(no subject)

[rubah]

it occured to me last night while watching Apollo 13 for the first time that they did not have electronic calculators to fly people into space.

holy crap they sent people to the MOON with pencils, paper, and sliderules.

It's so obvious in retrospect, but so thunderstiking.

(Got back from Houston about 4 this afternoon (we left at 6:15 ;.; ). Casey, ft worth/dallas land is scrubby and blah; houston is much more cool :D (not literally).

NASA was fantastic (a uofa grad works there now developing ways astronauts can minimize the damage done to the heat tiles on the shuttle so they don't go down in flames like columbia and he gave us a fantastic tour :D); things of note: got to walk through 6-story vacuum chambers (and others that weren't so tall), got to wear pressurized gloves and try to manipulate objects in a vacuum(well, partial vacuum xD); see mission control and run amok in the old apollo-era MCC (there was a button with a handwritten 'PANIC' written in, and the red president/department of defense telephone, and binders of decision making trees, and PNEUMATIC TUBES. holy crap, no calculators and no e-mail. oh yeah! and see a whole slew of tools meant to scrape mold and place heat-resistant material to cover cracks and holes in heat shielding! (some are very heavy like the gauge with inches but no centimeters, others are surprisingly light, like the.. I want to say it was a pipe cutter? )

These are just the things we did on the schedule. There was so much we talked about (it was a group of mechanical engineers/ing students xD) and I feel so much more informed now.

One thing I found funny was the amount of imperial thrown around. Foot-pounds, feet per second, psi etc. Only mm HG and torrs got any love that I recall. Of course that doesn't mean those are the units thrown around in the MCC, but if the engineers are using them, then~

I got to see my first professional basketball game. I had fun cheering for the Bucks even though they lost :D

saturday about seven of us decided to go to galveston and eat some seafood(at Casey's, Casey) and run around on the beach, and we did that and it was a blast. we stopped at fry's electronics to continue geeking out (engineers you know!) sadly I did not see the 'we take discover' signs until everyone else was checking out, and I had a lone twenty in my pocket, so I abstained, sadly.

our grad who gave us the tour hosted a fantastic dinner at his house which was equally fantastic with his fantastic woman and dog.

It really sucked to come back to physics and chem homework after filling my head with starry and tin can visions. I try to tell myself I have to wade through physics so I can do that astrotastic stuff, but GS makes it so unrewarding. Tomorrow I can pick up my copy of Modern Physics, and maybe that will help.

Comments

[king-bahamut.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, you wouldn't have even gotten within half an hour of Fort Worth. You would have taken I-45 at Dallas, so...

The Buccaneers didn't play this week! What professional football team did you see?

[jume.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the scenery was the same for like the last 100 miles before then, so I can imagine that it would stay the same for another 50 at least :p

it was basketball, not football. the rockets vs. bucks

we took 1-45 pretty much the entire length until it apparently turns into highway 69 in OK

[jume.livejournal.com]

holy crap, why did I say football? Sorry for the confusion! It was late when I typed that :D

[jume.livejournal.com]

man, I also typed team instead of game, so just mind-typos everywhere in that statement!

[bigdee.livejournal.com]

One of the strengths of the old Space Program was its lack of computerisation, I think. Sure computers were involved, but mostly it was a matter of mathematics and physics. There seem to be tentative plans for new journeys to the moon, but after the recent multitude of bungled or lost space probes, I'm worried that their efforts might be thwarted by yet more random computer errors.

[jume.livejournal.com]

I didn't think that computer errors were a big problem! The last big probe error I can think of off hand was in the late 90s when they forgot to convert imperial to metric.