10 Crazy Facts About The Apollo Program | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant [Applause] [Music] all three big engines burning clean and hot pushing the friendship seven spacecraft ever faster towards speed [Music] several months later we choose to go to the moon [Applause] [Music] what happened [Music] to say that we weren't ready for the announcement that we were going to the moon is an understatement in fact you could probably argue that we weren't ready to go to the moon when we went to the moon now this isn't to take away from the accomplishments of the engineers and the astronauts that went to the moon on the contrary it's only because of their creativity and unbelievable determination that we were able to do it at all but the state of technology at the time made the entire program as widely coyote as it comes and the fact that we were able to do it seven times successfully with an asterisk makes it nothing short of remarkable so today we're going back to the moon and we're bringing with us new technology and 50 years of experience living and working in space so in a lot of ways this feels right it feels like it should be happening now but in the 60s i know i catch a lot of hell whenever i say this but we had no business going to the moon at that point you know outside of the proxy cold war thing we had going on we were not really ready obviously if you disagree with that say so in the comments i know you will like i know you've probably heard a million times that the technology behind the cracked screen on your phone is like way vastly superior to what they had in apollo 11. yeah that's a massive understatement in fact according to a 2019 article from mac observer iphones have over a hundred thousand times more processing power than the apollo 11 computer did over a million times more memory in over seven million times more storage all that has to say that they had to come up with some crazy solutions to some overwhelming problems to get to the moon and here are just some of the ways that they did that number one the suits were made by a bra company so let's start this list off with underwear because i know what you guys like prior to the apollo missions astronauts basically flew in high altitude pressure suits like they would have had in the air force in the navy and they got the job done ed white became the first american to do a spacewalk in the space suit just like this but for apollo nasa decided an upgrade was necessary apollo was all about getting to the moon this was a totally different environment with totally different concerns for one thing they weren't going to be weightless on the moon you know when you're weightless it can be a bulky spacesuit and it can be kind of you know difficult to move around and it doesn't really matter that much because you know things aren't being shifted and forced around by gravity so yeah even though the gravity was going to be light on the moon there still was going to be gravity that was going to affect these spacesuits and how they fit them and for another thing they needed to be able to like bend over and pick things up and explore around on a rugged terrain so mobility was a big part of it so to find this new design nasa ran a competition and they put it out amongst a bunch of companies to pitch their ideas for what they called the pga or the pressure garment assembly and the winning manufacturers would also partner with people who put together the the life support system that would go in the back of the assembly that's relevant but not what we're talking about right now what we are talking about right now is the fact that the winning contract for the pga went to a company called international latex corporation or ilc now you might not have heard of ilc but you've absolutely heard of their subsidiary company playtex yeah the bra company over its 74 year history playtex and other subsidiaries have manufactured everything from latex girdles gloves baby bottles sippy cups bras and spacesuits one of these things is not like the others the specific division of ilc that created this was called the government and industrial division or now it's called ilc dover over the course of three years they worked on several different designs on this spacesuit the the pga in question uh one of the most final designs was called the a5l they did that in a 6l that added micro meteorite protection and that would have been what wound up walking on the moon until the apollo 1 tragedy on january 27 1967 during a routine training session a fire swept through the apollo 1 capsule killing astronauts gus grissom ed white and roger chaffee this resulted in a slew of changes and upgrades to many components of the apollo program one of which was making the suits fire proof or with non-flammable materials anyway this resulted in pressure garment assembly a7l the suit that would become the iconic look of the apollo program all right so why did nasa choose a girdle company to make their spacesuits as ilc dover representatives put in an educational document their goal was to permit quote as close to a full range of body joint motion as in the nude condition unquote i'm pretty sure that if you ask the moonwalkers they would tell you that it didn't quite get there but uh you know if you wanted to build a suit that moved along with you just as well as if you were naked can't do much better than an underwear company number two neil was misquoted kind of a lot that's one small step for man one diabetes this has always driven me crazy you've seen that clip a million times and it's wrong and it really messed me up when i was a kid first of all why is he saying one small step for for man when he when he's literally like taking a jump off of that ladder that doesn't look like a small step to me that's because he didn't say it then um he actually said it later that that moment where he jumped down from the ladder to the pad like the way it worked was first he jumped down from the ladder to the pad and stood on the pad that was on the surface of the moon and he actually jumped back up once just to make sure that they could get back up which is a fairly important thing so he tested that a couple of times and then he turned around and he took like one small step off of the landing pad onto the moon's surface so he was saying this is one small step so that was the one small step it wasn't the getting off the ladder thing but it was edited that way because