NASA built LLRV (lunar lander research vehicle) and later the LLTV (lunar landar training vehicle). They were not tethered. They used a jet engine, oriented vertically on a gimbal to lift the vehicle so that it would behave as the actual lander would over the moon. (The moon's gravity is about 1/6 of Earth's.)

Neil Armstrong said that the moon landing would not have been possible without these test vehicles. More info here: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-026-DFRC.html

If you want to see one, I know they have one on display at NASA Dryden in Southern California. I think they only do tours ever other Friday, though.

Your video, Neil Armstrong Ejects From Lunar Lander Testflight, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^jerryku:
I'm not surprised that so few are Republican (Einstein was a Communist, and many of Oppenheimer's relatives were, too), but I wonder how many today are Libertarian-types, since so many identify as independents?
And how many are pro-democracy? I would argue that science and democracy don't really work together well. For one thing, scientists are very smart, while the majority of the human race is probably embarrassingly foolish in their eyes. So are scientists (elite eggheads) really in favor of having the unwashed masses rule the world? I gotta wonder.
A scientist libertarian party guy makes sense to me though. Free market stuff is like a form of social darwinism. Survival of the fittest. Evolution. Science. Brutal, cold, efficient, and without any silly Bible or Quran to teach hippie whatever egalitarian "love your neighbor" principles that are in there.
A scientist fascist makes sense to me, too.
I guess a scientist Communist (which was VERY popular in the past) actually makes the least amount of sense to me. The only part that makes sense is the tenet of Communism that opposes faith in God. If high #s of scientists are not religious, then I can see the appeal of Communism. But all the other aspects of Communism, which is really based on the idea of majority rule ("The People!"), seems to go against what scientists would favor. Then again, I guess convincing the world that there was no afterlife after a nuclear world-destroying war.. would be the most important thing to do for the time being. Kinda like an Ozzymandias from The Watchmen type thing.




Maybe scientists are elite egg heads, but you know who else were also elite eggheads? Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Thomas Edison, Dr. Salk, Neil Armstrong. It was American eggheads that led the way to map the human genome. Nearly everyone on tonight’s shuttle launch is a science/math geek, and all but two are American. I for one am proud that my country has produced so many eggheads.

Science has done very well under democracy, and amazingly well under American democracy. In our brief history, American scientists (or at least scientists that came to and did their best work while in America [i.e. Nikola Tesla, Alexander Bell, Wernher von Braun]) have given the world the greatest number of advances in science, medicine and technology of the modern era. It makes totally sense; a free society, where ideas and information can be easily exchanged, coupled with a healthy amount of capital from the private sector to fund research is the best environment for scientific advances.

Just because a person is not religious does not mean they would automatically find communism attractive. If everyone that didn’t believe in a god were also a communist, communism would be a lot more successful than it is. I would venture to say that a disbelief in a god is more likely to happen in the above-mentioned free and open societies as opposed to one where everyone are told what to think. Communism (at least as in the form of China, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR) is not a “majority rule” government, but one where a small, self appointed, insular group at the very top controls everything. Majority rule is, however, a tenet of democracy.

>> ^southblvd:
At 5:17 -- aliens?!


Some lightning guy walked into the shot? Luckily Neil didn't pull a Bale...

>> ^binglebongle:
lies j/k
As everyone knows, he did misspeak his planned legendary oneliner. He only left out a single letter word, but that "a" being absent makes the statement make no sense when you think about it. It always bothers me a little every time I hear it because I'm kind of a perfectionist, and if I had bungled that shit, I would have been really pissed off at myself.

