Minutes of a Monday #11

Brain Food > Good ideas get shot down

“Even when he was invited to meetings, people would tend to walk out of the room. They wouldn’t listen or say something like ‘it’s crazy to try and do something as dangerous as that around the moon.’ Robert went on to say ‘I received two letters from John. The first one was fairly mild, saying he hoped we were still considering lunar orbit rendezvous and I think I wrote back and said ‘oh yes’. But the second one was a pretty stiff letter:

“Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness do we want to go to the moon or not? Why is Nova, with its ponderous size, simply just accepted?”

He realised it was not protocol to jump over, I don’t know how many echelons to write me the letter, but he went on to say it was just stupid for everybody to be considering these great big giant things like Nova (gigantic rocket as option 1), when by a much simpler process, namely Lunar orbit rendezvous, you could much more easily, and much more cheaply and much more quickly go to the moon.

At first I was getting sick of this guy, I thought he was a pest, but you know, I think maybe he’s right.’

Robert Seamans, senior Nasa administrator on the Lunar Landing programme, speaking about engineer John Houbolt’s persistent claims for initially ridiculed third option for getting a space craft to the moon for the first time – namely the Lunar orbit rendezvous.

Houbolt’s persistence paid off as this option became the method by which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in June 1969 aboard Apollo 11.

Excerpt taken from Episode 1 of 13 Minutes to the Moon, a podcast available on BBC Sounds.

Soul Food

"Action expresses priorities" Gandhi

Rare Air

“If you want to create silence, you have to actually put a noise into it, you have to describe silence…nothing is nothing, so you have to actually cheat and go and find a poetic way of describing silence.” Hans Zimmer

Appendix

“Whether you’re thumbing through Instagram or watching YouTube videos, to always be conscious of why you’re watching it and to watch for the right reasons.”

LOL

Martin Brundle was a pretty quick F1 driver in his hey day, but even he couldn’t stop Brad Pitt in his tracks.

AOB

Have a great week – Niall