Gamblers
As a kid, I never realized how fraught with peril space travel was until this date in 1967 when three NASA astronauts were killed in a capsule fire.
The irony was, their Apollo 1 spaceship was on the ground and they were merely rehearsing for their scheduled flight the next month.
“Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were the first American astronauts to die in service. I was 11 when the tragedy occurred. I’d been fascinated by NASA and America’s goal of landing on the Moon before the end of that decade. I remain a space geek to this day.
(L-R) Grissom, White, Chaffee.
BTW, if you’re space geeky in any way, here’s a very cool site. Hosted by Amy Shira Teitel, The Vintage Space is a lively, informative, and entertaining bunch of videos in which the Canadian historian and science writer riffs on Moon missions, orbital sojourns, interplanetary explorations, and scads of other science-y things. She presents her takes in way that reminds me of myself the first time I ever saw a Saturn V rocket at the Kennedy Space Center’s big hall. My jaw dropped and I wanted to babble on and on about it like…, well, like an 11-year-old kid. I was 56 at the time.
Anyway, NASA’s sending another crew toward the Moon in a few days. The Artemis II mission is due to launch on or some time after February 6th from Cape Canaveral. The trip’ll last 10 days and the route will take it around the Moon and back. The first Black man, the first woman, and the first non-American to travel to the Moon will be among the crew of four. They’re going to travel farther away from the Earth than any humans ever have.
The Artemis II Crew: (L-R) Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, Jeremy Hansen.
Space travel remains a risky business. In fact, some observers are worried about this mission because a previous Artemis test flight revealed some problems with the capsule’s re-entry heat shield. NASA says the issue has been addressed but, honestly, we won’t know until we know.
That’s the thing about crewed spaceflights. There have been 411 of them since Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth a single time aboard the Soviet Union’s Vostok 1 capsule in April, 1961. That may sound like a good number of tries, enough to work out any conceivable kinks in technology and planning, but it’s the equivalent of the number of times airplanes were flown before the year 1910. And you know how perilous air travel was for the first half century (at least) of its existence. In fact, poor old Yuri Gagarin died, not in space, but in a routine training flight aboard a MiG-15 fighter jet that crashed in 1968. At the time, the MiG-15 was one of the most technologically advanced aircraft in the world.
As for lunar missions, there have been a scant total of eight of them with humans aboard since Apollo 8 first circled the Moon in December 1968. One Apollo mission, 13 for you triskaidekaphobics, had to swing around the Moon and limp back home because an oxygen tank exploded. The crew made it back to Earth by the skin of their teeth. Traveling to the Moon is still a crapshoot.
Then again, to put things in perspective, 40,000-plus Americans die every year in car crashes even though everybody owns a car, hundreds of millions of them have been manufactured, and we drive (literally) trillions of miles a year.
Nevertheless, I still think my daily drive to Hopscotch Coffee is safer than the trip the Artemis II crew will take.
A Lucky Pup
Let’s get back down to Earth for a minute. As you know, temps in Indiana dropped well below zero last night. Hell, I was shivering even in my comfy home with the heat turned up to 72º and with two blankets covering me in bed.
I noticed a heartwarming post on social media this AM. It seems a lost pooch made scratching noises at the back door of some guy who lives in Indianapolis. The guy let the mutt in and posted his picture. Here he is:
How lucky is this doggo? I mean, he was probably hours — or even minutes — away from dying of hypothermia. Now he’s in a warm home for the nonce. The Indy guy is now sifting through pleas from people hoping to adopt the dog.