Did You Know? Volume II

Did you know that 22 chimpanzees were recently retired from experimentation at NASA funded laboratories? Amazingly, 7 of the chimps were among the first 65 babies taken from Africa in the late 1950’s to prepare for manned spaceflight. Only two of the original chimps, Enos and Ham, ever made it into space.

The red white and blue. The Apollo 12 backup crew made a risqué home movie that poked fun at the prime crew before they left for the moon. The movie is rumored to have a stripper dancing in an Apollo command module, and surviving copies are scarce to say the least.

Thank goodness for zero g. The massive Canadarm, on board the Space Shuttle, can easily maneuver up to twenty tons of hardware in space. Yet, on Earth it can’t even support its own weight.

SUV? I think not. Can you believe that during the 2.5 billion trip to Jupiter, the Galileo spacecraft used only 67 gallons of fuel for flight path corrections and spacecraft alignments!

Here’s a stumper. Many trivia buffs will claim that since Gordon Cooper was the last man to fly a Mercury capsule, he was the last man to go into space alone. Well, that is wrong. During Apollo 17, while Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were walking on the moon, Ron Evans was circling above in the Command Module alone. Since Apollo 17 was the last Apollo flight, and the last to perform this maneuver, this makes Evans the last man to be alone in space (Although, during an EVA one could argue that this is when an astronaut is really all by himself).

Lucky Guy! Only one astronaut has flown aboard all 5 Space Shuttles. Story Musgrave flew on Atlantis, Endeavor, Discovery, Columbia, and Challenger before it was lost in 1986.

Thanks for letting us know! Unbeknownst to NASA during the Cold War, the Soviet Union actually had emergency landing zones in the prairies of North Dakota, and Oklahoma for their Soyuz spacecraft. In particular, the crew of Soyuz 19 at one point in their mission were given coordinates to land in North America should a problem arise.

For Sale! In 1979, before the Space Shuttle even made its first flight into space, Boeing wanted to buy the entire fleet of reusable ships for private use. At one point, NASA was even interested in the deal since it would free them up for other projects. However, the deal never took place because NASA, Boeing, and the American public found out how expensive and time consuming the Shuttle actually was.

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