Most of us know Neil Armstrong as the first man to step foot on the moon. Rightly so, but lost in all this is the fact that Armstrong was also a truly awesome pilot.During Armstrong and Dave Scott’s Gemini VIII mission, the spacecraft malfunctioned and set itself into a roll (starting around 19’00″ in the video above), with a rate approaching 60 RPM (1 revolution every second). At roll rates such as this the danger of humans blacking out becomes very real. Armstrong, as the Command Pilot, kept his cool and managed to stop the roll by activating the Reaction Control System, and then orienting the Gemini craft for a perfect emergency landing into the Pacific Ocean.When I say perfect, I mean perfect. The craft came …
Neil Armstrong dies at 82
“It’s a story that we hoped we’d never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth’s Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself — along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It’s still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What …
Curiosity Rover has landed!
It once was one small step… now it’s six big wheels. Here’s a look at one of them on the soil of Mars #MSL http://t.co/uzO99NZz — Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity)