To the moon, Alice, to the moon… and away we went

Jeffrey Kluger, editor-at-large at Time magazine, recounts the human landmark of landing men on the lunar surface. Kluger talks with Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins and astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and, in archive footage, hears from mission commander Neil Armstrong about the achievement of the first Moon landing, and of the “magnificent desolation” they found there.

However, this rather than the above really captures the adventure on a personal level for an astronaut in his own eloquent words.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which first landed American astronauts on the moon’s surface. Of the intrepid crew, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have tended to dominate public attention, but it was pilot Michael Collins who flew the command module to the moon — and faced his own distinct concerns about the return trip. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.

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27 thoughts on “To the moon, Alice, to the moon… and away we went”

  1. sadly, they don’t mean Alice

    ‘Send her back’ chant at Trump rally prompts outcry

    as reported by fox news:

    Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., other Democrats, and a slew of commentators united in condemning President Trump on Wednesday night, after the crowd at a North Carolina “Make America Great Again” rally broke out in a striking chant of “send her back” while the president criticized Omar and other members of the so-called progressive Democrat “squad.”

    The three-word chant, which Trump did not respond to, referred to the president’s tweet on Sunday in which he asked why unnamed “Democrat Congresswomen” don’t “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came, then come back and show us how it is done.”

     

    The president later affirmed he was referring to Omar, as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley — all of whom, except Omar, were born in the United States. After a historic and bizarre floor fight, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives formally condemned Trump’s comments as “racist” on Tuesday.

    [… ugly quotes from the twit here & further crowd response…]

    In response on Wednesday evening, Omar, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, quoted civil rights activist and poet Maya Angelou on Twitter: “You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

    She also retweeted a post from California Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, calling out the “racist chant” and urging people to “vote, donate & organize like never before” to save “the soul of our country.”

    Ocasio-Cortez sent out a tweet just before 1:00 a.m. ET, telling “those scared for our future: we can get through this better than we started.”

    2020 Democrat presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand quickl“It’s vile. It’s cowardly. It’s xenophobic,” Harris wrote on Twitter. “It’s racist. It defiles the office of the President. And I won’t share it here. It’s time to get Trump out of office and unite the country.”

    Warren, for her part, called Trump “desperate.”y echoed those sentiments.

    [continues]

  2. It’s been obvious for a long time that members (?) of the Trump audience were shills either paid or recruited.  Last night it became even more obvious that this new “Chant” was orchestrated and led by some core group until picked up by the audience acting like trained seals. 

     

  3. When it finally became apparent that the landing was to take place, KumCho and I climbed into the car and drove from our quarters on Nellis AFB to that part of Las Vegas where used TeeVees were sold. We purchased our first color set after bargaining down to a realistic price. At the appropriate time, we kept the girls home from school and discussed, as a family, what was about to occur, and it did.

  4. Flatus, We had a color TV then and were a little surprised that the moon landing looked like it was broadcast in black and white.  The only color I remember was the red stripes on the flag.  And the landing was on Sunday, so we didn’t get to be kept home from school.  But I have to say I remember the event vividly – which for a 17 year old brain to retain that it had to be very impactful.

  5. HOUSEKEEPING: Thanks to your generous donations I have paid our server company to install a security certificate for the site that hopefully will prevent some of the glitches a few of you have experienced in your browsers. When this is done we all will need to clear cache in our browsers to open the new secure HTTPS site. I’ll let you know when it’s time for that.

  6. BB, your prediction about no real changes in the TDF standings has held through the first mountain stage of the week – the biggest notable mover in the field was Nicholas Roche who led the first chasing group and cut about 7 minutes off the gap between him and the leader and moved from 32nd place over 17 minutes back to 27th place under 10 minutes behind.  Top 10 is the same as yesterday.

  7. I was with my girlfriend at the Masonic Home, admiring the flower gardens. We had absolute confidence that the landing would succeed. But, just in case we were wrong, we didn’t want to see it. 

  8. I was 14 when we landed on the moon.  I remember my father being excited as hell.  It’s one of those events like when JFK was shot…  we all remember where we were and who we were with.  It’s still hard to believe that 50 yrs have gone by.

  9. this in addition to the old Epstein party vid yesterday is more reason the twit’s tossing more shiny objects in the air to distract folks

    the guardian:

    Donald Trump and his press secretary were directly involved in discussions that led to an illegal hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election campaign, according to the FBI.

    A court filing unsealed on Thursday said Trump and Hope Hicks spoke repeatedly with Michael Cohen, Trump’s longterm legal fixer, in October 2016 as Daniels – also known as Stephanie Clifford – threatened to sell her story of an affair with Trump.

     

    “I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public,” an FBI agent wrote, in an application for a search warrant.

     

    Cohen later admitted to making payments totalling $280,000 through a shell company to buy the silence of Daniels and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also alleged she had an affair with Trump.

