#apollo space program

Sometimes you read about a person and then immediately have make a post about it. This is one of those times.

Judith Love Cohen (August 16, 1933 – July 25, 2016) was an American aerospace engineer and author who worked on the Apollo Space Program at the height of her engineering career. In particular she worked on the Abort-Guidance System that saved the lives of the astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission. After retiring as an engineer, she started a publishing company called Cascade Pass in order to publish educational books encouraging children and girls specifically into STEM fields of work. Many of these books she authored herself.

Now I would not normally mention my subject’s personal life at all, because that’s not what this series is about. In this case I will make an exception because there’s a particularly good anecdote as follows.

On the day of the birth of her fourth child, she went to the office in the morning (for the Apollo Space Program) to do a little more work. When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And . . . oh, yes, the baby was born, too.

The baby that was born that day? Jack Black… yes that Jack Black. One can only assume much of his excellence comes from his brilliant mother.

Gus

On July 21, it will be FIFTY years since mankind stepped foot on the Moon.

The road to the moon was littered with failures – we didn’t even manage to smash a probe onto the moon until 1962. We made it through the Gemini program, only to learn that some things couldn’t be rushed or corners cut when the Apollo 1 crew – Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee – burned to death in an oxygen fire in a test module, because the pressurized doors opened the wrong way. This led to a pause – there was no Apollo 2 or 3, and 4-5-6 were all unmanned.

Apollo 11 pulled it all together. With less computer capability than an Apple watch, the lunar lander settled on the moon,  Armstrong sent out the famous words, “The Eagle has landed,” followed shortly by Armstrong’s historic “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Fifty years later, we sit back on our Tempur-pedic cushions with our cell phones, tablets, LED lights, and flat-screen TVs, watching through scratch-proof lenses or LASIK-fixed eyes (all outgrowths of the space program),  and marvel at a time when space exploration was our future...

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