Starting today, I'm going to send a series of e-mails about the Apollo project. Each e-mail will include some interesting facts and maybe a question. So watch out for questions marks. I want to read your answers!
The Apollo project ran from 1961 to 1972. I was born in 1977.
The Saturn V rocket is the most famous vehicle made during the Apollo project. It flew just one mission after Apollo was cancelled – it launched Skylab in 1973
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab
We didn't build Saturn V right off the bat. We worked up to it by building and testing smaller rockets, like Saturn I and Saturn IB
Other vehicles were developed too, like the LM (which the astronauts pronounced "Lem")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module
and CSM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_command_and_service_module
Saturn IB carried CSM to orbit for testing, but without enough fuel to get to the moon. Only Saturn V could carry a fully-loaded CSM.
There were dozens of Apollo missions to test various things, with names like "AS-103". Only twelve missions got the Apollo name followed by a number:
Apollo 1, and Apollo 7 - 17
The movie we saw was about Apollo 11, which was the first mission to land on the moon. We landed there six times, and twelve different people walked on the moon. Of them, four are still alive. (All came back safely but eight have since died of old age.)
When the astronauts came back from the moon and splashed down in the ocean, the US Navy came and picked them up. They came in an aircraft carrier called the USS Hornet.
Well, that ship is parked at the dock in Alameda. It's a museum now, and sometimes concerts and other events are held there. Mom and I have been on it several times, but I never knew it picked up the Apollo 11 astronauts.
Did you ever seen the Hornet? Or go onboard?
Ever hear of the "space race"?
It was an intense competition between the USA and the USSR to develop space-going technology.
The USSR (also called the Soviet Union) was an empire controlled by Russia. It controlled half of Europe.
Though we were allies with the Soviets in World War II, tensions came up after the war. We built thousands of nuclear missiles and aimed them at each other! This was known as the Cold War. "Cold" because fighting was threatened but never actually happened.
We won the Cold War when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. I was in 9th grade.
I visited the Soviet Union with Mom-mom and Pop-pop when I was about your age, Dylan. We traveled in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Question: Which of these three countries still exists today?
I'm telling all this because the Space Race was part of the Cold War. We were competing for control of the world and also of space.
The Soviets got a hot start and put us to shame when they launched the first satellite ever, in 1957. It was called Sputnik.
Then they launched the first person to space in 1961. His name was Yuri Gagarin.
But we finally showed our stuff with Apollo.
The Soviets had a moon project too, but they never managed to pull it off. If you're interested, you can read about it here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_crewed_lunar_programs
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/russian-moon-mission/
In the 50 years since Apollo 11, many countries have worked on plans to go to the moon. But so far none have managed to do it.
~
You're right, Germany did take over most of Eastern Europe during World War II.
But after the war the allies split it up into separate countries again. In that process, the USSR decided they'd take control of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and half of the old Germany!
The half of Germany where their army defeated the Nazis became a country called East Germany. The half where our army defeated the Nazis became West Germany.
When we saw the USSR taking over countries instead of setting them free, we didn't like it. It started the Cold War.
When the USSR dissolved at the end of the Cold War, East and West Germany reunited into plain Germany. Czechoslovakia split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
So of the three USSR countries I visited when I was young, only Hungary remains today with the same borders it had then. However, the Soviet government there has been replaced with a new democratic government, with a new Constitution and new laws. So in a way it is also new.
Apollo 8 was the first mission to go around the moon and come back (it didn't land on the moon).
One very important thing the Apollo 8 astronauts did was take photos of the Earth.
It's hard to imagine now, but until then people didn't really know what the Earth looked like!
Here is the famous most photo they took:
Apollo 17 astronauts took another famous photo – one of the most duplicated photos in history. It became known as "the blue marble"
Some time we'll watch the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey together. It's one of my favorite movies. It came out in 1968, just months before the Apollo 8 mission. It had incredible special effects that still look realistic today. Jupiter and the other planets look totally realistic. But the Earth looks weird and wrong
We take it for granted that we can imagine our home in the universe from above. But before Apollo, people could not!
