34
According to https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a15777930/launching-to-space-at-a-crawl/
it is to reduce dust created as the crawler crushes some of the "Alabama River Rock".
Photo showing the crushed rock behind the crawler.
(Source - Organic Marble)
14
That ring is the "instrument unit" (IU). Here's a picture of the component layout.
There is more there than a computer, but it's mostly dedicated to guidance, navigation, and control. There's a hugely detailed fact sheet here. It lists the systems of the IU as
A more detailed layout (same source as first picture).
Image source
13
Highest altitude of all manned missions excluding Apollo: Gemini 11, 1372 km
(leaving this here for reference: )
Highest altitude dated after Apollo: Space Shuttle STS-31R (the Hubble launch), 620 km.
11
In shuttle parlance the "flight deck" was the upper floor of the three-story crew module, the middeck was, erm, the middle floor, and the ECLSS (or Lower Equipment) bay was the lower floor.
The flight deck included both the forward facing airplane mode controls and the aft facing robot arm and rendezvous controls. If the term cockpit was used - and in my ...
10
They mark the candidate landing sites for the mission.
According to Wikipedia, five sites were considered for the first moon landing:
Sites 1 and 2 were in the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquilitatis); Site 3 was in the Central Bay (Sinus Medii); and Sites 4 and 5 were in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum).
Sinus Medii is a 287km diameter mare ...
9
Are there any atheist or agnostic American astronauts, past or present?
With the hundreds of astronauts who have been through the American space program, I am sure there are more than a few atheists and agnostics, but they're likely quiet about it. The only publicly self-identified atheist astronaut I know of is not American, ESA's Christer Fuglesang.
...
7
Those are tongs.
The tongs consisted of a set of opposing spring-loaded fingers attached to a handle and were used for picking up samples. Postflight evaluation of Apollo missions 11, 12, and 14 indicated a need for increased length, larger jaws, and additional closing force. These changes were incorporated for Apollo missions 15 through 17. Also, to ...
7
I'm not sure about this precise type of display (*), but there are ones very similar and that exactly match your description: Ten individual light bulbs, ten lenses and a mask with cut-outs for each digit.
They were called "in-line displays" or "projection displays" and became popular around 1960, before they vanished in favor of LED-based 7-segment ...
5
"Well, I just got back from MIT with my weekly quota of new ulcers, which I thought might interest you.”
Bill Tindall, June 13 1966
According to http://tindallgrams.net/ (thanks to @OrganicMarble's comment):
Tindallgrams
The snarky memos of Apollo’s unsung genius
In 1966, as the American space program was working furiously towards a moon ...
5
Yes, chase pilot Charles Justiz was a non-astronaut, though his biography certainly suggests he could have qualified; he applied for the astronaut class of 1985. According to this CollectSpace thread he flew chase for STS-5 and STS-41D among other missions. The thread names several other chase pilots; I didn't run down all of them but at least one other, ...
4
The exhibit is LM-13, which was scheduled for the Apollo 18 mission (which was cancelled). It's representative of the ones that actually did fly-to and land-on the moon.
However since then it has undergone a few modifications, tweaks etc. I don't know the extent of those alterations.
https://www.asme.org/about-asme/who-we-are/engineering-history/landmarks/...
3
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#Site_selection
NASA's Apollo Site Selection Board announced five potential landing sites on February 8, 1968. These were the result of two years' worth of studies based on high-resolution photography of the lunar surface by the five unmanned probes of the Lunar Orbiter program and information about ...
2
According to the NASA page on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, pig iron and pea gravel were loaded inside to balance the aircraft:
"You see, the nearly 2 tons (1710 pounds) of pig iron up-front in the former first class section of the aircraft, and the 3.5 tons (7000 pounds) of pea gravel in the cargo hold are for keeping the aircraft’s center of gravity ...
2
As an information security professional this makes me cringe, but I'm not in the last surprised. I've read the OIG report, there's not that much information on the data that is lost, but the report states on page 10:
Prior to detection and containment of the incident, the attacker
exfiltrated approximately 500 megabytes of data from 23 files, 2 of
...
1
I'm pretty sure that the numbers in RETRO's chronographs are stickers (or nice LEDs), but not connected to actual clocks etc (the leap-second gives it away).
The original photo from Wikimedia Commons shows much more clearly what look to me to be Nixie tubes. The slight misalignment of the baseline between numerals when seen off-axis is a strong indicator, ...
1
Actually as part of my application Blueturn (http://app.blueturn.earth) which makes interpolated video feed out of EPIC images, I have been following the EPIC feed a lot and I observed that except the memorable Moon transit of July 5th 2016, we don't have other images of the Moon photobombing the Earth.
There is a reason for this; the presence of the Moon ...
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