All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 14, 1995 - Bill Cooper
59:49
NASA Mooned America #3 - NASA Series
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Light up the power.
Use the power of the dark.
I'm mighty careful for the perfume of your water.
I'm so mad.
I'm Pooh.
And I'm William Cooper.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, intervisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you, my dear.
You're welcome.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how long I'm going to be able to talk tonight because I'm having a little throat problems.
So please bear with me, and I'll try to break it up with a little music.
But we're going to continue where we left off last night, and we're going to add a little atmosphere to it to bring back The feeling of those times.
Some of you will remember.
Some of you will not.
But you should enjoy what you're going to hear.
I got a fax today I want to read to you.
Actually, it's not a fax.
It's email.
For those of you who don't know what email is, it's electronic mail that comes to me through my computer from all over the world.
And it says... Excuse me, it's starting already.
It says, Great show last night, Bill.
I'm ordering the book today.
Please reserve me a copy.
I've wanted to tell this story for the past 15 years.
I was a human factors engineer at Grumman Aerospace Corporation, which, as you know, built the lunar module.
I was assigned at one point to creating a videotape After a month of fumbling around, it became apparent to me that no one knew what was going on except for isolated ritualistic procedures that didn't seem to tie together.
for all L.M. cryogenic systems, liquid helium, etc.
After a month of fumbling around, it became apparent to me that no one knew what was going on except for isolated ritualistic procedures that didn't seem to tie together.
I was shattered and confused.
During the Apollo 11 touchdown, I remember standing in Plant 5 in Bethpage, where the three Apollo astronauts died, with the entire staff of Lunar Module Engineers watching the NASA feed.
Or was it from Dreamland?
When the Lunar Module landed, we turned to each other, mystified, shook our heads, and said, I don't believe it.
How did they do that?
To this day, I don't believe anyone has ever landed on the moon.
The laser reflector mirrors could easily have been positioned onto the surface by remote control from the command module with small rockets.
Curious, too, how astronaut radio transmissions still use narrow bandwidth, single sideband instead of hi-fi FM, and low-resolution TV images instead of high-quality video.
Easier to mask imperfections?
Feel free to quote me on this if you find it interesting.
And I did.
One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock.
Five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, rock.
Nine, ten, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, rock.
We're going to rock around ten o'clock tonight.
What's that like song?
Join me home.
We'll have some fun when the dark strikes.
We're going to rock around ten o'clock tonight.
We're going to rock, rock, rock till the rock daylight.
We're going to rock, we're going to rock around the clock tonight.
When the clock strikes two, three and four, eight o'clock, eight o'clock, four o'clock.
We're going to rock around the clock tonight.
We're going to rock, rock, rock till the rock daylight.
We're going to rock, we're going to rock around the clock tonight.
When President Eisenhower, ladies and gentlemen.
And A Republican born and bred left office.
He uncharacteristically tried to warn us about the military-industrial complex, but we paid no attention.
He gave a speech in which he said, quote, In the councils of government, we must warn against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
He should also have warned us that the military-industrial complex had control of the Central Intelligence Agency, which President Harry Truman created after World War II to stave off the fatal hug of the Russian bear.
Had Truman been a closer reader of bureaucratic history, he would have known that intelligence organizations have a way of inevitably expanding themselves into covert actions.
Then, by infiltration and blackmail, they become a forceful shadow over the very government that gave them life.
Witness, ladies and gentlemen, the recent revelations concerning the transvestitism of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover.
And bear in mind that all of those allegations Come from people you wouldn't trust, no matter what they told you.
But still, it put enough doubt in the minds of the public that it could have been true.
Shadow governments become more totalitarian year by year.
Ike might have also warned us about this.
And the fact that they're sometimes handmaidens, the academic, legal, and medical professions, are also complexes that bolster and protect these entities.
The story of that period and the political ramifications from our expanding Cold War with the Russians is best summed up by the authors of an excellent and contemporary book on NASA, printed in 1969, shortly after the Apollo 11 flight. shortly after the Apollo 11 flight.
And it says, "The concepts of politics and war may seem to defile the beautiful picture of brilliant thinkers acting out private dreams.
