from the we-are-late-with-the-late-Frank-Borman dept.
Former U.S. astronaut Frank Borman has died at the age of 95, NASA said on Thursday.
He commanded the 1968 Apollo 8 mission that carried three astronauts farther from Earth than anyone had ever travelled.
I'm old enough to remember Apollo 8 (December 21–27, 1968, the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing, and then departed safely back to Earth. Three astronauts—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to witness and photograph the far side of the Moon and an Earthrise.
Born in Gary, Indiana, on March 14, 1928, he was the oldest American astronaut still living; that mantle now passes to Jim Lovell, who is also 95 but eleven days younger.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pTamok on Saturday November 11 2023, @09:06AM (10 children)
Missing option: Being able to remember when American astronauts orbited the moon.
You probably remember when the Science Museum in South Kensington had an automatic door, opened when a photocell was triggered, as an exhibit in the children's basement area. Apparently there was a queue of children wanting to go through it as it seemed like something out of Science Fiction.
In other words, automatic doors, in reality, were unusual enough to be a museum exhibit. Young people wouldn't believe that these days.
The Apollo programme seems like fantasy to people now.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Saturday November 11 2023, @11:54AM (9 children)
They've got a LEM in the Science Museum, and a V2.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday November 11 2023, @12:20PM (7 children)
The Science Museum is a marvellous place although I have not been there for getting on 20 years. I could spend hours, even days, in there if it were possible.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Saturday November 11 2023, @12:45PM (6 children)
I would willingly join you in the Science Museum from 20 years ago.
At my last visit, it had been taken over by 'interactive screens', half of which didn't work, and informed me less than looking things up on the Internet. There has been an active policy of removing exhibits. The occasional tour around their storage locations is far, far, more interesting, and wildly oversubscribed.
As a kid, it was nice to turn a handle and see things move. Pressing buttons was less interesting. The galleries of big industrial machinery were boring.
As a teenager, I realised that reading the text next to the display was interesting, especially when it was linked directly to the exhibit in front of you. Then the Internet arrived. And interactive touch screens. And museums lost their collective heads about the value of the exhibits themselves.
Museums cannot compete with video games (for entertainment) or Wikipedia (for information) - but they have real, live, actual exhibits. Throw out the interactive screens and rolling slide displays - if you really, really want them, put up a web-page for each room and exhibit for people to read on their mobiles while connected to the museum WiFi - use QR-codes to give access to different versions for different age ranges and interests. Give people models they can interact with physically - something (pretty much) impossible on the Internet. The physicality of early steam engines is amazing. the intricacy of industrial looms making cloth is a wonder to see. Working out how the surprisingly simple mechanisms of early clocks works is a nice puzzle. But always, always, always, tie things back to the actual exhibit: why it has value, what makes it unique, why we can believe its provenance.
Interactive touch screens and rolling sideshows are the death of museums.
I'm ranting again, aren't I?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday November 11 2023, @02:53PM (5 children)
It's only a few years since I last went with Turgid jr. He was completely underwhelmed. The Apollo capsule, LEM, V2 and old steam engines were decidedly "meh" as far as he was concerned.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday November 11 2023, @04:54PM
What a sad state of affairs. Rather than use technology to enhance what they had, they have used it to replace what they had. Thanks for the update but is not what I was expecting to hear.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday November 11 2023, @05:07PM (3 children)
That's entirely normal.
It takes a special kind of person to be excited by relics of the past. But Turgid Jr. might grow into it yet. Much like the alcohol progression: Alcopops, Cider, Lager ,Bitter. I'm certainly a Bitter man, now. My taste changed, quite suddenly when I was still reasonably young.
I think it's different to the "Dinosaurs!" infatuation that many go through - or "Ponies!♥!♥!♥"
I was reading Science Fiction when I was 10 or 11 (Arthur C. Clarke and Andre Norton, followed shortly by Asimov) and was really interested in Science well before that which made me definitely not normal - my peers were far more interested in football teams, so I 'got it' from an early age that other people were really Not Interested.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Nuke on Saturday November 11 2023, @05:25PM (2 children)
Straight whiskeys still to come then.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Saturday November 11 2023, @05:57PM (1 child)
Hah! I'm up at Laphroaig*, thank you very much. And I'm partial to some of the Scandinavian bitters. I haven't had Fernet Branca for a while, though. The Italians have some quite weird and wonderful bitter drinks.
What's next?
*Which is basically Marmite in a bottle - you either love it or hate it.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday November 11 2023, @07:10PM
I recently had a bottle of Laphroaig. Fine stuff indeed.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Saturday November 11 2023, @12:29PM
I think that's interesting, but the average teenager these days is more likely to say that they're models, the plans for which were generated by an AI using stable diffusion and that everyone knows the moon-landings were fake.
The pernicious effects of disinformation are horrible to see. People like to be 'in the know', and it is a lot easier to be dismissive and make vague and 'truthy' sounding statements that are difficult to refute than to engage critical thought. Teenagers/children are growing up in an extremely toxic environment, and don't see it themselves because they are immersed in it, like a fish in water. And there are plenty of sociopaths who love taking advantage of peoples naïvety.
People buy 'crystals' to glue to their mobile phones to protect themselves from the bad radiation.
And yet, if there is hope, it lies in the proles.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday November 11 2023, @04:00PM (3 children)
This inspired me to look it up. Only 4 people are still alive that walked on the moon.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2023, @05:53PM (1 child)
There are still plenty of living astronauts. If you get a chance to meet one, or hear one speak live I highly recommend it. They are exceptional people, often a combination of top "intellect" (academic or professional) combined with extra-ordinary "hands-on" (engineering test pilot).
I've heard several lecture, often at the local aero club. Met a few, sat across one for lunch one time, a number of great memories.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Saturday November 11 2023, @08:18PM
Absolutely. Even listening to John Glenn describing having just undergone egress training for his upcoming shuttle mission to a colleague, as I rode in an elevator with them at NASA headquarters, was one of the most inspiring moments of my life.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday November 12 2023, @02:51AM
Really puts a perspective on "Fifty years since we went to the moon" don't it?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.