Saturn V was one hell of a rocket. It set many records.
It's the most powerful machine ever made. The number to remember is 150 GW (gigawatts). This table shows the power outputs of various things.
| item | watts |
|---|---|
| smartphone | 1 |
| laptop | 15 |
| human | 100 |
| toaster oven (110v outlet max) | 1,800 |
| kitchen oven (electric) or clothes dryer (natural gas) | 5,000 |
| forced-air furnace (natural gas) | 26,000 |
| Tesla Supercharger | 120,000 |
| Dodge Charger STR Hellcat (at redline) | 527,000 |
| typical large wind turbine avg output | 1,000,000 |
| typical large wind turbine advertised output | 3,000,000 |
| gas pump | 20,000,000 |
| Boeing 737-8 (42.8 MJ/kg * 3.07 kg/km * 839 km/h) | 30,000,000 |
| typical nuclear reactor avg output | 1,000,000,000 |
| Saturn V first stage | 150,000,000,000 |
| human civilization (2014) | 18,000,000,000,000 |
Does any number on this chart surprise you? Which one?
Of course it's the biggest rocket ever made (363 feet tall). This graphic shows various rockets and space vehicles to scale. There are a lot of details to see if you zoom in.
Even the boring parts of Saturn V set records. The Crawler Transporter that carried it to the launchpad is still the largest land vehicle ever made (and it's still being used)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter
And don't forget the human speed record, set by Apollo 10 at almost 25,000 miles per hour!
Ever wonder what's inside Saturn V? Here's a famous cartoon showing a cutaway view. All the parts are labeled using only the 1000 most common words in the English language
Because it only uses the most common words, it has a hard time describing the fuel tanks. The first stage was powered by mixing liquid oxygen and kerosene. The 2nd and 3rd stages were powered by mixing liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Kerosene is similar to gasoline. It's not quite as good a fuel as liquid hydrogen but it's much cheaper, so it was used in the first stage, which required huge amounts of fuel.
~
Actually, civilization today uses about 100 times the power of Saturn V (18 trillion vs 150 billion).
Still, a single machine exerting 1% of the world's effort is crazy.
And that percentage was larger in 1969, when civilization was 1/3 the size – it dissipated about 6 trillion watts then.
For a glorious three minutes, Saturn V increased global energy use by 3%.
~
Let me clarify what I mean when I say human society uses 18 terawatts.
Take every light bulb, every computer, every car, boat and airplane... every air conditioner and every fireplace in the world and add them up. All human activity. You get 18 terawatts.
It was 6 terawatts at the time of the Apollo missions. So in a way we can physically measure, society is three times bigger now.
Another measure of the size of civilization – the number of living people – is about two times greater now than in 1969 (7.7 billion vs 3.6 billion).
It's important to understand history, but I don't want to give the idea that everything great happened in the past. Not true! With bright people like you growing up, anything is possible!
Right now, NASA scientists are remotely controlling a robot on Mars. I know you've heard of it – it's called Curiosity. It landed there in 2012, when Adric was 6 years old. You may remember seeing a full-size model of it at the Chabot Space & Science Center.
Because it's powered by plutonium, it will be able to drive around on Mars for many years to come. And next year, if all goes well, it will be joined by a friend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2020
After we proved we could go to the moon, the Saturn V series of rockets was retired. You can probably guess they were very expensive to build. And each one can only be used once! That makes it a very expensive way to get to space.
Elon Musk understood that in order to make space travel practical, reusable rockets would have to be developed. So in 2002, he started a company called SpaceX.
Last year, SpaceX tested a rocket called Falcon Heavy. Each of its three sections is designed to fly back to Earth so it can be refueled and used again. While not as powerful as Saturn V, Falcon Heavy is currently the most powerful rocket in the world. To demonstrate its payload capacity, Elon Musk launched a Tesla Roadster into space, along with a dummy driver he named Starman.
Falcon Heavy has three sections. In last year's test, one of them crashed, but the other two landed in good condition. Here's the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0FZIwabctw
-Dad