visually you see him taking a step you can't really see him take the step when he turns around the other way because the camera was situated that way so they edited it like that had been playing it like that ever since and it's been misleading us for years second of all i never understood that quote when i was a kid one small step for man one giant leap for mankind what's the difference between man and mankind why is it a small step for one and a giant leap for the other this this this i never could understand this kid joe has a confusion that's because what he actually said was one small step for a man or at least that's what he was trying to say and he's acknowledged this in interviews but even he has admitted that he can't hear the a in there but that has not stopped people from trying in 2006 a computer programmer named peter shan ford claimed that he had isolated the waveform of the a in the sound that though brief and nearly inaudible it was actually picked up by neil's microphone many sound experts dismissed ford's claim but in 2013 a couple of teams from michigan state university and ohio state university said that maybe he was right their reasoning had to do with accents neil armstrong was born and raised in wapaneta ohio and ohioans aren't really known for having strong accents or anything but just like everywhere else in the world they have their own particular idioms and the msu and osu researchers said that if you factor that accent into account that you could find an a sandwiched in there in that quote or more like an uh the researchers actually did a lot of work into this they they studied people from the ohio area the area close to where neal grew up and and listened to them and had them say the term 4a like 4a and they notice that um they do have a tendency to sort of squish the uh so much that you can barely hear it look i'm from texas so i am not in any place to make fun of anybody else's accent and i'm certainly not going to you know criticize the syntax of somebody who is stepping on the moon for the first time i mean he was saying some important words but i'm pretty sure there were some other things on his mind at the time and i think it's also worth mentioning that it's possible the signal could have just cut out for a split second i mean that happens to me all the time and i'm sitting like two feet away from the receiver they had a signal traveling 250 000 miles with 50 year old technology from today i mean it's remarkable they got anything and besides um if you listen you can kind of hear it it's one small step for man that's one small step for man that's one small step for man and yet for years um it's been misquoted everywhere as one small step for man instead of one small step for a man but now let's take a look at another neil armstrong quote that happened just a little bit before that number three the command and lunar modules had great names tranquility base here the ankle has landed again you've heard that a million times and you probably know that the eagle was the call sign for the lunar module by the way quick side note tranquility base that was the first time anybody had said that term neil armstrong and buzz kind of came up with that before they took off and they didn't tell anybody about it they kept it to themselves with the exception of one person uh charlie duke who was the communications person at mission control yeah they kept it a secret from everybody else until that moment funny little fact anyway eagle was the name of the lunar module and colombia was the name of the command module which michael collins was floating around the moon in uh but they were obviously very patriotic names because this was a big patriotic moment in our history and everything but all the other missions had some pretty cool names too starting with apollo 9 which were named gumdrop and spider obviously because they look like a gum drop in a spider and apollo 10 had much more fun names with charlie brown and snoopy in fact originally apollo 11 was going to continue the the tradition of fun names they were going to be called haystack and snow cone but you know somebody stepped in and had to make it all patriotic also michael collins apparently hated the name columbia when he first heard it he thought it sounded really pompous but they were able to change his mind on it because the name of the canon in jules vernes from the earth to the moon uh the canon that shot people to the moon was called the columbiad and uh that that kind of won him over anyway after apollo 11 was apollo 12 with the names yankee clipper and intrepid the ill-fated apollo 13 ships were named odyssey and aquarius apollo 14 had kitty hawk and antares apollo 15 had endeavour in falcon apollo 16 was named casper and orion and apollo 17 got a little bit more patriotic again with america and challenger yeah challenger actually it's interesting how many of these names that show up again like endeavor and falcon and orion maybe eventually number four the lunar lander was a tight fit space vehicles are always on the small side because there's only so much you can fit into a rocket fairing and keeping down weight is always the name of the game but in space that's not usually as much of an issue as it is down here on earth you know i always say if you look around your room even if you're in a small room just imagine if you were weightless and could use all the space on the ceiling and all the corners and stuff there's actually a lot more room in there once you are not tethered to the ground so yeah the fact that the apollo command and lunar modules were small that's no surprise but the difference is the lunar module it wasn't weightless they were stuck on the floor in the lunar module while they were on the moon the apollo lunar module had about 160 cubic feet of space which is about the same as a subaru outback which doesn't sound too bad but imagine being in a subaru outback while wearing that giant eba suit and all the life support systems and equipment and experiments and eventually 220 kilograms of rock oh yeah and another guy they were so strapped for room on the limb that they actually didn't have any room for furniture of any kind so the astronauts just had to sit on equipment or the ascent stage engine cover that was right in the middle of everything yeah the sleeping situation in apollo 11 was abysmal one of them had to literally sleep that was kind of leaned up against some equipment almost in a