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Houston, we've had a problem

At 10:06 pm om April 13, 1970, NASA mission control received an ominous message from the crew of Apollo 13, the third mission designed to land humans on the moon.

Jack Swigert: OK, Houston, we've had a problem here.

Mission Control: This is Houston. Say again, please.

Jim Lovell: Houston, we've had a problem.

One of the spacecraft's two oxygen tanks had exploded. The explosion caused the other tank and all of the fuel cells to fail. Apollo 13 was four days from home with no air, no electricity and no water.

The crew was forced to shut down the command module completely and to use the lunar module as a "lifeboat". This situation had been suggested during an earlier training simulation, but had not been considered a likely scenario. Without the lunar module the accident would certainly have been fatal.

Because Apollo 13 followed the free-return trajectory, its altitude over the lunar far side was approximately 100 km (60 mi) greater than the orbital altitude on the remaining Apollo lunar missions. Due to this fact, Apollo 13 holds the absolute altitude record for a manned spacecraft, reaching a distance of 400,171 kilometers (248,655 mi) from Earth.

President Nixon awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the crew and the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team for their actions during the mission.

With the recent celebration of Yuri's Night 2013 this past Friday, and the 43rd Anniversary of Apollo 13, I spent the weekend listening to all of the Apollo 13 air to ground transmissions for the mission. How everyone in Houston and the crew of Odyssey/ Aquarius turned potential disaster into a triumph is so incredible, even after 40+ years!

One little tidbit of trivia... the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had 72Kb of memory, and navigated a half million mile round trip journey to another celestial body. Today, a simple MP3 player has almost 50,000 times the memory capacity of the AGC!

Now... all we need is the funding, resources, and national WILL to send humans back into space, both in LEO and beyond. NASA's ready to go... why aren't we willing to support them?

As a result of the four-day saving journey home, the astronauts were dehydrated and chilled, and the lunar module pilot Fred Hayes also "earned" a kidney infection.

Yes, this is another revealing story about some things in space.
First: simulating contingencies is very important.
Second: this requires special people, and earlier materials were needed, but now rather programs.
Third: materials for spacecraft should also be well tested.
All this leads to a rise in the cost of space flights.
Although many of them still meaningless for me.
Ok, I understand space explorations with machines. Why do you need to send people to space at this point in space technologies?

Today's wake up story!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55239668

...and now some folks are off to land, populate, and trash our lovely Moon, (the reason why Planet Earth is what it is!).
...and as for Planet Mars...another pointless, expensive exercise when stuff needs to be sorted out; "down here"!

I love reading all about; "The Universe" and what is; "out there", but to me, it is pointless to suggest that anyone is going to travel to other; "Places" in the Universe, eg; other stars, planets and galaxies! Its the stuff of fairy tales, computer games, folks with very vivid imaginations, and dreams/nightmares in the night!
We are already making a pigs-ear of our own planet, so why the rush to go out and trash our own Solar System, and; "other worlds" too far away to travel!
Everything here on Planet Earth was designed to be; "here", and nowhere else!

Moan over...
.... time to go back to sleep, fire up the thrusters on my Millenium Falcon, engage my teleporter, load up my Photon Torpedos, and fight off advancing aliens on Planet Zorg, in the Galaxy of Sagittarius!

When I wake up tomorrow morning, Planet Earth will be OK again?
...or will it?.... ...!

Paul...in the Real World!... ... ...!

P.S: I love all this stuff!!.... ...!

Fozzer wrote:Today's wake up story!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55239668

...and now some folks are off to land, populate, and trash our lovely Moon, (the reason why Planet Earth is what it is!).
...and as for Planet Mars...another pointless, expensive exercise when stuff needs to be sorted out; "down here"!

I love reading all about; "The Universe" and what is; "out there", but to me, it is pointless to suggest that anyone is going to travel to other; "Places" in the Universe, eg; other stars, planets, and galaxies! Its the stuff of fairy tales, computer games, folks with very vivid imaginations, and dreams/nightmares in the night!
We are already making a pigs-ear of our own planet, so why the rush to go out and trash our own Solar System, and; "other worlds" too far away to travel!
Everything here on Planet Earth was designed to be; "here", and nowhere else!

Moan over...
.... time to go back to sleep, fire up the thrusters on my Millenium Falcon, engage my teleporter, load up my Photon Torpedos, and fight off advancing aliens on Planet Zorg, in the Galaxy of Sagittarius!

When I wake up tomorrow morning, Planet Earth will be OK again?
...or will it?.... ...!

Paul...in the Real World!... ... ...!

P.S: I love all this stuff!!.... ...!

Ha! To be honest, I meant only the still high risk of space travel for humans.
If we talk about debris, there is also a lot of it in space. I mean in orbit.
But space companies seem to have already begun to take care of this:
Skyrora's LEO engine which recently underwent numerous tests will also be integrated into our Space Tug allowing various payloads to be launched into space at once. It also aims to remove dead satellites and other debris, reducing our environmental impact. #makingspaceaccessible

[url]https://www.skyrora.com/blog/uk-space-news
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