yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What the Apollo Missions Meant | APOLLO - Missions to the Moon


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

NARRATOR: The moon is a necessary first step for exploration of the planets. To fly them there and return them safely in this decade is the goal of NASA's project Apollo. The early missions of Mercury and the experience from Gemini have brought this country to the next major milestone, the first Apollo 3-manned spaceflight. These are the men to fly that mission: command pilot Virgil Grissom, Mercury, Gemini, and now Apollo. His third time into space, one of the original seven astronauts. The senior pilot Edward White, he will be remembered for his spacewalk during Gemini 4. White has been specializing in the computers and training for the upcoming mission. Astronaut Roger Chaffee will man the third Apollo seat. He has been concentrating on the flight plan and experiments.

ROGER CHAFFEE: I think everybody in the space program has been asked this 50 times. And it's probably the toughest question to answer and not sound, shall we say, corny with the answer. It's a new phase of exploration. It's—you might say, and sound a little trite, it's there. We'd be neglecting our duties as people, as human beings, if we didn't try to investigate it. We're improving our engineering capability. We're building new equipment that has untold number of uses in fields that we can't even conceive of today. The scientific aspect, I don't think anybody can predict what it's going to be. Things that we'll find there. Some of the basic geologic things that we might find there that have long since been destroyed by weather on Earth might give us more insight into the birth of our universe, the birth of our solar system.

INTERVIEWER: You flew on—on Mercury, flew on Gemini, now you're flying on Apollo. Does the law of averages, so far as the possibility of a catastrophic failure, bother you at all, sir?

VIRGIL GRISSOM: No, you sort of have to put that out of your mind. There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. It's going to happen on any flight. It can happen on—the last one as well as the first one. So you'll just plan, as best you can, to take care of all of these eventualities. You get a well-trained crew, and they go fly.

More Articles

View All
This Guy Is Making Furniture and Buildings out of Your Trash | Nat Geo Live
[Arthur] I hate plastic. That’s why we’ve engulfed on a 15 year mission to turn that into something that we actually want. We have collected around 750 new materials that’s coming from our daily post-consumer waste. It can go into any consumer product a…
Brave New Words - Bill Gates & Sal Khan
Hi everyone, it’s here from Khan Academy, and as some of you all know, I have released my second book, Brave New Words, about the future of AI, education, and work. It’s available wherever you might buy your books. But as part of the research for that boo…
President Obama Credits Mom and Hawaii For His Love of Nature | National Geographic
It’s something to see, is it not? Amazing! It’s great to meet. Wonderful. Thank you for… We just diving in? Are we good? I think so. Okay, come on. Yeah, so I understand that you’re a big fan of your White House science fairs and that you seem to enjoy a…
Dr. David Anderson on supporting children's mental health during a crisis | Homeroom with Sal
From Khan Academy: Welcome to the Daily Homeroom live stream! For those of y’all that this is your first time, this is really just a way for us to stay connected during school closures. Obviously, Khan Academy has many resources for students, teachers, a…
The Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage
[Music] A war has been raging for billions of years, killing trillions every single day, while we don’t even notice. The war is fought by the single deadliest entity on our planet: the bacteriophage or ‘phage’ for short. [Intro + Music] A phage is a virus…
r greater than g but less inequality
One of the core ideas of Thomas Piketty’s book is if the return on capital is greater than the growth in economy, then that could drive inequality. Inequality is a natural byproduct of a market capitalist economy, and one could argue that, hey, look, some…