[MWEA] "Countdown" scenes at Lunar Gemini spread

[Mike Flugennock]

From the recently nicely-spiffed-up and augmented with new imagery Gemini
Lunar Surface Rescue Spacecraft pages at Mark Wade's, at:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemcraft.htm

....have a look at this scene from "Countdown" at:
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/g/gemlanv2.jpg
Check out this shot of James Caan piloting the Lunar Gemini down to the
surface. Why does this cockpit look _way_ too large? Why does it look like
a cross between the old Soviet TKS cockpit and those fake-ass Gemini
cockpits in "I Dream Of Jeannie" that you see Nelson and Healy in when
Jeannie decides to blink herself into Nelson's lap?

--
"All over, people changing their roles,
along with their overcoats;
if Adolf Hitler flew in today,
they'd send a limousine anyway!" --the clash.
__________________________________________________ _________________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
Mike Flugennock's Mikey'zine, dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

[Alan Erskine]

"Mike Flugennock" > wrote in message
...
>
> From the recently nicely-spiffed-up and augmented with new imagery Gemini
> Lunar Surface Rescue Spacecraft pages at Mark Wade's, at:
> http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemcraft.htm
>
> ...have a look at this scene from "Countdown" at:
> http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/g/gemlanv2.jpg
> Check out this shot of James Caan piloting the Lunar Gemini down to the
> surface. Why does this cockpit look _way_ too large? Why does it look like
> a cross between the old Soviet TKS cockpit and those fake-ass Gemini
> cockpits in "I Dream Of Jeannie" that you see Nelson and Healy in when
> Jeannie decides to blink herself into Nelson's lap?

Landing was one of the problems with Lunar Gemini - landing while laying on
one's back would have been 'problematic' to say the least.

--
Alan Erskine
alanerskine(at)optusnet.com.au
John Howard doesn't speak for this
Australian in the Amrosi death sentence -
Jail, not death.

[OM]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 00:02:12 -0400, (Our Pal,
Mike Flugennock) wrote:

>Check out this shot of James Caan piloting the Lunar Gemini down to the
>surface. Why does this cockpit look _way_ too large? Why does it look like
>a cross between the old Soviet TKS cockpit and those fake-ass Gemini
>cockpits in "I Dream Of Jeannie" that you see Nelson and Healy in when
>Jeannie decides to blink herself into Nelson's lap?

....Covered in a previous thread. The answer's pretty simple: in those
days, commercial film cameras were *huge*. Whether it was 16mm or 35mm
or 70mm, the cameras were too big to fit into a confined space like a
Gemini capsule. Hell, for that matter, they were so big that the
reason the corridors on Star Trek TOS were so damn wide was to
accommodate the camera truck.

....Nowadays, it's a different story. Cinema-quality digital tape cams
aren't much bigger than a lunchbox, and can easily fit in cramped
spaces as small as a Mercury capsule. Were "Countdown" done today, we
wouldn't see that "Tardis effect".


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

[Mike Flugennock]

In article >,
(Harald Kucharek) wrote:

> One of the movie snapshot images says:
> "The first man on the moon sets up from his lunar Gemini on the moon -
> scene from the film 'Countdown'."
> It's a long time ago I saw that movie, but didn't he find the wreck of
> a Russian spacecraft with some dead astronauts around it?

You're right, but having killed themselves in the attempt, I'd suspect
that they wouldn't count. I think there was a stipulation about getting
there and home safely without winding up plastered into the regolith.

--
"All over, people changing their roles,
along with their overcoats;
if Adolf Hitler flew in today,
they'd send a limousine anyway!" --the clash.
__________________________________________________ _________________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
Mike Flugennock's Mikey'zine, dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

[Doug...]

In article >,
says...
> In article >,
> (Harald Kucharek) wrote:
>
> > One of the movie snapshot images says:
> > "The first man on the moon sets up from his lunar Gemini on the moon -
> > scene from the film 'Countdown'."
> > It's a long time ago I saw that movie, but didn't he find the wreck of
> > a Russian spacecraft with some dead astronauts around it?
>
> You're right, but having killed themselves in the attempt, I'd suspect
> that they wouldn't count. I think there was a stipulation about getting
> there and home safely without winding up plastered into the regolith.

Yeah -- but there isn't any guarantee, at the end of the film (or the
book on which it's based, for that matter) that the Pilgrim astronaut
would ever get back to earth safely. They only established that he would
likely reach his shelter and make it for a month or so, until another
shelter was launched.

