AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Pog nasa meaning12/10/2023 ![]() "The flag on the Moon is a great illustration of the fact that in space, nothing is simple," said flag researcher and historian, and University of California Santa Barbara librarian, Annie Platoff in a recent statement. In the end, it weighed less than 10 pounds (4.3 kg). He built the whole thing out of 1-inch (2.54 cm) anodized aluminum tubing, which cost around $75 in 1969. Of course, Kinzler's design had to take into account that in their bulky, awkward spacesuits, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin couldn't reach higher than 66 inches (170 cm) or bend over to reach lower than 28 inches (71 cm). Then they would slide the top section onto the bottom section, salute, and take photographs. The idea was that one astronaut would use a rock-sampling hammer to drive the lower section of the pole into the lunar surface while the other folded out the crossbar on the top section and attached the flag. The lower corner of the flag would also connect to the flagpole.Īnd to make the whole thing fit aboard the lunar module, the pole broke down into two pieces. He hemmed the top edge of the flag into a sleeve that would slide over the crossbar, exactly the way a curtain slides onto a curtain rod. To make sure to the flag was properly photogenic and not disappointingly droopy, Kinzler decided to hang its top edge from a horizontal crossbar, which folded out from the top of the flagpole and locked into place. By the time NASA decided that it wanted Armstrong and Aldrin to plant an American flag on the Moon, NASA engineer Jack Kinzler had just three months to design and build a flagpole that would solve those problems. Second, the flag had to look good on camera with no wind to make it wave, engineers worried that the flag would just droop unimpressively. First, Apollo 11 (like every other spacecraft in human history) had very little room to spare, and very little available mass to allocate to frivolous things like flagpoles, so the flagpole had to be light and compact. ![]() The flagpole in those iconic pictures is a clever piece of last-minute engineering, designed to solve two important lunar flag-display problems.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |