Jim Lovell is one shit-hot guy and was a stalwart in the Gemini and Apollo programs. His fame went ballistic after his book Lost Moon and Ron Howard's movie Apollo 13 were released, but in recent years he seems to have quietly disappeared into retirement in Chicagoland. Like most pilots, he kept some mementos of his fascinating career, one of which was the checklist he used on the Apollo 13 mission. Bearing his own personal notes and calculations on how to get the crippled spacecraft safely back to Earth, this thing proved to be worth far more than the paper it was written on.

The item went up for auction a few months ago and fetched a whopping $388,000, but the sale won't go through if NASA has its way. Forget that he saved the mission and some might argue the entire Apollo program - NASA claims he does not hold title to it and as such it should be returned to the agency. This in spite of an internal NASA memo in 1972 allowing the astronauts to keep certain personal items as long as they were notified.

This isn't the first time they've gone after an Apollo astronaut for trying to sell space memorabilia. Rusty Swigert (Apollo 9, 13) hocked a couple of pieces in the same auction, including a stick grip which fetched over $22k. And Loony moon man Edgar Mitchell was busted last June trying to sell a camera from Apollo 14 for $80k - a camera that in other Apollo missions was typically left on the surface of the moon.

Cameras and stick grips might fall out of the "personal items" realm, but a checklist? I mean, what's more personal than an item which sat in your G-suit pocket 99.9% of the time? I guess I better hide my old T-41 Mescalero boldface card from Hondo, not to mention the various Non-Nuclear -34's I kept over the years...lest the Feds come-a-lookin!

America's manned space program offically ended this morning at 5:56am - 42 years to the day after Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. This country is no officially Third World, and we now have to rely on crappy Russian spaceships to get our astronauts into space. How that's change working for us all these days?

Below is an awesome shot of Endeavour right before touchdown at KSC. A little ground effect for ya...

We ran a story a while back about Apollo XIV astronaut Edgar Mitchell raving about UFO's, ESP and aliens, and now we have a former pole jockey running around claiming aliens deactivated a Minuteman missile site back in 1967.

Speaking at the National Press Club today, Capt Robert Salas, a former USAF missile officer at Malmstrom AFB, MT, claimed that on the night of March 16, 1967 an unidentified flying object hovered over his launch control facility and deactivated ten of his Minuteman missiles.

Salas, a graduate of the Air Force Academy who also holds a MS in Aerospace Engineering, first went public about the incident in 1994. Since then, he has become a minor celebrity in the CUFON and MUFON circles, and has appeared on such heavy-hitting science forums as Larry King Live and Art Bell's radio show. He is also the author of "Faded Giant," a  book about (what else?) aliens messin' with our nukes.

I wonder if Capt. Salas ever met Mr. Seven, the alien from the Star Trek episode "Assignment Earth" who showed up in a human costume and saved Earth from a nuclear holocaust. This was also the episode that you might recall featured, ahem, a very-porkable Teri Garr :-)

Below is a video shot on July 16,1969 during the launch of Apollo 11. It was filmed in 16mm format at 500 frames per second, stretching 30 secs. of film into 8 mins. of slow-mo awesomeness. (A shortened 2:45 version is below} Sadly, the Rocketdyne F-1 engines were retired after the Apollo program, but remain the most powerful rocket engine ever developed by the US. Each F-1 engine had more thrust than all 3 of the Space Shuttle's engines combined -- and the Saturn V rocket had five of them!

Moon hoax conspiracists point to the "waving" US flag on the moon as proof positive that the Apollo landings were faked. Ignoring the fact that the flag was bracketed by aluminum framing beneath the stitching - and the law of inertia - filmmaker Bart Sibrel has it all figured out. Sibrel, a numbskull conspiracist (and recipient of the Buzz Aldrin knuckle sandwich) claims, "The wind was probably caused by intense air-conditioning used to cool the astronauts in their lightened, uncirculated space suits." Yeah.