Actually I believe they analyzed the recording and found that Armstrong actually did perform the line correctly(a man), but that in a freak coincidence, it was lost in the transmission.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4225856.html

"The weekend has landed! All that exists now is clubs, drugs, pubs and parties. I've got 48 hours off from the world, man. I'm gonna blow steam out my head like a screaming kettle, I'm gonna talk cod shit to strangers all night, I'm gonna lose the plot on the dancefloor. The free radicals inside me are freakin', man! Tonight I'm Jip Travolta, I'm Peter Popper, I'm going to never-never land with my chosen family, man. We're gonna get more spaced out than Neil Armstrong ever did, anything could happen tonight, you know? This could be the best night of my life. I've got 73 quid in my back burner - I'm gonna wax the lot, man! The Milky Bars are on me! Yeah!"

>> ^Xax:

>> ^jwray:
Under the law as it is now, Private property is essentially a dictatorship. You can be asked to leave by the owner of the property or his representative for any reason whatsoever and failure to comply can be considered trespassing. So Free speech does not really exist at all in 90% of the land of this country, because it's privately owned. Fuck that.

That's the way it should be. Can you imagine if the government told me I couldn't kick someone off my own property for calling my wife a bitch? If I own property, and someone comes onto it and says something I don't like, I should have every legal and moral right to have them removed for trespassing on my whim. The reason is irrelevant; I should have the right to control who is on my property, period. The First Amendment is to protect free speech from the government, but the government doesn't own my property. Don't like it? Stay off my property.
In any case, the property on which this bullshit meeting took place on appears to be public property, so it seems to me that this lady had her rights violated.
Fuck McCain and his minions.


I know where you're coming from and would like to agree, but the problem arises under this system: You have no freedom unless you have your own private property.
If you're on someone else's private property, you basically have 3 choices:
1. Do whatever they say in exchange for permission to stay.
2. Get arrested for trespassing
3. Go somewhere else (Where? Someone else's private property?)

If the whole world will be someone else's property, poverty will be equivalent to slavery.

Since land existed long before people existed, it was at some point appropriated in a way that's just as illegitimate as if Neil Armstrong were to claim ownership of the entire Moon.

Well said and well said choggie. Fortunately i was able to decipher what you decided to say today.

I think the world's going to hell in a handbasket. Thinking of the world we live in today, i'm thankful for some of the opportunities and benefits that i was granted by the grace of it, but hateful of the rest. A world in which a respectable life-course is to earn money working in an office that deals solely with handling advertising material for companies that sell commodities. I could name other useless vocations that stem from other vocations, and even vocations that stem from the first. "High fashion" - of no practical use to anyone, yet money to be earned. And a magazine that reports on high fashion - a useless job reporting on a useless job, yet money to be earned. What a perfect little rat race we've designed for ourselves, and as long as not too many people protest and try to break it at once, the illusion of progress holds itself steady.

I don't have solutions, and i don't want to hear that what we have now is the best of the available options. I hate it the way it is, and i hate being forced to play that game.

I think the path we chose for ourselves worked up to a point, and then it needed changing for something better for any REAL further "progress" to take place. Right now, we're just going through the motions, a little prison that we made for ourselves that's easy to blame on some imaginary people that pull all the strings. When in actual fact, they don't exist, and we're pulling our own.

I'd love the entire world as a collective to have a Radiohead-Just moment where they all suddenly stop what they're doing, curl up into a ball and go "my god, i've just wasted 30 years of my life in a tiny cubicle entering numbers into a spreedsheet that ultimately has no meaning to humans or humankind".

Neil Armstrong - the most naive words ever spoken - "one giant leap for mankind".. how true we've made those words ring out.

Does this rhetoric even belong under this video's comments?

On the plus side, the kooks briefly kept clueless harridan Sheila Jackson-Lee's trap shut.

Prior to the 110th Congress, Lee served on the House Science Committee and on the Subcommittee that oversees space policy and NASA. She once asked, during a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whether the Mars Pathfinder had taken an image of the flag planted on Mars in 1969 by Neil Armstrong.

do not f**k with astronauts. I would be pissed off at doubters too if I had been sitting on a few thousand metric tons of thrust that had been built by the lowest bidder*.

Based on actual Neil Armstrong quote.

From Nasa:

On the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop a Saturn V rocket at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.