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John Glenn has died

dispatch.com

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Re: John Glenn has died

#71

Post by jeo1234 »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #64
ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

This deserves a black bar (IMO) John Glenn was very influential on me as a student. He gave a talk at my high school about how learning as much as you could prepared you for the unexpected. He certainly put that to the test (as all of the astronauts then and now) do. The stakes are high, the resources limited, and time for a solution is finite. God speed John Glenn.

>This deserves a black bar (IMO) Why would YCombinator give him a black bar? Did he bootstrap a lean startup using microservices in Haskel and basic income while building relationships with angel investors for the next round and ensuring a long runway for a pivot into another market? No? Then Hacker News doesn't care. This is Investor News. Angel News. Money News. Not Hacker News. Not "give a crap about science". Eve…

I recommend you review the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "Anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on topic. John Glenn clearly fits into the group.

Re: John Glenn has died

#72

Post by oxide »

I lived in the Imperial Valley for a few years, from the way they talk about John Glenn I thought he was born and raised there.

Nope, he's from Ohio. He passed over the valley (El Centro, specifically, IIRC) when he re-entered the atmosphere, it was just a claim to fame to attract tourists to the middle of nowhere.

Re: John Glenn has died

#73

Post by JustSomeNobody »

jason_slack wrote: post #7

RIP. I have to wonder, these first missions, did the astronauts have any assurance they would make it back to earth? What was it like to say goodbye to family, not knowing if you would return or not. Am I way off here? Was this mission uncertain or did NASA have reasonable assurances?

I would be very surprised if _any_ astronaut feels assured they will come home. I'm sure they don't talk about it much, but there's got to be that little voice telling them there's a chance...

And yet, they still go.

Re: John Glenn has died

#74

Post by [deleted] »

noonespecial wrote: post #67
rmason wrote: post #14

John Glenn was one of my boyhood heroes. I remember as a young boy listening to reports of him taking off and making those three orbits of the earth. My uncle gave me a crystal radio shaped like Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule that ignited a fierce passion into radio that led to a ham radio license and a lifelong interest in science. It was a time in America when the future seemed endless, anything was possible. A lot h…

>It was a time in America when the future seemed endless, anything was possible. Somewhere between "We choose to go to the moon" and "if you see something, say something" we traded all of our hope and optimism for fear and suspicion. I'm just hoping for hope again.

[deleted]

Re: John Glenn has died

#76

Post by tossaway1 »

butter_NUT wrote: post #65
kumarski wrote: post #54

I grew up next to mission control and many of my neighbors and friends' parents were involved in Mission Control and/or Astronauts or both. Oddly, in the middle of nowhere Texas - Clear Lake. This gave me some interesting run-ins with cosmonauts, astronauts, physicists etc... I was lucky enough to meet John Glenn on 3 separate occasions. The first time, I discussed Plutonium 238 and my worries for satellite power giv…

Man, in what world is Clear Lake TX out in the middle of nowhere??

Did you create an account just to make this comment???

Re: John Glenn has died

#77

Post by thechao »

butter_NUT wrote: post #65
kumarski wrote: post #54

I grew up next to mission control and many of my neighbors and friends' parents were involved in Mission Control and/or Astronauts or both. Oddly, in the middle of nowhere Texas - Clear Lake. This gave me some interesting run-ins with cosmonauts, astronauts, physicists etc... I was lucky enough to meet John Glenn on 3 separate occasions. The first time, I discussed Plutonium 238 and my worries for satellite power giv…

Man, in what world is Clear Lake TX out in the middle of nowhere??

In the '90s it was ... sort of out there. Especially getting all the way down NASA Rd1---it was at least 20 minutes combined getting down 45 and out to JSC. A lot of the astronauts lived in El Lago, Seabrook, etc., which definitely were way out there.

Re: John Glenn has died

#78

Post by 0wl3x »

photogrammetry wrote: post #44
bernardom wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other classic (and definitely an HN-appropriate book) is "Failure Is Not an Option," which gives an awesome look at the engineering and management challenges they faced from Mercury to Apollo. https://smile.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/...

The title, it should be disclaimed, is not what the astronauts or flight controllers believed. It's a poor abbreviation of the following: "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz#.22Failure_is_not_a...

Thanks for that link to Gene Kranz's wiki. The guy was a real hero, and an understated one at that.

Re: John Glenn has died

#80

Post by slg »

ffk wrote: post #75

[Removing, comment was about someone else, sorry]

Do you maybe have him confused with someone else? John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth, but he wasn't on any of the Apollo missions.
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