So who made the US flag that Armstrong and Aldrin planted forty years ago today? No one can say for sure and it is still a contested issue. Delores Black, a seamstress from Wisconsin, claims she made the flag for NASA and has her signature on the inseam to prove it - a pretty safe boast unlikely to ever be confirmed. In his book "All We Did Was Fly to the Moon", Dick Lattimer claims that the 3'x5' flags were purchased off the shelf at a local Sears store and modified. Fearing another "Tang" situation, NASA chose to keep the source quiet. [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWghCdIqedA 400x300]

Twenty four hours after launch, Apollo 11 was hurtling along nicely toward the moon at a cool 24,545 mph, or roughly Mach 409 give or take a few Ernsts. That's a little slower than the 24,791 mph its predecessor Apollo 10 hit on its way back from the moon - still a record for a manned vehicle according to Guinness. But while all eyes focused on Apollo, there was a little publicized wildcard entry into the space race - Russia's Luna 15.

Resembling something created in a "Junkyard Wars" episode, the USSR launched the unmanned Luna 15 three days before Apollo 11 in hopes of upstaging the US. They planned on landing the probe on the lunar surface, collecting soil samples, and racing back to Earth before Apollo splashdown. The crew  of Apollo 11 was briefed daily on the progress of Luna 15, and it was being closely followed by NASA and tracking stations in the UK. It entered lunar orbit on July 17, 1969, and was still in orbit three days later as Armstrong took his first steps. While the astronauts prepared to leave the moon on July 21st, Luna 15 finally began its descent and attempted to land -- only to end up as a smoking hole on the lunar surface.

Below is a fake video of Luna 15 orbiting above the Eagle lander and then crashing. I include it only to demonstrate the idiocy of the film makers. Since when do parachutes inflate without an atmosphere?

Apollo 11 lifts of from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, FL. Still the most powerful machine ever built, the huge Saturn 5 rocket generated close to 8 million lbs. of thrust as the crew set off on an 8-day mission to the moon. Below is the actual news broadcast of the event. Seems like it was only yesterday...

 [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGNryrsT7OI 400x300]

Mike Judge's (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space) futuristic film Idiocracy postulates that natural selection is indifferent to intelligence, and in a society where intelligence is systematically debased, stupidity will eventually reign supreme.  Judge thought it would take 500 years for us to reach the complete breakdown of reason and intelligent thought, but a recent poll by the Institution of Technology and Engineering says the dumbing down of the Western World is rolling along in splendid fashion.

ITE surveyed 1009 random people in the UK about the upcoming Apollo celebration, and found some startling ignorance. Less than three-quarters could name the first man to walk on the moon, although several got it half-right in answering "Louis Armstrong."  A bunch of other fifty-percenters answered "Buzz Lightyear" when asked who the 2nd guy on the moon was. Most disturbing was the fact that 25% of those surveyed thought the entire Apollo moon landing was faked. Here's a clip of the real Buzz running into one these guys a few years back:

 I was only 3 when JFK was shot so I can't tell you what I was doing the second it was announced, but I can tell you exactly where I was when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. As we approach the 40th anniversary of man's first step on another world, I thought I'd throw out a few little known pieces of trivia from the Apollo program over the next few weeks that may have slipped from your memory.

Apollo 7

Apollo 7 resurrected the moon race from the ashes of the Apollo 1 disaster, and  was the first Apollo mission commanded by one of the Original 7 astronauts, Wally Schirra. The Original 7 were the rock stars of the astronaut corps and weren't afraid to call a spade a spade with the higher-ups.  A veteran of Mercury and Gemini  with 295 hours in space, Schirra was a mission-oriented ex-fighter pilot with a MiG-15 kill to his credit in Korea, and had little patience for the lab coats.  By the time the 11-day mission was over, NASA would have the final say in this American hero's career.

Fighting nasty colds during the mission,  Schirra and his crew started gulping Actifed tablets which ran down their patience and their tact in dealing with the shoe clerks on the ground.  As NASA loaded them up with superfluous additions to the flight plan and publicity stunt TV broadcasts (Apollo 7 was the first to beam down live TV to earth), communications became heated. Reporters the world over noticed the tone of the exchanges between Schirra and Houston, and began to write about the "snappishnish" of the astronauts. Head of  the astronaut corps Deke Slayton was called in to admonish Schirra in this curt exchange:

"I told him that the whole world was following this flight and that he and his crew were not coming across well," Slayton said. "I told him he was trained to do a job and that he'd better get busy doing it." And?

 "And he told me to go to hell."  None of the Apollo 7 crew ever flew into space again - remember that next time you feel like flipping off your boss.

