Routine

Tam notices that these launches were supposed to be as routine as backing out the family car...

They sure could have been.

Just in case anyone doesn't know.

The space program was in direct competition with LBJ's Great Society for funding.  There was a constant hue and cry that continues to this very day about how much money we're wasting on space and how it could be better spent right here on Earth.

It's one of the first examples of me noticing the media can manipulate things.

We plopped two dudes on the moon in 1969.  Ten months later not one of the three (yes just three) national television networks bothered to air the launch of the THIRD mission to the moon or cut into normal programming for a live broadcast from space.  Ironically that mission was Apollo 13; which got lots and lots of coverage.

Two successful all up flights and the media of the day decided it wasn't worth covering anymore!

There was nothing routine about a Saturn V launch.  First, they were damn near hand built with a bewildering array of variations and revisions.  Some were official changes, some were from the people building them figuring out a better way to assemble something and just implementing it.  Read this about the F-1 engine and pay attention to what they say about how the engine they have doesn't match the blueprints.  Every launch was different, yet eerily similar.  I wonder how many small mistakes were made because CSM-103 was different from CSM-108.

It also bears mentioning just how marginal the entire Apollo stack was.  It could do the job with almost no room to spare.  Those changes I mentioned to the vehicle?  Apollo 11 couldn't have carried the lunar rover and made it back.

On our evolution to becoming Pierson's Puppeteers we're going to insist on wider margins for our manned craft.  Challenger and Columbia underscoring the demand.  It's an awkward place to be.  Aviation is a dangerous place to learn on the job, but sometimes there's no other classroom.

I notice the freak-outs associated with V-22A crashes and compare them to the numbers who died learning helicopter.  Or how many who died just learning winged flight?  Every venture into the unknown is literally filled with unknowns.  Sometimes you find them the hard way.

Apollo 1 did.  Soyuz 1 did.  56-6672 did.  Soyuz 11 did.  Challenger did.  Columbia did.  Spaceship Two did.

There.  Will.  Be.  More.

We.  Should.  Keep.  Going.