r/apollo

The suits were John Young's and Charlie Duke's from Apollo 16 (Young's looked like it still had some moon dust on it) and Charles Bolden's from his Space Shuttle missions.

There was also a backup Apollo 11 flag, an Apollo 14 moon rock, Mercury patches, pieces of two Mercury spacecraft's heat shields, and helmets from Gemini, Apollo, and the shuttle.

They were giving away buttons with a space monkey on them as a nod to NASA's 1959 press conference with Able and Baker, which took place in the building.

Really cool event with a rare chance to tour buildings that have a long history, from Dolley Madison to women's suffrage to NASA.

https://youtu.be/WffXYD3VOIM

This video shows mankinds last seconds on the lunar surface, as Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt prepare to liftoff from the Moon. It is made from several sources of footage, 16mm onboard the Lunar Module, live TV from the Lunar Rover and in the second part of the video, 16mm film from the Command Module in lunar orbit as Ron Evans captures the LM rising up to rendezvous and dock.

The 16mm footage has been upscaled and interpolated to 60 FPS with audio and music by Moonpans

Original Footage Source: Apollo Flight Journal
Original Audio Source: Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

https://youtu.be/nx-Z42fe1Mg

Incredible footage of the ascent of the Apollo 11 lunar module from Tranqulity base back to rendezvous with Michael Collins in the Command Module.

The first half of the video shows the view from the Lunar Module window as the lunar terrain falls away and huge craters pass beneath the crew.

The second half shows the view from Michael Collins in the Command Module as the Lunar Module edges ever closer to rendezvous and eventually dock

Both videos have been Upscaled, Interpolated to 60 FPS and set to beautiful music by Moonpans

Original footage source: Apollo Flight Journal

The apollo 18 movie had a lot of alternate endings and also had a lot of extra material im searching for the "The White Room – John Grey Debriefed by D.O.D." is a short talk between jhon and the D.O.D someone have it or know where to properly ask?

Currently waiting on a Mercury keychain to complete my trifecta of Apollo, Gemini and Mercury

We all know Huntsville, Alabama as the "Rocket City" earning that moniker for its vital role in the U.S. Space Program, but there is a lesser known historical intersection at the Historic Huntsville Depot that ties the Civil War to the Apollo moon landing. It centers on two men separated by a century, both obsessed with the stars, who stepped onto the exact same train platform.

🌌 Part 1: The "Carl Sagan of the 1800s" and the 1862 Artery Cut

Before he was a Union General, Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, affectionately known as "Old Stars" by the soldiers under his command, was arguably the most famous astronomer in the United States, effectively serving as the Carl Sagan of the 1800s. Mitchel was a visionary populist who went door-to-door selling $25 public shares to establish the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. Through this sheer force of will, he founded the Cincinnati Observatory in 1843—the nation's very first professional observatory—boasting a 16-foot mahogany and brass telescope that was the third largest in the entire world.

Mitchel was a massive pioneer in the field. He created and published The Sidereal Messenger, the first popular astronomy magazine in American history, and wrote bestselling books like The Planetary and Stellar Worlds to bring deep space to the masses. He was such an engineering and academic powerhouse that he later helped establish the U.S. Naval Observatory and the observatory at Harvard University. Former President John Quincy Adams even traveled at age 77 to lay the cornerstone for Mitchel's facility, delivering his final public speech. In 1846 Mitchel was the first to observe and record a bright white region at the south pole of Mars later named the Mountains of Mitchel in his honor.

But when the Civil War broke out, Mitchel traded his telescope for a sword. On the morning of April 11, 1862, Mitchel leveraged his deep civil engineering background to lead a swift, surprise overnight march into Huntsville. His target? The Huntsville Depot, which served as the Eastern Division Headquarters for the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Control the depot, and you cut the literal "backbone of the Confederacy" by severing their only continuous east-west rail line.

Mitchel took the city without firing a single shot. He immediately turned the third floor of the brick depot into a makeshift prison for Confederate soldiers retiring on a train from the Battle of Shiloh (you can actually still see their handwritten graffiti on the walls today). Mitchel used his deep understanding of engineering and infrastructure to turn Huntsville into a vital Union stronghold.

