I have been reading this thread from the start. Obviously there have been a lot of posts about the sad deaths of people killed in the space programme (17 people have died during a space flight and 13 have died during spaceflight testing or training, and another number of people killed due to accidents in developing hardware) which is of course sobering and it is quite right all of these people are remembered.
But Becky's thread is also about hope, optimism and inspiration. So in that vein....
Quote:
Originally Posted by beckychestney
... So. Do you remember a specific time or a special event related to NASA or any space program (no matter where on earth it operates out of) that inspired you to learn?....
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Absolutely.
For me it was the manned flights of the Apollo programme in particular views like this
I was (I think) the perfect impressionable age to get caught up by the manned programme to the moon.
In the UK, TV coverage was pretty limited (there were only 3 channels back then, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV)which broadcast for a few hours each day. For the Apollo missions special programmes were put on. I recall we watched the BBC and their programme were mostly 3 people in a studio, Patrick Moore an astronomer, James Burke, (a linguist) to explain all the technical stuff and Cliff Michelmore as host. (Only a few minutes of those broadcast programmes remain the rest apparently wiped or lost). The only TV pictures were those from NASA of the Saturn V on the pad at launch, Mission Control room at Huston (like above) or TV broadcasts from the Apollo spacecrafts.
Sometimes newspapers would have really nice cut away pictures of these fantastic moon machines or diagrams explaining the mission.
I was lucky in my father was able to explain some of the things to me. He had been in the RAF (UK air force) for a decade and was something technical in ground crew. He used to go to air craft crashes, spent quite a bit of time attached to USAF bases and once told me about installing a liquid oxygen making plant.
So I wanted to go to the moon (who didn't/doesn't) but he was able to explain that it takes a huge number of people doing all sorts of jobs to make that happen and right at the heart of every problem that had to be solved was a maths problem that had to be solved first. "That room is full of maths PhD's" he would tell me (the room being the one in the picture above). So I wanted to be a maths PhD (whatever that was) because it sounded great to solve how to go to the moon and beyond!
Anyway I just kept doing stuff your average child does, namely, playing with toys. Together we watching man land on the moon at 4.00am Monday morning 21st July 1969 and then I went to school that day. We watched all the Apollo moon landings and of course Apollo 13 as well as the moment the last person stepped off the moon. Apollo was cancelled and it was incredible just how quickly it was forgotten in the UK. Certainly from a media point of view.
All the time through school I kept trying to be good at maths, thinking maybe one day I would work for NASA and they would go back to the moon and Mars. The space shuttle came but not the return to the moon or going to Mars.
After school I went on to do a degree in maths. It turned out I was quite good a maths and went on to get a PhD in maths. Funny enough the sort of maths that is used for space exploration is not what I found the most exciting. I found an area called algebra the most interesting and to this day I am still an "Algebraist". I remember getting my PhD and phoning my father (he did not know what a PhD really was) but he remembered telling me about them during the Apollo missions. He died not long after.
Epilogue: I had always wanted to see a Saturn V in real life though never thought it would happen. However in the mid 1990's I was lucky enough to go to Florida for a holiday and visited KSC. Had a great time but the Saturn V was no longer on display for the public to see. Sigh. I thought I would never get to see it now.
Then in 2005 I was lucky enough to go to WDW and also to KSC again. This time the Saturn V was on display in its own building. If you haven't seen it and get a chance to I would encourage you to go. It was brilliant the way you were introduced to it, I wont say how, except nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for seeing this magnificent machine in the flesh the way it was arranged. When I stood there and saw it with my wife and children beside me, it was as if time had stopped for a few moments as so many happy moments flashed through my mind, from the days of Apollo with my father right up to that moment of a great holiday with my family. Apollo/Saturn V inspired me to do maths and doing the maths eventually enabled me to see Apollo/Saturn V. Funny how things turn out.