The history of Apollo’s hardware and software—the technology, the missions, and the people; people like Elaine Denniston and Margaret Hamilton.
(The site is made by Draper, the company founded by Doc Draper, father of inertial navigation.)
Take a tour of the Lunar Module.
The LM (or “LEM”, as it’s pronounced) has the appearance of an aeronautical joke, with not a trace of streamlining. Instead, it’s an insect-like asymmetrical collection of legs, angles, bulges, and surfaces that’s very hard to visualize. Frankly, it looks like it was thrown together on a Friday afternoon by someone in a hurry to go fishing.
Ah, what a wonderful treasure trove this is! PDF scans of Apollo era press kits from a range of American companies.
Categories include:
There’s something so fascinating about the mundane details of Isolation/Quarantine Foods for Apollo 11 Astronauts from Stouffer’s.
The cosmonaut counterparts of the Mercury women astronauts: Zhanna Yorkina, Irina Solovyova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomareva, and Valentina Tereshkova.
Ponomareva recalled there being no envy between the women in the squad. According to her, it was a healthy spirit of competition. Everyone did their best to be number one, but also supported each other’s efforts.
One of those cosmonauts went to space: none of the women training for the Mercury missions did. There would be a shockingly gap of twenty years between the launch of Valentina Tereshkova and the launch of Sally Ride.
Another great sci-fi short film from Dust.
This is so wonderful! A 3D fly-through of the Apollo 11 command module, right in your browser. It might get your fan whirring, but it’s worth it.
Click through for lots of great details on the interface controls, like which kinds of buttons and switches were chosen for which tasks.
And there’s this lovely note scrawled near the sextant by Michael Collins (the coolest of all the astronauts):
Spacecraft 107, alias Apollo 11, alias ‘Columbia.’ The Best Ship to Come Down the Line. God Bless Her.
A selection from an ongoing photography project—seven years and counting—leading up to the launch of the Orion project.
A brief history of space concept art—Norman Rockwell, Chesney Bonestell, Robert McCall, Pat Rawlings, David Meltzer …all the classics.
Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Millennium Falcon, wrapped up in one unsurprisingly insanely detailed essay from Michael.
This is rather nice—a Spacelog-like timeline of Apollo 17, timeshifted by exactly 43 years.
Gene and the crew are on their way to the moon …the last humans to ever make the journey.
For when you just have to name something after a Culture General Systems Vehicle …or maybe a General Contact Unit.
A fantastic new site from Ariel and Lisa: a collection of probes that are out in space right now, with oodles of facts for each mission and links through to more resources. SCIENCE!
This is basically porn for me.
Bernal spheres, Stanford tori, and O’Neill cylinders, oh my!
Tech specs for a spacecraft that doesn’t exist (yet).
The Ballardian beauty of a dying Baikonour.
I want to go to there!
This is what Photoshop is for. Be sure to watch the slideshow.
A gallery of all your standard space stations: the Stanford Torus, the Bernal Sphere and the O’Neill Cylinder.
A joint effort by the Tau Zero Foundation and the British Interplanetary Society to research the design of an interstellar spacecraft.
Now this looks like a fascinating project …and there’s a symposium happening in Florida at the end of September with Jill Tartar, Stewart Brand and more. I want to go to there.