But it is these that gave the journey to tranquility a troubled, uncertain, and sometimes sordid passage.
Some politicians built careers on it, others lined their pockets from it, while corporations survived on the strength of it as tiny groups of men decided where its billions of dollars would be distributed.
The builders of Apollo were not technicians at work in a laboratory insulated from the world.
They were soldiers in an age when technology has become warfare by other means.
As I walk along I wonder What went wrong with our love Although it was so strong And as I still don't know what I think of The things were done together
While our hearts were young I'm a walking in the rain Tears are falling and I feel a pain I'm wishing you were here by me To end this misery Young, Silcock, and Dunn wrote these words, ladies and gentlemen. - Mm-hmm.
Long before the satellite got off the ground, it became the object of political and military wrangles of the most virulent kind.
When it finally reached its destination, it was no longer a triumph of science.
It had been transformed from a box of technical tricks into the obsessive tool of Cold War politicians.
There could have been no apter beginning to the real history of America's great space adventure.
Immediately after Sputnik, we were playing a losing game.
We could orbit a tiny, tinned toy, and they would answer with a big, heavy, mean machine.
They had Cummins diesels, and we had Volkswagens.
Our Mercury program popped Alan Shepard up in ballistic flight for all of 15 minutes.
We hailed this, even though we could not achieve a true orbit.
Their cosmonauts were breathing air at normal atmospheric pressure 14.7 pounds per square inch, but ours were forced to use 100% oxygen at 5 pounds per square inch.
Simply stated, a shell strong enough to hold normal pressure in space was much heavier than our then rockets could even lift.
The hysteria caused by Sputnik destroyed the logical development course we should have followed in attempting to reach the moon.
In his book called Angle of Attack, Mike Gray writes how we should have flown.
He says, the X-15 to the edge of space.
Then build an X-16 that would fly into orbit.
Then an X-17, a space shuttle, that would carry cargo.
Use the shuttle to build an orbiting space station and then, say about 1985, depart from there on an expedition to the moon.
In due time, our second astronaut, Virgil Grissom, spent 16 minutes in ballistic flight.
But two weeks after that, the Russians upped the ante by putting a cosmonaut in orbit for over 25 hours.
Six months later, John Glenn finally boosted into orbit fame and politics by staying up for almost five hours.
Five hours!
Got him the United States Senate.
Three months after that, Scott Carpenter duplicated almost to the minute Glenn's ride.
Two months later, on August the 11th and August 12th, 1962, the Russians really played hardball by sending up two cosmonauts and two separate birds.
They also had the nerve to add a lot of insult to our injury by staying up for 94 hours and 71 hours respectively.
Plus another first.
They made a rendezvous with each other.
They made a rendezvous with each other.
They made a rendezvous with each other.
They made a rendezvous with each other.
A month later, the Russians played one upmanship again, and within two days sent up another two birds.
The first one stayed up 119 hours, and the second carried the first woman into space.
Valentina V. Tereshkova, who orbited for 17 hours.
Excuse me, make that 71 hours.
Then, rub-a-dub-dub, the Soviets sent up three men in a big, big tub.
Six months later, we got two men up in our own wash tub with the first shot of the Gemini program.
But we finally had the bit in our teeth.
We were going to win that space race no matter who it killed or how much the cost.
The decision, ladies and gentlemen, to go to the moon was not made by President Kennedy.
But by NASA itself.
A man named George M. Lowe pressured an internal NASA committee into accepting that goal.
You see, it was the tail wagging the dog that day when NASA set its own agenda to start the Apollo program.
And nothing, and I mean nothing, ladies and gentlemen, has changed since.
Had rocket expert Werner von Braun, ex-German retread, been allowed to fire off his rocket in the fall of 1956, we would have orbited the first satellite.
However, you see, it was politically incorrect to use former Nazi expertise.
Politically, our great leaders desperately wanted the Navy to be first with an all-American-made Vanguard rocket.
In the early 60s, the only technicians who actually knew how to build rockets were those harvested up by the Army from the German V-2 program through Project Paperclip.