     

    The new disclosures raise the possibility that Hicks lied to the FBI. Hicks told an agent in an interview that “she did not learn about the allegations made by Clifford until early November 2016”, the new filings said. Hicks, who is now a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, has denied wrongdoing.

     

    The filings were released at the federal court in Manhattan, where Cohen pleaded guilty last year to campaign finance and personal financial crimes. Cohen began a three-year sentence in federal prison in May this year.

    They said Trump and Hicks had a four-minute call with Cohen on the evening of 8 October 2016, a day after the leak of an NBC recording of Trump boasting that he grabbed women by their genitals, as an effort to silence Daniels apparently began.

     

    Cohen had not spoken with Hicks for weeks beforehand and typically only had a call with Trump about once a month, according to the agent, who said Cohen and Hicks “spoke again for about two minutes” soon after the call with Trump.

     

    Following the calls with Trump and Hicks, Cohen embarked on a flurry of calls and texts with executives at American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer, which later admitted helping Trump cover up hush-money payments.

     

    Numerous additional text messages, calls and frantic discussions between Cohen and others about the payoff to Daniels were detailed in the filings. Cohen “spoke to Trump for approximately five minutes” on 28 October, the day the payment was finalised, according to the FBI.

     

    The filings were unsealed after Judge William Pauley disclosed on Wednesday that federal investigators had ended their inquiry into Trump’s hush-money payments to two women who alleged they had extramarital affairs with him.

    […]

    “The campaign finance violations discussed in the materials are a matter of national importance,” Pauley wrote. “Now that the government’s investigation into those violations has concluded, it is time that every American has an opportunity to scrutinize the materials.”

     

    When he pleaded guilty, Cohen said he had acted “in coordination with” Trump as part of an attempt to stop allegations being aired that could damage Trump’s presidential campaign in its final weeks.

  10. “Last night it became even more obvious that this new “Chant” was orchestrated and led by some core group until picked up by the audience acting like trained seals.” 

    Jamie, wonder if that core group is the same folk kamala was talking about as reported by NBC2  the other day

    Sen. Kamala Harris has claimed her presidential campaign is being targeted on social media by Russian bots. But while US intelligence officials say Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Americans continue, verified evidence of attacks on specific candidates has yet to publicly emerge.

    Harris’ claims come as “Russian bots” have become a catchall description, for some, of any disinformation spread online.

    […]

    The Harris campaign provided links to a number of news articles when CNN asked what evidence it had that Russia was involved in the attacks.

    Some of the stories cited respected researchers who say some of the influence campaigns they see playing out on social media bear the hallmarks of state-backed disinformation campaigns.

     

    don’t forget how they helped trump by ginning up descension and promoting fake black lives matter protests during 2016.  this is just a variation on the same strategy

     

  11. SFB’s choke hold on the FBI and FEC is apparently near total.  There is clear evidence that HE and Hope (daughter No. 2) engaged in a conspiracy with Cohen to commit campaign finance violations, and neither entity plans to do anything further about it.  

    Oh, and Jeff, enjoy your vacation.

  12. There are times when Godwin’s law may not apply:

    The scapegoating of immigrants and minorities for society’s ills. Prisoners dying in state-run detention camps. Leading mobs in violent, race-tinged chanting at rallies. I’m just going to say it: This story never ends well.

  13. One of those odd things in life is I was a park ranger and out of communication and did not know the Moon landing occurred for a day.  It was when my radio picked up an AM station from Chicago that I heard the news.  The radio waves had a clear shot up Lake Michigan to where I was living, but I was busy and did not turn on the radio on the special day.  I remember staring up at the Moon for hours after that, just dreaming.  We had gone from The Day the Earth Stood Still to real life space exploration in a matter of years, not decades or generations.

  14. Those were the days. sigh. We thought that we were finally getting out of the bad old days.

  15. Tuesday night Debate.  I’m looking forward to Klobuchar.  Hope she wipes up the floor with Bernie if Warren doesn’t destroy him first.

    Wednesday Night debate:  Looking forward to Castro since one of my two “preferred tickets” would be Harris/Castro.  My other that I won’t see up against the field would be Harris/Klobuchar.

     

     

  16. Marvelous prayer from a man who spent a great deal of time contemplating the stars.

    Disturb us, Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore…

    Disturb us, Lord, when With the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim…

    Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wilder seas Where storms will show Your mastery; Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars…

    We ask you to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push back the future In strength, courage, hope, and love. This we ask in the name of our Captain, Who is Jesus Christ.

  17. Hmmmmm. Sailing close to shore isn’t very safe.
    Other than that admitted knitpickiness of mine, I applaud the pray-er’s requests. 
    Thank, Ms Jamie.

  18. On Facebook, Alicia Knight asked everyone who friends her to tell something that they have done that no one else among her friends have done.  It is turning into truly interesting lives.  The same could be done here as I know we have all sorts of interesting people either obvious or lurking.

     

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