Voices from the Moon
What it was like, in the astronauts’ own words. Excerpts from a new book by Andrew Chaikin.
- By Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl
- AirSpaceMag.com, May 20, 2009
NASA
[Entering Earth’s atmosphere] is a very dynamic situation—a lot of monitoring, a lot of activity. And it’s over very, very rapidly, too. You separate that service module, and you orient yourself to hit the atmosphere….Christ, it’s over in, what, eight minutes?...You’ve oriented yourself heads-down coming across that South Pacific, and you’re really moving. I mean, you can really tell….[During] translunar injection, you’re oriented in such a way that you’re really not seeing the Earth go by; you can’t see it. But in reentry, you can. Coming back in, with your head down, you can look out that window, the side window, and you’re really smokin’. Goddang, you’re really moving. Those damn islands in the South Pacific are going by like—unreal.
—Dick Gordon, Apollo 12 command module pilot
(Photo: Apollo 8 enters the Earth's atmosphere, photographed by an airborne tracking camera.)
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Comments (1)
Another excellent book on this is Rocket Men by Craig Nelson. What I found fascinating about this book was the way Nelson deftly wove together the Apollo story with ongoing global events. The likes of Werner Von Brown, Walt Disney, Khrushchev, the Cold War, all come together in such a way as to shed a new light on an often told story.
Posted by Dave on July 18,2009 | 08:59 AM