Collins recently wrote a love letter to Columbia -- here's an excerpt:
"On the Big Day, with seven-and-a-half million pounds of thrust churning away beneath us, I feared for your fragility. But strong you were; you didn’t even pop a circuit breaker. You seemed to like leaving Earth better than sitting on the launch pad and were even smoother in space (well, except for Fuel Cell #3, but I did not consider it a failure, but simply a free spirit not to be regimented like #1 and #2)."
The entire letter can be found here:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...columbia-apollo-11-astronaut-michael-collins/
Yes, that graffiti is mentioned in the Nat Geo piece as well:
"While aboard the U.S.S. Hornet following Columbia's splashdown on July 24, 1969, astronaut Michael Collins crawled back into the command module and wrote this inscription on one of the equipment bay panels."
Which makes one wonder: exactly when could he have done that, considering the quarantine protocol that was in effect?
There was a poly-tunnel connecting the Mobile Quarantine Facitily to the CSM so that the engineer (John Hirasaki) in residence in quarantine could decontaminate and make the CSM safe from excess propellants etc...
There was a poly-tunnel connecting the Mobile Quarantine Facitily to the CSM so that the engineer (John Hirasaki) in residence in quarantine could decontaminate and make the CSM safe from excess propellants etc...
@TIMElyBehaviour
During manned spaceflight, some astronomy research has been done, ranging from science instruments on the X-15 rocket plane to putting a f 1.0 Schmidt telescope on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission
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