🚀 Part 2: April 1950 – Shivering onto the Platform

Fast forward exactly 88 years. On the night of April 1, 1950, a cross-country relocation began. Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists, along with their families, boarded a train at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. They were leaving the desert via Project Paperclip, reassigned to turn the old Redstone Arsenal into a rocket development center.

When they boarded the train in Texas, it was a sweltering 110°F. After a grueling two-day rail journey across the American South, the steam locomotive finally hissed to a halt at the brick passenger platform of the Huntsville Depot on April 3, 1950.

Stepping off the train, the families received a shock. They walked out into a freezing 30°F Alabama spring morning, entirely unprepared for the chill. Waiting for them on the platform was Dr. Hans Grune—a teammate who had traveled ahead to scout the town—who picked up von Braun directly from the tracks in his car. At the time, Huntsville was just a sleepy, isolated town known mostly for its watercress and cotton fields. The Depot was their literal gateway into the city they would completely transform.

🪐 The Ultimate Cosmic Irony

Think about the significance of this location to Civil War history and the history of America's Space Race:

Von Braun’s freezing arrival at the depot directly catalyzed the creation of Marshall Space Flight Center, the development of the Redstone and Jupiter missiles, and ultimately, the massive Saturn V rocket that carried Neil Armstrong to the moon.

Next time you visit downtown Huntsville, drive past the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, or look up at the Saturn V dynamic test stand, remember that the road to the moon didn't start at Cape Canaveral. It started on the platform of the Historic Huntsville Depot, where on April 11, 1862, America's first great popular astronomer captured it as a strategic prize for the Union and on April 2, 1950 a team of space exploration pioneers arrived on a mission to propel this nation in a great Space Race.

https://youtu.be/E_WIrj-KIgY

During the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972 the crew were tasked with putting the Lunar Roving Vehicle through a series of tests to asses its capabilities.

Commander John Young  drove the electrically powered rover through a series of maneuvers—including S-turns, hairpin turns, hard stops, and acceleration to "high" speeds of roughly 6–11 mph (10–18 km/h)—while Charles Duke (lunar module pilot) filmed it with a 16 mm camera from a safe distance.

This video above has been upscaled in quality, interpolated to 60FPS, Stabilised and synced with mission audio by Moonpans

Original Source Footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COc-dAPTw4k

Mods: Delete if inappropriate, but I think there might be interest here.

I recently added the Apollo cameras to the full signal chain simulation of AnalogTV. Refer the details here: https://analogtv.net/#apollo (click on each tile there to expand)

The simulation covers SSTV Mono (Apollo 7-11) and Field Sequential Colour (Apollo 10+) as well as the SEC and SIT Vidicon tubes and the ground-based Scan Converter. It's built using the original NASA, RCA and Westinghouse reference documents and then it's fed through the full signal chain. This is 100% signal domain simulation, not a "Filter" or "Pixel Shader" that just overlays a 'look' over existing video. The scan lines are captured and drawn at the correct frame rates, etc. The conversion from 320 line, 10 fps SSTV to NTSC is done per the original scan converter documentation.

The example above is footage from yesterday at the Sydney Opera House taken on my iPhone and then fed through the simulation.

This is the first release with the Apollo TV formats and it still needs some tweaking. I was just a wee lad when these were originally sent from Apollo so I don't remember seeing them live. Wondering if people who remember the live feed (without post-processing) feel this is close?

Jim Skaggs is a living legend in the Space economy. As NASA’s last living original Apollo Lunar Landing program director from the 1960s - he was the youngest individual in the US government to ever serve at that level of responsibility.

Jim visited Vorago Technologies to speak with our team about what it takes to be victorious to tackle the harsh conditions of space, with lessons that are applicable to each and every one of us. Thank you Jim for your life's work and leadership. Come back to see us any time, as we lead in rad-hard and rad-tolerant semiconductors for any mission, in any orbit.