Way Stations In Space (1961)
1,161 views since 2007-09-16
Way Stations In Space (1961) Pretty cool movie, but the physics is very bad. It is obvious that no real scientist reviewed the script. The two worse errors : rocket planes (they showed an X-15) were carried up in a plane to escape (much of) the drag of the Earth's atmosphere, not the Earth's gravity and the gravitational acceleration of a space station is still directed towards the center of the Earth, etc. - the direction is not changed by motion. But the engineering is pretty correct for 1961. This movie pretty much shows how NASA planned to get to the Moon before Kennedy announced the goal of doing it during the 1960's. Since 9 years wasn''t enough time to build all of these pieces, we decided to go straight to the Moon with Apollo, and the space station and shuttle plans were shelved. It is interesting to think what would have happened if he hadn't said "within this decade"; we might have had space stations in the mid-1960's and a space shuttle by 1970 or so.
| Credits: | Public Domain |
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