One of the real drawbacks of the Lunar Surface Rendezvous plan was that
your shelter could only be launched with enough consumables to last about
a month or so. You needed to keep launching shelters to keep your
intrepid lunar explorer alive for yet another month. One launch or
landing failure (or failures in any of the shelter systems) would doom
your crewman.

Now, here's a question. The LM was really designed to be operated by two
people. Would it be safe to land a LM with only one crewman? If not,
how would you return your intrepid LSR explorer? Sit him on the engine
cover and bring him back instead of any moon rocks? And while your moon
rock weight budget approximated the weight of an adult human male, it
didn't cover the weight of a third pressure suit -- and you would never
be able to jettison the pressure suit without killing someone.

You'd have to modify the LM ascent stage significantly to allow it to
perform an ascent with three men aboard, wouldn't you?

The only other obvious answer -- have the LMP from the Apollo
"rescue" flight take the Pilgrim astronaut's place as the long-term lunar
surface crewman -- means you're still leaving someone to the mercy of
continued shelter launches. Unless you could land a LOT of mass and set
up a working closed-loop ECS (at least as far as water is concerned),
start extracting oxygen from the rocks, and start growing food on-site,
you're not going to get away from the need for regular reservicing
missions.

I imagine this is one of the biggest reasons why the Pilgrim concept
never got off the ground. Besides, a Gemini landing (or, as in the book,
a Mercury landing) is still a pretty iffy proposition, IMHO.

--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for | Doug Van Dorn
thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup |

[Dale]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 22:11:23 -0400, (Mike Flugennock) wrote:

>> Are you suggesting that Jeannie was some kind of hoax?
>
>Dude, I'm just saying that even if Jeannie _were_ able to squeeze herself
>into Nelson's lap in there, there wouldn't be enough room for him to
>wiggle out of his suit and have any kind of fun. It'd be a forced
>threesome, as PLT Healy would've had to skootch out of his seat and give
>his CDR someplace to cram his suit. Even then, you'd have to worry about
>Jeannie's elegant backside bumping the wrong stick.

But Jeannie had the power to make herself and others really small. A fact
that escapes most of the IDOJ hoax/conspiracy theorists...

>Maybe in an MOL cabin, but I can't find any entries at MWEA that'd suggest
>Nelson and Healy being _anywhere_ in the rotation for that. Still, the
>fact that they're seen flying missions so many times throughout IDOJ
>suggests that they may have had a fair amount of "pull" in Deke's office.

Deke depended pretty heavily on Dr. Bellow's recommendations, as
well as those of Deputy Administrator Sheldon.

>Besides, I'm still trying to figure how Aldrin got his pipe aboard:
>http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/iams/images/pao/GT12/10074594.htm
>... and, never mind flying to the Moon on an HP calculator, this boy's
>working up his Agena docking numbers on a freekin' _slide_rule_.

I don't even want to think about where he may have hidden his pipe :)

Dale

[Chris Jones]

(Harald Kucharek) writes:

[...]

> IIRC, the russians didn't die on impact, but short after crash-landing.
> I doubt if something similar would have happend to Neil and Buzz, that
> now Pete and Al would be named as the first men on the moon. I'm
> sure, it would be Neil and Buzz, maybe to an even higher degree as it is now.

Probably, though it wouldn't have fulfilled the final clause ("and
returning him safely to earth") of Kennedy's challenge. However, when a
mountaineer summits and dies on descent, it is recognized, by people who
keep track of these things, as a summit. Not everyone agrees, but
they're a minority.

[Dennis L. Rodgick]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 00:02:12 -0400, (Mike
Flugennock) wrote:

>
>From the recently nicely-spiffed-up and augmented with new imagery Gemini
>Lunar Surface Rescue Spacecraft pages at Mark Wade's, at:
>http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemcraft.htm
>
>...have a look at this scene from "Countdown" at:
>http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/g/gemlanv2.jpg
>Check out this shot of James Caan piloting the Lunar Gemini down to the
>surface. Why does this cockpit look _way_ too large? Why does it look like
>a cross between the old Soviet TKS cockpit and those fake-ass Gemini
>cockpits in "I Dream Of Jeannie" that you see Nelson and Healy in when
>Jeannie decides to blink herself into Nelson's lap?
There's a shot in the Yahoo spacemodeling newsgroup of a guy that
built a model of the spacecraft that was used in the movie.
Very cool......
>
>--
>"All over, people changing their roles,
> along with their overcoats;
> if Adolf Hitler flew in today,
> they'd send a limousine anyway!" --the clash.
>__________________________________________________ _________________
>Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
>Mike Flugennock's Mikey'zine, dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org