Apollo 8.

I watched a programme about this mission last night, I was in awe of it as a 7 year old in 68.

Boorman, Lovell and Anders were all just about middle aged men of 40, 40 and 35 when they flew this mission 53 years ago.

All three are still with us and are closing in on 94, 94 and Anders has just passed 88.

The NASA selection process has long fascinated me, a very large proportion of that generation of astronauts is either still with us or have lived deep into their 80’s and 90’s and some look like making it past the 100 mark.

The way they evaluated these guys must’ve been incredibly skilful.

Hearing Frank Boorman describing travelling at 7 miles per second and then talking about travelling half a million miles in between toilet dumps really summed up these guys for me!

You had to be extremely fit and intelligent to be an astronaut, so no surprise they reached a big age.
I remember that flight well, I was 13. I was watching the ISS live the other night sending back film of the earth. It travels at almost 30,000km per hour.
It is a few miles up just outside our atmosphere, astounding the technology we have today.
More astounding that over half a decade ago with primitive computers we could send men a quarter of a million miles, and then a few months later land them on an unknown surface and bring them back.
The space race achieved so much in just eight years but appears to have been treading water since.

One of the things that I find most amazing Des is the speed of travel.

Like going from Stourbridge to the far side of Dudley in a single second or Stourbridge to The Albion ground in less than two seconds.

The thought that something physical can travel that distance in one second is hard to comprehend.

The astronauts were incredibly brave men who were skilled engineers. On Apollo 11 the switch to activate the LM ignition to leave the Moon surface broke off. Unless they fixed it they couldn't leave. Aldrin fixed it with the nib of a ball point pen. Cool as you like.

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Originally Posted by mickd1961

One of the things that I find most amazing Des is the speed of travel.

Like going from Stourbridge to the far side of Dudley in a single second or Stourbridge to The Albion ground in less than two seconds.

The thought that something physical can travel that distance in one second is hard to comprehend.

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It's all about relativity Mick, the Universe is vast and we are microscopic. It still takes light 100,000 years to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Unless we find anything faster than light we won't travel very far.
We can travel much further and faster than an Ant but if it was the same size as us it would be as fast as a plane.

Have you read First Man by James Hanson about the life of Neil Armstrong Mick? Well worth a read for all those of us of a certain age who grew up enamoured with the Apollo space programme. The sheer mental and physical attributes needed by these astronauts at a time when the computing power in the command capsule is dwarfed by todays i-phones is staggering.