vertical position the other one had to just sort of fold up into a ball over in the corner in this tiny capsule that was about as big as about 10 of the filing cabinets that you see behind me there throw on top of that the fact that sun was constantly blindingly coming through a window and the loud noise and worse of all the life support equipment and just the excitement of being on the news i see on the news not on the news on the moon they were on the moon they were excited about being on the new i'm doing it again anyway they had trouble sleeping on apollo 11. so they tried to fix this in future missions future apollo missions would incorporate makeshift hammocks that would crisscross each other and some astronauts would even took sleeping pills some found that stripping down to their constant wear garments which are essentially long johns help them to sleep a lot more comfortably they were probably really happy to get back into the command module and get out of that ascend stage once they got back off the moon after that of course once they moved everything over into the command module they would jettison the ascent stage for it to crash back into the moon number five eagle's ascent module may still be orbiting the moon like the earth the moon is not a perfect sphere it's it's kind of egg-shaped and we're looking at the fat end so yeah the moon's mass and therefore its gravity is not evenly distributed and because of that we're not 100 sure what happened to the eagle once it was jettisoned and yet according to a recent computer module it might still be orbiting the moon the modeling was done by an independent researcher james meador and was published in the journal planetarian space science mater was trying to find where eagle crashed and the answer he got back was nowhere he tried varying the parameters in 100 different ways but every single time he did it it just came back saying that it's probably still in orbit scott manley did a great video on this i'll point to it down in the description or i'll put a link up here it's definitely worth watching like all of his stuff but yeah the gist is assuming it didn't explode at some point it might still be up there and we should be able to find it uh it's happened before anyway yeah the lunar orbiter chandrayaan-1 went missing uh back in 2009 i believe and in 2016 they were able to find it on radar still orbiting so yeah something similar could happen with eagles somebody might uh look close enough and and find it good looking people number six aldrin's mother's maiden name was moon i mean come on but yeah buzz's mother's name was marion aldrin she married his father edwin eugene aldrin senior but before she got married to him her maiden name was marion moon apparently that had gotten around after the moon landing and the new york times asked buzz about it and he responded by saying quote yes i didn't feel nasa needed to know that somebody would think i was trying to get favorite treatment because my ancestors had the name moon he was probably just joking about that but no a super weird coincidence the second guy to walk on the moon was something of a moon himself but he did make sure to use his paternal name aldrin when he filled out his customs forms when he got back oh yeah that's another fun little fact number seven the astronauts had to fill out customs forms yeah i heard this and i had to look it up for myself but yeah when they landed back near hawaii on july 24 1969 when they got back into the state they had to fill out customs declaration forms i mean they definitely left the country but here it is as you can see it's signed by all three astronauts it shows the flight manifest is leaving from cape kennedy and arriving at honolulu with a stopover at the moon under cargo they had to declare moon rock moon dust and samples and the departure point up at the top the moon and one of the most interesting ones under quote any condition on board which may lead to the spread of disease it says to be determined yikes but yeah as most of you probably know they were concerned about the possibility of them bringing home some moon germs so they were quarantined for three weeks once they got back to earth three weeks amateurs number eight nixon had another speech prepared just in case so yeah there were like a million things that could have gone wrong with apollo 11 from the launch to the rendezvous to the landing all of that but maybe the most tragic outcome would be one where neil and buzz were stranded on the moon it was a possibility they had one shot at getting that ascent stage to light to get them off the moon and if it didn't light they were going to be stuck there and just with the whole world watching until their oxygen ran out or they bit into the cyanide pills that they may or may not have had and it seems that this was the eventuality that the nixon administration was most concerned about because they had a speech prepared just in case it was written by speechwriter william sapphire luckily it was not needed of course but they did stick it away in the national archives it resurfaced again around the 30th anniversary in 1999 so we've known about it for a while but last year in 2020 some mit researchers decided to use this speech to do a deep fake of nixon actually giving the speech they had an actor deliver the lines and then use the face and voice of richard nixon to actually deliver the speech and then put it together in a short film this was released online and it played at various film and technology festivals around the world but they were very careful at the beginning to have a description a caption that said that uh this was not a real video in fact those are the very first words on the video this is not real and that was kind of the point of the film to sort of show the dangers inherent in ai's you know manipulating video and stuff to create something that's realistic enough to get people to believe in all kinds of misinformation it's a little creepy on a lot of different levels i mean just think about how this could be used to you know get people to change history on things i mean the mandela effect people would go nuts over this but anyway in case you haven't seen it here's a clip of it and i must reiterate this is fake good evening my fellow americans faiths has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace these brave men neil armstrong and edwin auburn know that there is no hope for their recovery