Causing a stir in space

I checked my emails late last night and the hairs raised on the back of my neck when I saw a note from Sy Liebergot.

To anyone unfamiliar with the space race, the name will almost certainly mean nothing. To anyone interested in the Apollo missions, and most especially the explosion that crippled Apollo 13, Sy's name stands right up there with Jim Lovell, Gene Kranz and the crack NASA team that turned a near disaster into a triumph of ingenuity and fortitude.

Sy was EECOM at Mission Control for the Apollo 13 mission monitoring the electrical, environmental and communications system for the spacecraft, and indeed was in the trenches as a Flight Controller from Apollo 8 right through to Apollo 15, as well as for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz link-up.

He has agreed to be interviewed for my Masters Dissertation and it will be fascinating the get the views and impressions of a man who saw NASA through its finest hours and was still at the heart of the agency as it sought to find a new purpose and new goals once the Stars and Stripes were flying on the lunar surface.

Sy's put together a lively and comprehensive website, and I'm now adding his book to the disso bibliography.

I went to bed smiling last night, and I'm still grinning this morning.

Bedstead crashes - and history might have been different

Forty years ago today, just a few miles south east of Houston at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, Neil Armstrong fell out of bed.

Well, that's oversimplifying things probably too much. Armstrong was testing the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle when he lost control and had to eject out. he landed by parachute suffering only minor injuries - but the LLRV was a $1.5 million wrote-off.

This strange flying bedstead contraption - seen flying here - was just about the only way that NASA could reasonably accurately simulate the control needed to approach the moon's surface in 1/6th earth gravity.

It's said that Armstrong was coolness personified, hanging on and trying to regain control for as long as possible before baling, showing the kind of split-second hard-nosed decision making that earned him the prime shot for being the first man on the moon.

Four decades ago today, Armstrong came within seconds of death. Had that happened, we'd never have heard that famous line: "This is one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind."

The irony is that Armstrong's back-up was Jim Lovell - the ill-fated commander of Apollo 13....who never actually got to walk on the moon at all.