lemshavefaces:

thewoodlanders:

Early Pics of the New Nine boys, who didn’t seem to be allowed out on school trips without their Mercury dads.  

And I have no idea what’s going on with those ladders “Of course you’re not short, now stand on this ladder dammit!”.  

I like figuring out who’s who.  Got all the top photo, but the bottom one’s a miss or 2

Same people in both, but the bottom one includes Deke on the far right. He’s smiling, so that certainly threw me. ;-) John and Wally are playing with toys in the middle, and the rest are from l-r: Jim McD, Tom, Ed, Elliot, Pete, Jim, John, Neil, Squarehead!

Early Pics of the New Nine boys, who didn’t seem to be allowed out on school trips without their Mercury dads.  

And I have no idea what’s going on with those ladders “Of course you’re not short, now stand on this ladder dammit!”.  

From the Earth to the Moon - little recaplets and thoughts:

Episode 1: Can we do this?

The first installment takes the story from the early days of NASA and breezes through the Mercury and Gemini missions, ending just before the start of Apollo. Starting with Yuri’s achievement, it shows how Washington got nervous and promised NASA a lot of money/support to enable them to beat Russia.  

Chris is suitably scary throughout. Like really scary. They got that spot-on.

Interesting that they show Webb, Gilruth and everyone else, completely unaware of what the President was about to announce in terms of the Mission to the moon. Was that accurate? Webb is pessimistic, he feels that they would have to put up thousands of men into space…for the record, they got there with 23 different men and 22 manned missions.

Max Peck: I like the way they introduce the personalities of the astronauts by how they introduce themselves as Max Peck – Ed White is confident, Pete is pretty casual, John is quiet, Tom is obvious, Jim is nice and bemused – makes me laugh how he checks what is meant to be his own name. Clever way of introducing everyone within 30 seconds.

Boys exchange stories about how they find out they had been selected: One character observation is that Frank would NEVER pass up an opportunity to bluntly express a funny opinion about Glenn, and give the punch line to Neil. Elliot looks to be about 12. 

I’m not sure if there’s some hidden meaning with two scenes, but both Elliot’s and Roger’s only major scenes involve presenting cartoons to the public. Was this coincidence or is this some metaphor that I haven’t picked up on?

Gemini VI-VII doesn’t get a mention despite being the critical rendezvous development. Then again, I suspect viewers would have turned off if they had tried to encapsulate the hell that was 2 weeks in the VII spacecraft….

Deke offers Apollo 1 and the lunar landing to Gus – nicely showing their friendship … more than that, however, build up really effectively the awfulness of the events of the following episode. It’s at this scene that I usually start to whimper a little.

I won’t go into the Gemini XII footage except to say: Exactly how much influence did Buzz have in this production? ;-)

The Men in this Room scene is just lovely with Groups 1-3. Frank and Jim are sitting together hehe. Deke announces the fact that the first man in the room is sitting there looking at him. It’s a beautiful scene which brings across the scale of what they are about to achieve…and in hindsight, incredibly sad too. 

Share your thoughts below!

It’s time for Sunday Random Frankness! This week’s theme: Anniversary Reunions! 

The pics above show the 20th, 25th and the bigged up 40th Anniversaries of Apollo 8, all of which were fantastic events. A real hidden gem, however, was the 30th Anniversary in 1998.

No big public reunion, instead something much rarer: Frank spoke for an hour about his career and thoughts on NASA at the Smithsonian. 

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/116310-1

It’s a wonderful engaging way to spend an hour, if you have the time. I intended to watch the first 5 minutes, and then watched the whole of it as I was mesmerized.  Frank’s frank, funny, smart, strong, very honest and still manages to humbly deflect the credit for everything onto other people.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see any more reunion events with these guys, or with Frank at all, but I feel incredibly fortunate that we have these events to remind us of that incredible time in NASA’s history, and the even more extraordinary people who worked there.