International Space Museum Presents On Apollo Landings in SecondLife

Troy McLuhan presented today at Spaceport Alpha on Project Apollo done by NASA. In real life, Troy has a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has also attended the International Space University. There was no audo, but there was a pictorial presentation and some video later on in the presentation. To bring this all home, there is a mockup of the Apollo 11 lander and an Apollo rover right behind where the audience was sitting.

He first started off by making some short announcements:

• Next weekend, there will be a series of open house events at the planetarium as Chaac Amarula's students present the new planetarium shows they wrote for his Astronomy 102 course
• 'Cypress Rosewood' (SL name) will be performing a live music show here at 7pm on Dec. 6th, 2006. Cypress' music was used in the soundtrack for the Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky.

The talk that Troy did was very informative. A few points which Troy made:

• The Apollo Moon Landings were ultimately a product of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union
• The Soviets launched the first satellite (Sputnik in 1957) and put the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961). The US was constantly playing catch-up.
• There was also a botched operation by the US in Cuba's Bay of Pigs, so president Kennedy was looking for ideas to improve morale. On May 25, 1961, he went before a special joint session of Congress and announced "the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

Troy then went through and explained the separate modules of the Apollo Project. Of course, there was some humor involved - such as wondering how many cornflakes could fit into the Saturn V rocket nozzle, which was amusing to say the least.

I could write a lot more about it, but being there and seeing 3d models of what Troy was talking about during a presentation was really very fun and interesting. Within SecondLife, you can zoom your camera around with some practice and really have a good look at these things while the speaker continues talking. The models used were very detailed, and the builders are to be commended for making these models to scale. Very impressive; that sort of work in SecondLife is very detail oriented and can be very irritating at times (I know).

You can watch a movie of the original Apollo landing here.

Random datapoint: Armalcolite was named after the three Apollo 11 astronauts: ARMstrong, ALdrin, and COLlins.

Troy then repeated the goodbye of the last man on the moon, Eugene Cernan:

As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come - but we believe not too long into the future — I'd like to just [say] what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.

These words, spoken on December 14, 1972. And, as I covered in an earlier story, NASA plans to get back to the moon by 2020.

All in all - great presentation, and there was a bit of odd nostalgia in seeing the images of the old Apollo missions mixed with the SecondLife models. SecondLife is a powerful medium for communicating such things, and it's good that it's being used in this fashion.

Check out the Internation Spaceflight Museum for future events, or, if you're in SecondLife already, join the open-enrollment group (within SecondLife) named "Spaceflight Museum Happenings. To donate, there is a tip jar near the landing point - and once they have 501c3 status, there will be a sponsors program.