apollo capsule.

Armstrong's landing on the moon has always been amazing; 16 seconds of fuel remaining. The idea that he was getting warning messages and alarms which were trained as an ABORT scenario up to two weeks before the mission, flew through those on the assurance of experts on the ground, then flew around a football field sized crater, to set down (with a drift rate which is appreciated when you see how he dragged a probe through the Moon dust) to landing is a real feat of piloting skill. For those of you who like formation flying, his ability to whip a spaceship around and stop it on a dime is eye watering. Dude could drive.... .

I've always thought the approach to the moon as particularly interesting. Nobody at the upper levels of Mission Control knew what the warnings were and neither did those on the capsule. Somebody can wiki-search the guy who knew. To hear his voice, sync'd to the events as they played out and how fast it worked it's way up the COC to the Moon ... wow these folks were sharp ... and saved a multi billion dollar mission with the whole World watching.

Which brings me to another point about this movie. The people on the ground are usually left out of any documentary. In this, seeing the people camping out, being ordinary families to witness and incredible event in the history of mankind, gave a lot of relevance to my kids. Yes, this was a BIG DEAL.

With a missed green-slip, tickets and food, the movie cost me something like $3,300. Can't believe I'm writing this but, worth every penny.

As a millennial, I was too busy playing angry birds and looking at Kylie jenner’s Instagram to care about some stupid space crap.

Millennial (I assume) that has a YouTube vintage space show on all things non shuttle.

https://youtu.be/_Kq67RcfSpw

https://youtu.be/OmCzZ-D8Wdk

I dig the exclamation point tattoo on her left forearm. Yeah, I was looking toward the bottom of the screen. So were you.

:D

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ee/63...f9d3c3cb1b.jpg

I did find one video of hers on why there is no Apollo 2 and 3.
https://youtu.be/C7ULrq9Z9yg

I'll warn you. It's more modest but good info.

There are actually two different stories on this, but neither story has Armstrong aborting in the sim over 1201 and 1202 alarms.

Armstrong and Aldrin have independently said that they never saw the 1201 and 1202 alarms in any of the sim training.

Gene Krantz has stated (in Failure Is Not An Option) that in at least one of the simulator runs (but not with Anderson and Aldrin in the box) a 1201 alarm came up and the sim crew aborted, it turns out unnecessarily. Following this, Krantz directed the GUIDO to come up with rules for these alarms.

A fun little read on the topic:
http://www.collectspace.com/news/new...-apollo11.html

The psychological/human factors/CRM issue is also fascinating. Even the Apollo 13 crew felt massive regret (and some degree of legitimate temptation) to mentally indulge in thoughts of "going for it". You come 250K miles and are only 60 away (something like that) its RIGHT THERE! and you may not get another chance. And whatever pressure they felt, Apollo 11 probably had 10 times more. I bet it rivaled even a last leg of the trip commuter with a tight offline connection on the other side of the terminal! :)

Good article! So, am I misunderstanding the "BAILOUT" to not mean "Abort"? for 1202? My reference for the abort, which on further reading in your article now seems to have been an error, was a Smithsonian article published in Air & Space magazine about the software that was priority driven and asynchronous.

Then, while watching the above videos, ran across this by the same young lady https://youtu.be/kGD0zEbiDPQ

and the best comment ...

"404 ERROR "MOON NOT FOUND"

"On the last integrated simulation, 11 days before the launch of Apollo 11, a program alarm went off during the descent of the lunar module. Steve Bales was the controller in charge of guidance for the LM, and he had no idea what the alarm meant. He called an abort, with the LM 10,000 feet above the lunar surface. “I had a hard time explaining my actions” after the simulation, Bales says. “Something was going on we didn’t understand, so I thought we should abort.” The program alarms were in part debugging aids, useful to programmers as they developed the programs; they were built in to let a programmer know that the computer was overloaded, unable to finish all the tasks in its execution frame. Mission planners never expected them in real time.

After the aborted simulation, flight director Gene Kranz assembled the controllers, Garman remembers, and told them to develop a response for every program alarm. There were about 40 alarms. “Most were innocuous,” Bales says, “but about 10 were in a class requiring judgment.” For these, Garman says, “the notes we wrote were to the effect that if the alarm doesn’t happen too often and nothing else seems wrong, then the best thing is to just proceed.”

As it happens, Bales was the guidance controller on duty for Apollo 11’s landing on the moon. Exactly 316 seconds into the descent, Buzz Aldrin reported a “1202” program alarm, one of those requiring judgment. Forty seconds later the alarm repeated.

“That was a shock to our system,” says Bales. “We had 10 to 15 seconds to decide what to do. I remember Jack [Garman] talking in my ear, saying ‘It’s not coming too fast, it’s the same type we had before.’ ” Bales called “Go” to the flight director. The alarms recurred three more times before the landing. Because of this distraction (and because they had to fly past the landing site, which was strewn with boulders), the astronauts lost track of where they were, and it took mission control a few hours to pinpoint their location.

It took even longer to determine why the alarms occurred, but the source turned out to be extraneous data from the rendezvous radar. The radar had no role to play in the landing but would be used by the LM after takeoff from the moon for return to the command module. Initial mission procedures called for the radar to be shut off during the landing, but at the last minute it was decided to leave the radar on in case the landing was aborted and it was needed. What mission planners didn’t realize was that while the LM computer was busy carrying out the tasks necessary for landing, it was also processing data from the rendezvous radar.