but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice i gotta say it's a pretty good speech i'll put a link to it in the description down there but uh yeah super glad that moment didn't really happen now to something a little less horrifying number nine the astronauts drank fizzy water according to michael collins in his 1974 memoir they had a problem with the hydrogen gas filters on the fuel cell that they used to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water and it also was used to power the capsule so the filter was allowing too much hydrogen into the fuel cell so the excess hydrogen was sort of being saturated into the water and making it fizzy so yeah the astronauts were basically drinking club soda the whole time except instead of being carbonated meaning that it's infused with carbon dioxide it was actually infused with hydrogen making it hydrogenated hydrogenated so i guess you could say the astronauts chose gas with their water because because when you go to restaurants they ask if you want it still or with gas when you order water and with gas means that it's the soda water it's really it's really more of a thing outside of the u.s than than in the united states it's uh shut up it's a solid joke speaking of with gas though it turns out that drinking this fizzy water made them a little bit sort of you know kind of seriously gassy according to collins quote these bubbles produce gross flatulence in the lower bowel resulting in a not so subtle and pervasive aroma which reminds me of a mixture of wet dog and marsh gas luckily it's not like they're all trapped with each other inside of a subaru outback with the windows rolled up or anything and number ten the astronauts trained sideways apollo astronauts had to train in all kinds of weird places from giant swimming pools to far corners of the earth to study different kinds of crazy geology that were similar to what they expected on the moon in fact nasa teamed up with the us geological survey to actually blast craters into cinder lake and arizona to give them a better feeling of what it's like on the moon you know by this time we had a good handle on maneuvering and and getting around in zero gravity most of the astronauts had flown on gemini and and they had various ways of simulating that on earth like on the vomit comet but nobody had ever walked on a surface with only one-sixth gravity nobody had ever experienced that and they didn't know how to simulate that like how do you just turn down the dial on gravity a little bit to answer this and about a million other questions nasa set up the lunar landing research facility at langley research center here they stopped at nothing to simulate the entire mission as closely as possible this means creating a full-size lunar lander that's supported by a gantry that would support 5 6 of the weight giving it the feeling of 1 6 gravity and to practice walking around in 1-6 gravity they came up with this crazy idea it was called the lunar gravity simulator and they basically hung astronauts sideways and had them walk on a surface 9 degrees off vertical which simulated 1 6 gravity along the spine now obviously this was different from walking on the moon because you're still dealing with that downward force of gravity but it did give you an idea of how high you could jump i guess they thought if nothing else that could give you an idea of how fast the ground would push away from you when you were walking up there and it just looks like a lot of fun all that attention to detail and training obviously paid off in fact when armstrong landed back on earth and somebody asked him what it was like landing on the moon he said this quote it's like langley the only thing they probably could use more of was a little more dust on the surface just another example of the thousands of unknown but hugely important people that made this insane moment in human history come true and here we are we find ourselves at another major point in history one that seems to split us in two so maybe it's a good time to remember that when we come together we can actually do some really amazing things if the will is there and by the way if you're wondering how the hell people could have gotten to the moon with so much less computer power than what's in your pocket right now it's because they had a superhuman understanding of the physics behind all of it and if you would like to understand it just as well well you know brilliant will help you get there and two courses specifically that would help you to get there are the classical mechanics course and the gravitational physics course understand the rocket equation for the first time get an appreciation for how difficult it is to get off the ground the classical mechanics course and once you're out of the atmosphere figure out how to not come back down again by learning more about how gravity works by the way if you haven't checked out brilliant lately it's gotten a lot more interactive so if you're one of those people like me that has to visualize and play with something to understand it brilliant's got you covered this just makes it easier to understand the core concepts and the fundamentals courses which sets you up for success in the more advanced courses later on next thing you know you've got super villain knowledge and that's when the real fun begins plus they make it easy to make learning a habit so you can do it on your mobile device and even offline 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got some new members i got to murder their names real quick we got mark wilkins nicola matic frances del vecchio michael traynor vic rachel land case jackson the kiwi chrono knot uh jessica finch chili bot john white wynn morgan and natsar thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos exclusive stuff and just be part of an awesome community you can go to patreon.com answers with joe please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check this one out google thinks you might like that one or any of the others that i've done i've done a whole bunch at this point and if you do like them and you want to see more i invite you to subscribe i'll come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now i hope you guys enjoyed this one you guys go out there and have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 567,427

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: Qvf8r6awak4

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021