Forums: Apollo 15, Outward Journey

MIAMI — NASA is questioning whether Apollo 13 commander James Lovell has the right to sell a 70-page checklist from the flight that includes his handwritten calculations that were crucial in guiding the damaged spacecraft back to Earth. The document was sold by Heritage Auctions in November for more than $388,000, some 15 times its initial list price. The checklist gained great fame as part of a key dramatic scene in the 1995 film "Apollo 13" in which actor Tom Hanks plays Lovell making the calculations. After the sale, NASA contacted Heritage

Explanation: If you drop a hammer and a feather together, which reaches the ground first? On the Earth, it's the hammer, but is the reason only because of air resistance? Scientists even before Galileo have pondered and tested this simple experiment and felt that without air resistance, all objects would fall the same way. Galileo tested this principle himself and noted that two heavy balls of different masses reached the ground simultaneously, although many historians are skeptical that he did this experiment from Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa as folklore suggests. A good place free of air resistance to test...

Apollo Image Atlas AS15-P-9625 Image Collection: Panoramic Mission: 15 Magazine: P Revolution: 38 Latitude / Longitude: 19° S / 117.5° E Lens Focal Length: 24 inch Camera Look: Forward Camera Altitude: 117 km Sun Elevation: 27° Stereo Pair: AS15-P-9630 Film Type: 3414 Film Width: 5 inch Image Width: 45.24 inch Image Height: 4.5 inch Film Color: black & white Index Map: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/apolloindex/apollo15/as15indexmap01/ Feature(s): DELPORTE, SOUTHWEST OF IZSAK, NORTH OF

A long-lost, highly valuable Moon rock brought back from the Apollo 17 mission has turned up in the files of Bill Clinton. The rock was one of 50 presented to each state, and was given to Arkansas while the ex-president was governor. The rock, worth millions of dollars, had been missing since at least 1980 until an archivist found it in old gubernatorial papers. Bobby Roberts, director of the Central Arkansas Library System, told Reuters the archivist opened a box previously archived as "Arkansas flag plaque." The rock and a state flag were originally affixed to the plaque, but the...

A team of astronomers are planning an epic quest to track down the 42-year-old lunar module that's adrift in the solar system. It's not often I read about a new project that leaves me undecided whether it's totally crazy or a stroke of genius. I was recently sent a press release of such a project and, having read it over a few times, I think I'm leaning toward the latter. The idea is the brain child of British amateur astronomer Nick Howes who not only has a passion for hunting for asteroids, but also for the Space Race -- in...

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites. Images show the twists and turns of the paths made when the astronauts explored the lunar surface. This interactive shows two LRO images of the Apollo 17 landing site. Click and drag on the white slider bar to wipe from one to the other. The left image was released today; the right image is a zoom-in on an LRO image released in 2009. LRO was moved into a lower orbit to capture the new image. The images do...

Wounded by the CalPERS bribery scandal and other problems, a New Jersey pharmaceutical-benefits company is being sold. Medco Health Solutions Inc., one of the giants of the drug-benefit industry, on Thursday agreed to a $29.1 billion takeover by rival Express Scripts Inc. Such a deal would have been unthinkable a few months ago, when Medco was flying high. But the New Jersey company ran into a series of problems that began with its entanglement in the CalPERS bribery case. "This year has been a head-spinner for this (Medco) management team, starting out with the CalPERS issues," said investment analyst Arthur...

Several days ago, Steven Jones of Dow Jones Newswires – a News Corporation company – broke what may be the story of the Millennium, literally. According to 69 recent SEC filings that have now “vanished”, a Texan by the name of Johnny Earl Satterwhite claims to hold over $8 trillion in public companies like Microsoft, Exxon Mobil and City National Bank, among others. Jones also obtained documents that show Satterwhite falsely warranting his ownership of almost one trillion shares in Microsoft. This is 100% impossible, as Jones brilliantly notes... that's more than the 8.4 billion shares Microsoft has issued in...