Conference 7.286::space

	I just saw the PBS special "Greatest Adventure" a few weeks
back. They showed the Apollo 11 liftoff, and then cut to a telephoto
shot of a Saturn IB in flight! I have seen the same error, or the
reverse of the S-IB changing into a S-V, in several TV shows, from "The
Six Million Dollar Man" on up. It was disapointing to see such an error
in as nice a documentary as this was. 

Mysteriously changing launch vehicles really bother me in
a very deep way. For instance, I have a tough time watching
a movie (The Right Stuff) with a supposedly competent technical
advisor (Chuck Yeager) and seeing a single stage Redstone 
in flight do a stage seperation (obviously an Atlas). And this 
was one of the "highlighted" scenes in the movie.

It makes it a lot harder to respect Chuck Yeager, but then it
is pretty hard to respect a guy who "pushes" spark plugs when
he made his fame in jets. . .

Still, it can (and often is) worse. I have seen the shuttle
(on the pad) turn into a Titan (long telephoto shot) and
other such atrocities I would rather shut out of my mind.

	-SES

If you don't like those attrocities, I hope you haven't been watching
"Space". The darndest things show up in their test footage of the
Jupiter. I think the missile they finally showed as the successful
jupiter was a minuteman or MX (Close,huh?). Does anyone know for sure?

The most disgusting part (they've done this in two separate scenes) is
when they pan to the press box at launch time. In the midst of several
refractor scopes trained on the pad is the mirror end of a newtonian
reflector. You'd think somebody on the set would've looked through the
derned thing, just out of curiosity.

How many have noticed the shows that have color pictures of the LEM (Lunar
Excursion Module) taking off from the lunar surface, supposedly showing the
first manned lunar landing (for those who don't realize it, there were no color
cameras on the first lunar landing, and I don't think they had shots of of the
LEM taking off until the Lunar Rover was sent up).

By the way, does anybody know if the Lunar Rover's left around up there
are still capable of sending back pictures?  They ought to transmit one
image each lunar or earth year so we could get time-lapse images of the
lunar surface and Rovers collecting dust!

						-Dave

re .3
	I was out of town this past week, and has my wife tape it all 
for me. I will check this out when I get around to watching the tapes.

re .4
	Apollo 11 ( the first lunar landing) only had a black and white 
camera, which was set up so it could catch the first step on the moon. 
It may have been the next mission, Apollo 12 when they got the color 
camera. And you are correct, the only liftoff shots of the LM were from 
the last 3 flights, when they had the rover mounted cameras. The rovers 
were battery powered, and I doubt they would function for much longer 
than a short time after they were left on the moon. The experiment 
packages were powered by SNAP nuclear reactors, and may still be alive 
on the lunar surface, but I haven't heard anything about this for quite 
some time. They could also tell something about the dust collection on 
the moon from the corner cubes left behind on some of the missions. 
These were designed to reflect telescopic laser light sources back to 
the earth, enabling the distance from the earth to the moon to be 
measured within a few inches. As dust collects on these, the light 
reflected would be reduced.

And yet another set of mistakes in "Space". There are some dialogue errors
in the last episode, such as the capsule communicator preparing the crew
for trans-lunar injection while the photos from the capsule are of the
rapidly approaching moon. The best is the footage of the LM descending.
Gonna be a rough landing. The footage is actually an ascent and the descent
stage is already missing.

Lastly on Space I noticed Ms. Pope driving into Johnson Space Center to get helplobbying for Apollo 18 launch funds and it was lying on the ground in the 
background.