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Significant Numbers
Jul. 20th, 2009 05:36 pm"Amid all the excitement and hyperbole, what was the real significance of Apollo 11?
"In a minor sense, perhaps, it was the coming of age of the space program, for it was the 21st manned space flight for the United States, as well as the 21st launch in the Saturn series. And if life begins at 40, that too is symbolic, for the day after the flight began marked the 40th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first launching of an instrumented rocket, complete with thermometer, barometer, and camera."
-from the article "The Flight of Apollo 11: 'One giant leap for mankind'" by Kenneth F. Weaver, National Geographic, December 1969 (p. 782)
(And, since just finding a quote in a period magazine seems a little less significant than putting my own thoughts together, I was also quite interested to see that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken its first pictures of the lunar module descent stages. I'm reminded in an oblique way of how one of the early targets of the Mars Global Surveyor was the "face...")
"In a minor sense, perhaps, it was the coming of age of the space program, for it was the 21st manned space flight for the United States, as well as the 21st launch in the Saturn series. And if life begins at 40, that too is symbolic, for the day after the flight began marked the 40th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first launching of an instrumented rocket, complete with thermometer, barometer, and camera."
-from the article "The Flight of Apollo 11: 'One giant leap for mankind'" by Kenneth F. Weaver, National Geographic, December 1969 (p. 782)
(And, since just finding a quote in a period magazine seems a little less significant than putting my own thoughts together, I was also quite interested to see that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken its first pictures of the lunar module descent stages. I'm reminded in an oblique way of how one of the early targets of the Mars Global Surveyor was the "face...")