The mission's main objective was to test the space toilet ... and it didn't exactly live up to expectations ...

 

This is pretty good: all the camera angles they didn't show us on launch day.

Nice. Still no crew, though.

Maybe I'm weird, but that's what I really want to see.

 

This is pretty good: all the camera angles they didn't show us on launch day.

Thanks!

It's still hard to beat the majesty of the Saturn V launch. Part of that was because the thrust-to-weight ratio was lower, so the initial acceleration was lower. I think my favorite part is the flames that initially billowed up from the tail getting sucked back down. When I first saw that (probably in some movie as a kid) I assumed that it was a special effect and they were just running the film backwards. Nope. Firm testament to Bernoulli.

 

I also agree that the beauty of Saturn V lifting off is unbeatable. It has this grand, majestic quality to it.
My favorite sequence us when one sees the UNITED STATES slowly scrolling and then fading into the F1s, with its distinctive dual brightness exhaust.

 

I also agree that the beauty of Saturn V lifting off is unbeatable. It has this grand, majestic quality to it.
My favorite sequence us when one sees the UNITED STATES slowly scrolling and then fading into the F1s, with its distinctive dual brightness exhaust.

That is also one of the iconic sequences. Then there is that beautiful shot of the first stage separation and interstage ring jettison on Apollo 4. Beautifully and carefully recreated and set to music in the movie Apollo 13 (they did such a good job that Buzz Aldrin asked NASA where the archive footage came from).

Even as a young kid, every time I saw that separation sequence I was almost brought to tears because, to me, that Saturn V first stage and those mighty engines were living creatures being sacrificed after serving faithfully and honorably. The thought of them just being discarded to crash into the ocean and be lost was hard. I knew way it had to be that way (at least to the degree that it could be explained to someone so young), but, to this day, I always have get internal pang where my inner child still feels that they deserved a better fate.

Later, as I understood the operation better, a question popped into my mind that no one could answer. If the lower stages were allowed to crash into the ocean and sink, how did we get the film? By that time, I understood that live color TV transmission was not practical, so it had to be recorded on film. But that meant that the film had to be recovered. It was one of those questions that no one I knew could answer, because it was such a minor technical detail that it wasn't worth spending air time mentioning it. So, for years, I assumed that divers had simply dove down and recovered the waterproof camera. I, of course, had no idea at the time of the depth at which the debris sank (the Apollo 11 first stage is in about 14,000 ft of water), or of how violent such a crash into the ocean would be. I didn't try to seek further answers, though, because the ability of a middle school student to do that kind of research in the pre-Internet days was rather minimal. But, in high school, some film we saw in an AFJROTC class happen to have the full length footage, including the usually-trimmed final second, in which it's obvious that the camera was jettisoned from the second stage just prior to engine ignition. I remember saying, out loud, "That's how they did it!"

 

Nice. Still no crew, though.

Maybe I'm weird, but that's what I really want to see.

Here ya go:

 

 

From an Ontario farm boy to the moon.
Jeremy Artemis (in red) with his dad, tractors to space ships, pretty much the same !

 

She asked him where he was going, he replied "To the Moon Alice"

With appologies to Jackie Gleason!

 

 

 

 

The average age of astronauts on space missions is 47 years old.

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The average age of astronauts on space missions is 47 years old.

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How does the average age of the particular astronauts on one space mission equate to "the average age of astronauts on space missions"????

And how is the average of 50, 49, 40 and 47 come out to 47??? Seems like that works out to 49 years to me.

According to NASA, the average age of astronauts is 34 years old, but I didn't see what they defined as "average" -- and there are a lot of different ways to define it that probably lead to quite different values.

Also, since Artemis II was an international crew, the average shouldn't be restricted to just NASA astronauts.

The best definition would probably be to use the age of each member of each crew on any space mission, from Gagarin to Artemis, at the time of launch (or recovery, or some other well-defined time since over eight astronauts have been in space on their birthday). But even that requires some further refinement since many people have flown multiple missions, so do we only consider distinct astronauts, or do we count each time a human goes up as a separate event (which probably makes the most sense, given that some of them, like John Glenn, did so at very different ages. I think there's been nearly 700 distinct individuals that have gone into space (not counting suborbital -- but perhaps those should count, too), but something like 2/3 of them have multiple missions under their belt and it is often years in between flights.

It would be a bit interesting to see what the moving average is over time to see what the trend has been. I would guess that it has gone up over time as we've learned how well "older" humans tolerate space flight and as we seek to get a higher return on training investment by extending astronaut careers and getting them on as many missions as possible. I could foresee it going up even more as industrialization and commercialization of space incentivizes sending up people that are highly-experienced experts in specialized fields.