“The computer was interrupting itself hundreds of times a second, adding and subtracting bits from memory,” says Garman. “Just the act of doing that addition and subtraction stole 15 percent of the computer’s available time.” Carrying out the tasks necessary for landing took about 85 percent of the computer’s available time, so the added work sometimes pushed the computer to the end of the cycle before all tasks were completed, triggering the alarms.

“Had the radar noise problem taken 20 percent of the computer’s time, it’s not clear we could have landed,” says Garman.

“Our software saved the mission,” Hamilton says, “because it was asynchronous—it bumped low-priority tasks. Without it, the mission would have aborted or crashed on the moon.”


Read more at https://www.airspacemag.com/space/practicing-safe-software-180962744/#bfhYbi7MJQtCmTwS.99"

Go to Netflix and find Mission Control It is a fantastic documentary with those guys and about Apollo 11 and 13. It'll give you goosebumps when Krantz cuts out the outside world right before the Apollo 11 landing and says we came in as a team and we are leaving as a team. Those guys sacrificed their lives for that job and you'll be shocked at their pay for it.

They also talk about the 1201 alarms, how they figured them out beforehand and what happened in the room when it went off.

Now then watch on Amazon Prime in the Shadow of the Moon. It's interviews from 2007 with the Apollo guys and it's made by Ron Howard.

Dr Renedevouz explains why that alarm went off. Buzz. What a bad ass.

And if you're into books, or me audio books for my driving, get Audible and Michael Collins book. Its 22 hours of listening but it is insightful. My favorite was within days of riding Apollo 11 to the moon he was flying back from up north in the T38 at night was looking down at his hometown of DC and finding points of interest and then realized after a while it wasn't DC. And I'm going to the moon next week??? He was upset but they just ran them hard. If they needed 12 months of really hard work to make it happen they were given 8.

Also great documentary was about Gene Cernan and it's called the Last Man on the Moon. Also on Netflix. It's great, doesn't hide the warts.

I watched that on the airplane a few years ago. Very moving.

Also try “Moonshot” from the 90’s. About the whole shibang from Mercury through Apollo. A lot of the guys were still around for that one.

This movie in IMAX is amazing. I don’t know who couldn’t see this and not get the chills during launch. The footage is breathtaking. What a great time in our history.

The engineers during the Gemini/Apollo era were also largely in their 20's. They tackled rendezvous in Earth orbit, lunar orbit, trans-lunar injection calculations, precision landing and a whole host of other complex problems that had never been done before. And they did it all on slide rules.

Thanks for posting those, FTB! It’s been a long time since I heard the phrase “ullage burn”. :)

I liked the movie, but personally I found the lack of information a poor choice.

There is just too much to say, imo.

Also, I remember the emotion, omg, what emotion. (Not saying it would be easy to replicate, but.....its like when the 1202 went off on short final, the impact was lost in the wild cacophony.) Imagine the fear and trembling that rattled the hearts of all but one of the controllers, the only kid in the place who knew enough to say: its OK.

Didnt feel much emotion in the movie other than blast off.

That grainy, white-suited, clumsy spaceman, inching down the pod, poised on the lip, hanging like no other moment in human history, alone and vibrant, and we got to see the whole damn thing.

That was something.

So I saw it with one of my kids.

It's takes a couple of moments to go, oh wait, this isn't Hollywood. Thats history. That's the crowd that was there, that's their cars, that's what they wore.

Launch was fantastic. I just wish they'd cranked the volume up in my theater and blasted your ear drums. Just for the heck of it. :D

To me I had listened to Collins book and so my point of view was, oh theirs that, oh that's what he was talking about, there he is being a smart ass. I had pictured it all while listening and putting out a dump truck of mulch. Now I could see it. I remembered what not only what he said but he was thinking, including his humor and sarcasm that came over the radio and they played. I remembered how rendevouz was incredibly hard (as he experienced with gemini) and they nailed it. And life in that trailer. And sure enough when they put them in the c141. He talked about all of that. All the way down to the gift for Gunter at the launch pad, I saw him holding the brown bag with a minnow stuck to a plaque that he was hoping wouldn't spill out in front of the world. And when they let Eagle go, how he said he watched Buzz and Neil stare and say goodbye to the machine they had spent so much time in on Earth and then on the moon. So I was a bit too informed.

But I like it just the way it was. It was perfect.

The one thing that got me was that long range camera that caught the 3rd stage firing off and watching the velocity get to 26,000 mph or whatever it went to and miles from earth tick a mile or more per second. I loved those clocks.

When they slowed to land and it got to 5000 mph and you're like, whoa, that's slow. Then I got in my truck. 50mph. felt very lame.

Fwiw. No real previews. Be there on time. Caught a bunch in our theaters off guard.

What's the name of the song that they played on the floating cassette player scene (and the film itself also incorporated the studio version into it at that point in the footage)?

That song is Mother Country" by John Stewart. Some other facts of the movie on this link. Incredible movie!.

Eleven hidden space history details in new documentary 'Apollo 11' | collectSPACE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=oF0XBlW_L6s