50 years ago today, July 20, 1966, Gemini 10 was in day two of it's three day mission. The mission practiced rendezvous and spacewalking. It's crew was John Young commander and Michael Collins pilot. Three years later to the day, July 20, 1969, Collins was circling the Moon in Apollo 11, while Armstrong and Aldrin landed and walked on the Moon. Finally, on July 20, 1976 the Viking 1 lander soft landed on Mars and started looking for life. The results that came back have provoked dissension within the scientific community over the ensuing 40 years whether the signals from the experiments were caused by biological or chemical processes. Here is a flown Gemini 10 Fliteline medallion from my collection. Flitelines are somewhere between the size of a quarter and a half dollar. Their designs are metallic representations of the mission patch. In this case the patch shows the Gemini spacecraft rendezvousing with the Agena spacecraft.
@Skyman Thanks for posting this, Sy. Just out of curiosity, was this specimen owned by either Young or Collins or was it part of others included in the "payload". Chris
It's strange to think the height of the space age in many ways was half a century ago. This isn't to demean more recent accomplishments and some of these have been far more imporetant than those of the '60's which made later achievments possible. I hope something is done numismatically for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
Somewhere around here, I have an old National Geographic explaining how we would get a manned mission to Mars by 2010. Are we even able to launch astronauts now that the shuttles have been retired?
Sure. Our astronauts have to hire a Putin Taxi (a.k.a. Soyuz). Other than that, nope. There's supposed to be this new ship, "Orion" that looks like an Apollo spacecraft. Hasn't flown yet.
Orion was supposed to be built at the NASA plant in New Orleans. Might be wrong, but I think it was shelved.
Think it's funny? Maybe you don't know the half of it: To pilot the Soyuz, they use a STICK to push the buttons because the cosmonauts sit so far back from the instrument panel!
The Soyuz is like an old Ford pickup. It may not be glamorous, but it gets the job done. No one has lost their lives on it since it was still in it's early teething period in the late 1960's early 1970's. The reason that the cosmonauts use a stick to push the instrument panel is the way that they are seated in the spacecraft. In US spacecraft, astronauts are launched seated on their backs with their legs above their heads. In Soviet/Russian spacecraft astronauts at launch are seated upright with their knees tucked up close to their chests. The really sad part about the US manned space effort, is that we knew in 2003 that the shuttle was too risky, courtesy of the Columbia disaster (the SECOND shuttle disaster). Here we are THIRTEEN years later, and we STILL can't launch people into space. In the 1960's in EIGHT years, we went from launching one person on a suborbital trip that went about 300 miles downrange in ~ 15 minutes, to sending three humans to the Moon, landing two of them on the Moon, and returning them safely, with missions lasting up to 14 days. Orion was planned as your generic government replacement capsule. It was originally designed to be used with the Constellation system to take people back to the Moon. The Obama administration decided to go to Mars instead (because the MAJOR costs associated with this would occur long after Obama was out of office), so they canceled the Constellation system, but Congress decided that the Orion capsule would still be built. The one good thing the Obama administration did with regards to US manned space travel, was to push for commmercialization of low earth orbit (LEO) launch capabilities. Various companies bid on producing a LEO spacecraft, and over the intervening years that has winnowed down to two; Boeing, with the CST-100; and SpaceX, with the Dragon 2. The CST-100 will get to orbit on an Atlas V rocket (which uses Russian rockets in it's first stage). The Dragon 2 will get to orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket. Both spacecraft are designed to be reusable, last I heard on the order of 10 times per space capsule. It is both amusing and sad, and IMO quite telling, that Boeing, which was given roughly TWICE as much money as SpaceX, is actually not as close as SpaceX in launching it's manned vehicle. Theoretically sometime in 2017 the Dragon 2 will launch, with the CST-100 launching roughly a year later.
