X-Nico

17 unusual facts about Apollo Program


Albert L. Hopkins

worked at the US MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now known as the Draper Lab) during the development of the Apollo Guidance, Navigation, and Control System, or the GN&C.

Beyond the Stars

This science fiction drama centers on Eric, teenage son of a computer scientist who worked for the Apollo program which sent the first humans to the moon.

Command module

The Apollo Command Module, the crew cabin of the Apollo Command/Service Module, used in the Apollo program to send men to the Moon and low Earth orbit, designed specifically to return through the atmosphere to a water landing

Graham Ryder

From 1978 to 1982 he helped in the assembly of catalogues and guides to the Apollo lunar samples.

Heinz Kaminski

In 1967 Kaminski installed a 20 meter parabolic antenna in a radome, with which all Apollo missions were followed.

Henk Terlingen

He became notable in the Netherlands as the presenter of the Apollo lunar missions in the late 1960s, which he presented with Chriet Titulaer.

Ismail Akbay

Between 1963 and 1975, Akbay served in various managerial capacities during NASA’s Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz projects.

James May on the Moon

James May on the Moon is a British documentary in which James May commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings.

Larry Burkett

He spent the next several years at the Space Center in charge of an experiments test facility that served the Mercury-, Gemini-, and Apollo-manned space programs.

MV Retriever

It was used to train United States astronauts for post-splashdown ocean recovery operations and water egress from their command modules during the Gemini and Apollo programs from 1963 to 1972.

Quarantine

The fear of a interplanetary contamination by back contamination from the Moon was the main reason for quarantine procedures adopted for the early Apollo program.

Ronald Greeley

Through his military service, he was assigned to NASA’s Ames Research Center in 1967 where he worked in a civilian capacity in preparation for the Apollo missions to the Moon.

Sneak circuit analysis

The first computer aided implementation of SCA was for the NASA Apollo program in 1967 by the Boeing Company.

Sphingosine kinase

Learning of it inspires the protagonist of the series, President Josiah Bartlet, to consider launching an Apollo program to cure cancer.

The Butterjunk Effect

The Planet Express crew are assigned to return the "stolen" moon rocks from the Apollo missions to the Moon.

The Reluctant Astronaut

The Reluctant Astronaut was a popular children's film during the Apollo program, and was frequently shown on weekend afternoons.

Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science

The students had to build a vehicle resembling the Lunar Rover used on the Moon during the last three missions of the American Apollo program and then race it to the finish line.


Al Reinert

He co-wrote the screenplays for the Ron Howard film Apollo 13 and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, but is best known for directing and producing For All Mankind, an Award-winning documentary about NASA's Apollo program.

Apollo Telescope Mount

The ATM was one of a number of projects that came out of the late 1960s Apollo Applications Program, which studied a wide variety of ways to use the infrastructure developed for the Apollo program in the 1970s.

Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project

Some of these errors have existed since the database's creation during NASA's Apollo Program, where it was used to help produce probabilities of tropical cyclone-induced winds in critical areas such as Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral).

Cape Canaveral

NASA's Project Mercury and Gemini space flights were launched from Cape Canaveral, as were Apollo flights using the Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets.

Charles Schnetzler

Schnetzler is best known for analyzing moon rocks brought back by the Apollo program and for studying the Earth's environment using the Landsat and the Earth Observing System.

Edward Givens

After completing basic astronaut training, he was assigned to the Apollo program and briefly served on the support crew for the first manned post-Apollo 1 fire mission, eventually to fly as Apollo 7.

Gene DeWeese

He worked for General Motors' Delco Electronics Division as an electronics technician in Kokomo, Indiana from 1954–1959, and as a technical writer (including for the Apollo Program) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 1959 to 1974 (when he became a full-time freelance writer).

Georg von Tiesenhausen

He would later be transferred to NASA, where he would work on various spaceflight programs, including the Apollo program which would land men on the Moon.

Jerome F. Lederer

In 1967, following the deaths of three astronauts at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA appointed him director of the Office of Manned Space Flight Safety for the Apollo Program.

Joseph G. Gavin Jr

(September 18, 1920 – October 30, 2010) was an American engineer responsible for the development of the lunar module used in the Apollo program, as well as president, chief operating officer and chairman of the executive committee of the Grumman Corporation.

Kinsey Anderson

During the following decade at UCB he and his students flew instruments on many of the early generation of space science missions, including the Interplanetary Monitoring Platforms (IMP) 1-6, OGO 5, Explorer 33 and 35, and Apollo 15 and 16 lunar sub-satellites.

Less

LESS (Lunar Escape Systems), a series of proposed emergency spacecraft for the Apollo Program.

Mobile Quarantine Facility

The Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) is a converted Airstream trailer used by NASA to quarantine astronauts returning from Apollo lunar missions.

NASA Astronaut Corps

An additional four (Elliot See, Charles Bassett, Theodore Freeman, and Clifton Williams) were killed in T-38 plane crashes during training for space flight during the Gemini and Apollo programs.

Paul C. Donnelly

Paul Charles Donnelly (born March 28, 1923) is a retired American guided missile pioneer who was a senior NASA manager during the Apollo moon landing program at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

Roald H. Fryxell

In 1971 he was selected to be part of the team of geologists in Houston who examined rocks brought back from the Moon during the Apollo program.

Space Task Group

After President John F. Kennedy set the goal in 1961 for the Apollo Program to land men on the Moon, NASA decided a much larger organization and a new facility was required to perform the Task Group's function, and it was transformed into the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center), located in Houston, Texas.