Recently in Apollo Category

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

One of many media channels to report it, watch NBC's bulletin above about the open letter sent to the White House Tuesday by Apollo mission commanders Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell and a second such letter from other Apollo veterans all criticising president Barack Obama's NASA plan

Go here for spacepolitics.com report on the White House's reaction to the Apollo astronauts' criticism. How much worse can the PR get for Obama's day at Kennedy Space Center?

This video appears to have been taken during a presentation that was screening a film with no apparent sound from the 1970s showing what seems to be a lunar lander simulator. This video's Youtube page, provided by someone called easynow, has a long description but does not state who the persons are that can be heard speaking during the presentation, one of whom sounds like they must be an Apollo astronaut because they are talking about what it was like to fly the lander over the lunar surface. The Youtube webpage blurb says

What you are seeing there is not a LM landing simulator, but rather that footage is showing the SMK-23 Flight Simulator at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

It was a simple question, given rhetorically by then president John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 12 September 1962 in the baking heat of Rice University in Houston, Texas and its simplicity understated its significance

The answer, no doubt, is that they play because it is a challenge

And it is the challenge of the unknown, of being ready to seek what is over the next hill, to overcome the difficult environment that maybe there, and to persist; that is the simple explanation for why the technical achievement that was Project Apollo was undertaken and accomplished

Humanity had wanted to go for millenia and that manifested itself in myth and legend, books and film, and in the earliest days of the moving picture too. It just took a race between super powers to realise it

The challenge is still there, to go and stay and not just at the Moon. Mars looms large in peoples' imaginations and space agencies see it as the greater goal. Humanity will go back to the Moon and do the other thing

The simple question that remains is, will the nation that leads that great endeavour speak of Rice playing Texas or Shanghai playing Beijing or Delhi playing Mumbai?

Last week Paul Coffman and Bob Biggs, former Rocketdyne engineers and members of the development teams for the J-2 and F-1 engines, respectively,spoke to Flightglobal through a teleconference organised by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne

Both are now consultants on NASA's Ares rocket J-2X engine programme. Due to the quality of the telephone line the audio is best listened to through headphones with the volume up

Paul Coffman's MP3 file is here and Bob Biggs' MP3 file is here

credit Flight / captin: Christoper Riley was interviewed at the Royal Aeronautical Society

Christopher Riley, co-producer of the In the Shadow of the Moon documentary, spoke at the Royal Aeronautical Society's Apollo 11 Forty years on lecture on 16 July 2009 and Hyperbola was there to interview him

His latest collaboration is the restoration of Moonwalk One. This NASA funded documentary was made about the historic 1969 mission and is being shown by the British Film Institute at its National Film Theatre as part of its One Giant Leap season. The BFI describes the season as a series of "landmark films and live events celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing"

Go here for Flightglobal.com's 40th anniversary webpage and here for NASA's restored "first step" film and here for other anniversary related material from the US space agency

credit Max Kingsley-Jones / caption: Charlie Brown being inspected by Londoners

Three weeks and forty years ago today the NASA capsule pictured above was orbiting the Moon, on 22 May 1969. Apollo 10 and its crew, Eugene "Gene" Cernan, John Young and Thomas Stafford paved the way for the 20 July 1969 landing of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin

The Apollo 10 command module named "Charlie Brown" seen above is in the London science museum and was photographed this month by Max Kingsley-Jones, Flight International magazine's deputy editor. More of Max's photos of the capsule including its fully equipped interior can be found here

Flight has an Apollo programme gallery in its airspace.aero community site and an Apollo 10 image collection can be found there too

Expect more from Flight about the Apollo programme in the run up to the 40th anniversary of humanity's first landing on the Moon

credit NASA / caption: Apollo 11 is recovered on 24 July 1969

Flightglobal.com is just a couple of years old (and Hyperbola even younger!) but its namesake Flight International magazine celebrated its centenary last year and that print title featured articles about spaceflight before it was technically feasible and reported on every step of the space age when it began in 1957

As such Flight's offices here in London (OK the south London borough of Sutton) has a library of images going back to the birth of Sputnik that includes the Apollo programme

Flightglobal.com now brings all these images to life again with a gallery dedicated to the most momentous aerospace programme the world has ever seen. This image shows the assembly of the Saturn V for the final Moon mission Apollo 17

credit NASA / caption: Does this mean the Dryden Flight Research Center is to be renamed Armstrong?

This image above shows a NASA procurement web page giving details of its intent to buy an oil painting of former astronaut and Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong

From what Hyperbola knows of the First Man he's unlikely to want to sit for that and will probably find news of it somewhat embarressing. The US Congress has already decided that the US portion of any international lunar outpost be called Neil Armstrong and some have wanted to rename Dryden Flight Research Center after the Apollo 11 mission commander. Poor Neil

credit NASA / caption is this what return to the Moon means?

In an extraordinary exchange between NASA acting adminisrator Christoper Scolese and the US House of Representatives' committee on appropriations' subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies chair, Scolese said that the agency was still working on what "return to the Moon" meant and whether that was a outpost, which he went on to describe as expensive, or an extended sortie like Apollo

So much for Apollo on steroids...

Hyperbola hoped to have an audio recording of the webcast but unfortunately Microsoft's sound recorder didn't deliver. Hopefully the appropriations will have a webcast replay accessible soon

I've come across this other educational space exploration game by Canadian company Project Whiteheadcard called Project Moonwalk. Here is its flash site and here is its wiki and this is its development site

Alas it seems to have come to a stop although the company developing it is now involved in the new Canadian Space Agency exploration game that features the International Space Station and robotics