In This Episode: A wild story of several civilians who rescued a piece of history — a little-known account from the sidelines in the race to the moon.

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Show Notes

* To help support Uncommon Sense, see the Patron’s Page, or the form in the sidebar.
* This is the second of two parts on rescuing human history. The episodes don’t really need to be consumed in order.
* This episode refers to last week’s, Solving Cultural Amnesia, as well as #038, The Giant Leap for Mankind, my July commemoration of the first human moon landing exactly 50 years before.
* Links: NASA’s Planetary Data System, and Keith Cowing’s space sites SpaceRef, NASA Watch, Astrobiology Web, and Space Q.
* The photos mentioned (and more!) are placed within the transcript, below. Click any of them to see larger.

Transcript
Last week’s episode talked about “Cultural Amnesia” — that electronic records are a lot more vulnerable to loss than paper records, meaning humanity could literally risk losing its history. That even happens in government circles: this week, let’s explore a very specific example from the U.S. space program, and how just a few people with Uncommon Sense stepped up to prevent the loss of irreproducible data.
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
Last summer was the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s landing on the moon, winning the “space race” against Russia, as their crewmate Mike Collins circled overhead in the command module. Before launch, Collins said that he’d probably be the only American that wouldn’t be able to watch that history being made since there was no TV in the command module. He asked news reporters to “save the tapes” for him! Well, this episode shows just how prophetic the idea of “saving the tapes” really is.
In Episode 38, part of the theme was that NASA succeeded with the Apollo mission goals in part because it was given enough money to hire enough people with Uncommon Sense to get the job done. And of course, they were in a mighty hurry to do it not just because of President John Kennedy’s challenge to do it “before the decade was out,” but because we didn’t know whether Russia retained its demonstrated lead in, literally, rocket science.
And here’s an example of what that haste led to.
While the manned spacecraft for Apollo were being designed and built, not to mention the gigantic Saturn V rocket, which would be big enough to get everything to lunar orbit, we launched a number of small unmanned missions to the moon to gather data to support the human landings later.
One of my favorites was the Surveyor missions: we sent seven robotic spacecraft between June 1966 and January 1968 to land softly on the moon to test all sorts of systems, especially soft landing, and to see if the moon’s surface could hold something heavy. Because if a spacecraft simply sank in the fine dust that they expected cover...