Neil and Buzz ...
Don't ever tell Buzz Aldrin it didn't happen. He'll punch you in the face!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOo6aHSY8hU
I would not suggest doing it to one of our other heros Neil Armstrong either, I know a guy who was there with Neil when some nut accosted him at LAX. Neil didnt bat an eye after he asked the guy to back off and he didn't...BAM right in the kisser... nut went down.
Nothing quite as funny as seeing someone get thier ass kicked by a 74+ year old man (at the time). I just wish I had been there myself to see it! :rofl:
Neil and Buzz have been harassed many times to the point that Buzz finally punched a repeat offender who was lugging his camera crew around.
Neil Armstrong was chosen because he was the most humble Astronaut. To this day he keeps a very low profile, gives very few interviews and never, ever benefits from being the first man on the moon. About the only thing he does is that if anyone tries to benefit from him indirectly, he forces them to donate any proceeds to charity.
Neil's coolness was proven in Gemini 8 when he made a split second decision to bring the RCS on-line and the necessary roll actions before the spacecraft was undergoing angular momentum to the point that both he and Scott were blacking out due to a stuck attitude thruster. If he hadn't, Americans would have been looking up into the sky for the next few years and thought about the spinning spacecraft with two astronauts with their brains literally rattling around inside of theirs skulls.
Buzz Aldrin doesn't get enough credit for what he did on Gemini 12, the very last mission before Apollo. He is the father of working in space. Truth be told, Americans couldn't figure out how to Spacewalk. Sure, White got out in Gemini 4 and just hovered about for 20 minutes, no different than the Russian for 10 minutes prior. But in every Gemini mission after that, to actually "work in space," every astronaut that attempts to work around the spacecraft instantly got frustrated, worn out and often fogged up their visor until they made adjustments with their mix and just gave up.
Buzz designed the handles, tools and techniques to actually brace, move and otherwise work on the spacecraft, which he make look easy when he himself used them on Gemini 12. Before that, NASA
never had a successful EVA (other than "float about" -- same as the Russians). He was also involved with many aspects of Rendezvous that NASA would later deploy during Apollo, based on Gemini experiences (and it was also his PhD focus).
You're talking the cream of the crop who were chosen for the Apollo 11 mission -- which was far from smooth. In fact, using the world's first, craft deployed digital computer, it regularly overloaded during the decent. Later on, Buzz realized that he was likely at fault for the overloads because he left one of the radars on -- on-purpose -- because he wanted the additional data. Such "failures" and "oversights" were regular with the quickly developed spacecraft and systems during Gemini and Apollo.
Why would you believe anything NASA says though? NASA can lie.
It's hard for any large organization to not have whistle blowers, let alone there are always plenty of employees at prime contractors who are required, by ethics, to report things back to the government.
Heck, one of the stupidest things the US government did early on was try to make an 100% pure, civilian space program with absolutely no use of military ballistic missiles. That was just stupid because it removed decades of experience and product development. If anything, NASA's honesty is always in its best interest.
The problem are always the politicians, and the citizens they listen to, that only look at 3-5 years, instead of the 20+ years required for sustainable engineering. The great majority of Americans don't even apply 18th century physics in their understanding, much less what engineers study in their first two years. Everything from the O-Rings to the Insulation on the STS system haven't been talked about in their real details, like the material changes in 1985 (sealant) and 1997 (CFC-less insulation) that caused the issues. The system, as designed, was well risk-mitigated -- material changes are always the death of engineering safety, because they were not accounted for in the original design.
People like to discredit NASA on the Moon Landings as they like to discredit the ASCE and NIST on the Twin Tower failures. Aristole-level Greek observations applied to either will render assumptions that are actually
anything but factual. Like the fact that air is required for anything, light sources in space (much less the reflective mylar on the octogonal base of the LIM, and other things), just like you don't have to completely melt steel in order to weaken and bend it, especially after you cut two of the three supports in a building.
We engineers are "too few" to fend off the public that tells us we're "too dumb." Just like people who think solar power will ever be a mass power generation solution, and lecture us electrical engineers (EE) on this, along with hydrogen and other things.