Apollo 8

"Earthrise over the moon" is one of the most famous photos to come out of the space program and gave us the first high-resolution, full color look at our world as viewed from lunar orbit. LEM pilot Bill Anders snapped the photo on Christmas Eve 1968, followed shortly thereafter by Commander Frank Borman's reading from the Book of Genesis as live video was beamed back to Earth. Pretty heavy stuff.

Stuff that was apparently too heavy for Madalyn Murray O'Hair - founder of the American Atheists - to accept. She filed a lawsuit against NASA for 1st Amendment violations, claiming that as government employees, astronauts should not be allowed to mention anything to do with religion while carrying out their duties. The suit was thrown out by the US Supreme Court, citing lack of jurisdiction.

Dr. Edgar Mitchell has an impressive resume - PhD from MIT, USN test pilot and lunar module pilot for Apollo 14. He owns the record for longest moonwalk and caddied for Alan Shepard when he hit a 6 iron for "miles and miles" on the lunar fairway - pretty cool stuff by anyone's measure.

It was after his retirement from NASA that things started to go south for this guy. He claimed to have conducted "ESP experiments" with friends on earth while on the moon and founded the Institute of Noetic Science - a pseudo-scientific organization that champions all sorts of new age crap. "Noetic" refers to the theory that humans will eventually evolve into a new species - homo noeticus - that will be possessed of all sorts of paranormal abilities. 

Recently Mitchell went on an Australian radio show and claimed first hand knowledge of alien contact with earthlings and the massive government cover-up behind it.

"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real. It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it."

He also added a warning to us lesser beings, claiming our technology is "not nearly as sophisticated" as theirs and "had they been hostile we would be been gone by now". I can't think of anything cooler that could happen than to have a bunch of friendly aliens visit earth and take me up for a ride in what would have to be one kick-ass spaceship. But it hasn't happened yet, and Mitchell's claims are as ridiculous as his "noetic" agenda. Carl Sagan made a very poignant point about these alien visitor nuts in his book "The Demon Haunted World":

"Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in ?contact' with extraterrestrials.  I am invited to ?ask them anything'.  And so over the years I've prepared a little list of questions.  The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember.  So I ask things like, ?Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem'. Or the Goldbach Conjecture.  And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it  'Fermat's Last Theorem'.  So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. . . I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like ?Should we be good?' I almost always get an answer.  Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgments, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to.  But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence".

 16 July 1969, Apollo XI launch and first manned lunar landing.  The Apollo XI lunar landing mission launched from Kennedy Space Center, carrying astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Col. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr, USAF, and Lt Col. Michael Collins, USAF.  On 20 July, Armstrong and Aldrin flew the lunar module Eagle to the Sea of Tranquility, where Armstrong took the first step on the moon.  On 24 July, Apollo XI splashed down in the mid-Pacific.

  ... but there's definitely something very cool about a night launch captured on film!

The Shuttle program is winding down fast and will be gone in 2010.  I never quite got what the Shuttle brought to the space program; it rarely goes up more than 200 miles into space, and serves like a Mississippi barge ferrying parts up to the dubious  'international' space station. Over the years NASA has used it to train and showcase 'multi-cultural' astronauts from around the world on touchy-feely 'we're all in this together' type missions.  (And lets not forget the stupid chick who -- because she couldn't get over a semi-limp piece of wood-- donned a pair of old diapers and drove 900 miles to snuff out her romantic rival!) Apollo was a giant killer that brought tremendous pride to this country and drove the USSR to its knees. The Shuttle has been an embarassment of a program fraught with poor engineering, low bids and top-level snivelling and cover-ups since its inception, and in the end it will won't have a single lousy moonrock to show for its efforts.

Nowadays it'd be impossible to send a man to the moon. I read once that the blueprints for the Saturn rockets had been lost and with no large rocket basis from which to build on, it would take years to come up with an engine powerful enough to get to the moon and back - let alone Mars! And the rockets needed today would have to be HUGE! You know that in today's politically correct world, they'd have to have a  representative from every minority and special interest group out there riding in the thing.  The dinky little LEM that Armstrong and Aldrin landed on that historic day in 1969 would have to be the size of a freaking super-freighter to make sure everyone back home in feel-good America felt 'good' about the mission. Sorry, the space program lost me when they quit replacing the old guys like Sheppard, Glen, Cooper and even good old Gus --  the days of the ex-fighter pilot, male and heterosexual astronaut are long gone.

 Apollo 17 night launch Dec. 17, 1972.