Talk:When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions

Broadcasts in the UK
In the UK the series was called NASA's Greatest Missions: When We Left Earth. Can somebody please make not of this on the main page. I have already made searches for 'NASA's Greatest Missions: When We Left Earth' or NASA's Greatest Missions redierct here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Remdabest (talk • contribs) 15:26, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Kranz on Grissom
Gene Kranz is in the first episode talking about seeing the rescue of Gus Grissom - the helicopters and Gus in the water and saying "Get Gus!" There was no live TV coverage of the rescue of Grissom. We were watching TV and they showed supposed video of the capsule being recovered. Soon we found out that the spacecraft sank. My father (and many others) called the TV station to complain. Afterwards, they were always careful to state when something was simulated or whatever. But there was no live TV of Grissom's recovery, the footage you see is film, probably 16mm. Bubba73 (talk), 16:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah. That was actually a pretty big scare for NASA ... Gus came close to drowning - on the second US human spaceflight. Apparently, according to From the Earth to the Moon, a proposed (but rejected) redesign of the hatch design used on American spacecraft could have increased the potential for the Apollo 1 astronauts to have survived. Not sure whether that's true (just about everything in From the Earth to the Moon is)... --J. Atkins (talk - contribs) 19:57, 10 June 2008 (UTC)


 * In early design of the Apollo spacecraft, the hatch was made to be opened using exploding bolts in case of an emergency. But since the exploding bolts fired accidently during Gus Grissom flight, allowing water to fill the spacecraft and sinking it, they removed it from design in order to avoid such occurence again. An explosive hatch on Apollo 1 spacecraft would have allowed a chance for the astonauts to get out before suffocating. And since the hatch was designed to open in the inside of the spacecraft, the increasing pressure building up in the spacecraft because of the fire would have made impossible to pull open the hatch, as pressure was keeping it closed. And still, they didn't have enought time to even operate the "opening procedure" of the hatch, a process lasting about 20 seconds to get it open. After the accident, they put back the "exploding hatch" on every other Apollo manned flight. The irony is what nearly killed Gus Grissom could possibly have saved the life of these three astronauts.--Jerem © 2002-2006 (talk) 10:23, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

friends and rivals
Did anyone catch the discussion on the "Friends and Rivals" episode. I thought I heard the narrator say something akin to: "If an astronaut's space suit would rib, his blood would boil"  Which is completely contradictory to the answer give by NASA back in 1997. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jdhebner (talk • contribs) 02:20, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm... the "blood boils"/"body explodes"/"freeze","lose consciousness" answers are the commonly known ones, but NASA are well, NASA, so their explanation must be correct. The common answers are probably just misconceptions. As the link you posted says, they had a suit testing incident in 1965, and the guy was fine. --J. Atkins (talk - contribs) 12:59, 15 June 2008 (UTC)


 * "Blood boils", as much as it sound strange, could be considered a correct way to picture what would actually happen. What exactly wouls happen, is that lower pressure would make some gazes to get out from the blood, as the blood looses it's capacity to dissolve gazes when pressure gets lower. It's like when you open a bottle of Pepsi (or Coke), the dissolved gazes start to come out. You compare this process to "boiling", as both see the process of gas escaping a liquid... It's the same problem scuba divers encounters when they go deep underwater. As the pressure is climbing, their blood absorb more and more nitrogen... And in order to get it out safely when coming back to the surface, they have to take periodic stops in order to get it out gradually, not too fast... A fast pressure change, from high to low pressure (such as the tearing of a space suit would make), would "boil" the blood so fast that pockets of gas would form inside the body since it doesn't have enough time to evacuate it safely. Such an occurrence would be enough to kill him if it's bad enough, or just have him loose consciousness at a lower degree.--Jerem © 2002-2006 (talk) 10:23, 26 June 2008 (UTC)


 * They didn't say anything like "they thought that..." or "it was believed that..." which would lend historical relevance, so it's just bad science on the part of the writers which missed getting edited out. 76.104.129.243 (talk) 01:26, 27 April 2009 (UTC)