Some of us have toys and models of similar things but there’s nothing like seeing the full size in - your - face real thing.
Although the hatch is removed and a clear Perspex cover separates the general public from the module’s cramped environment you can still see the controls and the joysticks.
The three astronauts would have spent eight days working, eating, sleeping, washing, shaving and doing all the natural things that us Earthbound spacemen do in this cramped world, with the odd scramble into the LEM. It takes a heck of a lot of guts to travel a quarter of a million miles in this tny spaceship and crack on it’s great being a astronaut. The Apollo 10 mission couldn’t even land on the Moon, so not even a chance for two of them to stretch their legs.
The original polished silver look of the spacecraft is darkened following it’s return through Earth’s atmosphere. You can see the heavy scorch marks on the heat shield.
Here's a close up of the heat shield.
And if, by some stretch of the imagination I’d got a chance to travel to the moon and back in a capsule that’s smaller than the cupboard under my stairs!
Would I go?
In a heartbeat!
We have a command module capsule here locally in The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, I cannot imagine how three grown men survived such a claustrophobic space during the Apollo missions.
ReplyDeleteIt literally is little more than a an exaggerated trunk or boot from a large luxury car.
I get claustrophic just looking at these capsules. It really did take a special breed of person to go up in these!
ReplyDeleteI gather that after the very confined space of Mercury and Gemini, the astronauts found Apollo spacious! I know that in Zero G more room is available, like on the ceiling but it is an awfully long way to the moon!
ReplyDelete