They were all working in Huntsville, Alabama, on our missile program, and miraculously, the military, an organization rarely known to give up the spoils of war, released them to NASA.
I maintain that just as its predecessor, the Nazi V2 missile project in Norway had been taken over by the Nazi SS, ours was also held in thrall by the Central Intelligence Agency.
How this machination was accomplished and maintained is not known, but as the Tiger is known by its stripes.
You can bet that whenever big bucks are involved, the Central Intelligence Agency is going to be there.
And NASA bucks, ladies and gentlemen, are still big.
The estimate given to Kennedy to put a man on the moon was less than $20 billion.
The final cost, if tallied by the total expenditures of NASA from 1962 to 1973, was over $39 billion.
And if you think I've been joking you about the constant deflation, or I should say inflation, the constant inflation of your dollar and its decreased buying power,
that $39 billion that NASA that $39 billion that NASA spent from 1962 to 1973 is about $200 billion five years ago in 1990.
be.
Norman Mailer said of the Apollo Project that he couldn't decide whether it was, and I quote, the noblest expression of the twentieth century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity, end quote.
Some extemporary...
I'm on the verge of going to bed...
Ladies and gentlemen, my throat is not working properly.
And I don't think my head is reading properly either.
I'm coming down with something.
So every once in a while I'm going to have to go back and read something over again because I'm just not seeing it right.
Couple that with a failing vision in my right eye and you can get some kind of feeling for what I'm going through in this studio in the dim light.
Some contemporary critics called NASA's Moon Project a Roman Circus.
And you've heard me call it that on many occasions on this broadcast.
However, Rene feels that term is a little too strong.
I don't know why.
Because his whole book proves it right.
Space opera, he says, has a better ring to it.
First, there was the terrifying quasi-cremation of three astronauts on Pad 34.
Then, in each of the manned missions that followed, serious problems developed.
But each time, in the nick of time, American astronauts and our unsung NASA geniuses saved the day.
Who's this?
I'm the wealth man, Tattletall!
This is Go and Little Rock, way down in the valley.
You're calling from Little Rock, California?
Yeah, long distance.
My, my, my.
Listen, man, what kind of entertainment you got in that town?
All we got is you.
That'll be the day!
The late great buddy Holly and the Wolfman Jack Show.
You hug me and your money too.
Well, you know you love me, baby.
Till you tell me maybe that someday we'll all be true.
Well, that'll be the day when you say goodbye.
Yes, that'll be the day when you make me cry.
You say you're gonna leave.
You know it's a lie cause that'll be the day when I die.
I don't know how many of you have started to make the connections because I've given you plenty of hints.
Yes.
I've given you so many hints that it's just absolutely incredible that some of you aren't yelling and screaming and jumping up and down with your own discoveries about these things.
The original number of astronauts was seven.
The first manned Apollo mission was what?
Apollo 7.
But they skipped some numbers to make it Apollo 7, didn't they?
And which one went to the moon?
Apollo 11.
How many of you have been with me when we've studied the mysteries and the symbology?
When you gonna wake up, folks?
You know what?
You're dozing with your nose in your coffee.
I bet it burns.
What do you think?
After the Apollo 11 landing, the American public began to ignore the subsequent landings.
Congress was getting a little...
Shaky because of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret Laos War and the Vietnam police action, racial rioting, hippie rebellions, and student demonstrations.
Our leaders were working overtime trying to throw a great war in Vietnam, but many of the kids from farm and slum, the backbone of all our previous armies, just didn't want to go to the party.
Tens of thousands of draft dodgers were leaving the United States for Canada and other parts unknown.
The legacy of Vietnam, ladies and gentlemen, still troubles this country.
Potential draftees seem to know instinctively.
Thank you.
What took me another 20 years to find out that basically Vietnam was a Central Intelligence Agency war over who would control the worldwide distribution of heroin from the Golden Triangle and the oil in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea.
NASA had planned the first manned landing for some time in October 1967.
There were three very political reasons for this schedule.
The first was that the Russians were expected to execute a moon landing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The next, because 1968 represented the beginning of a period of intense solar flare activity.
And the last, was because it could affect the coming presidential elections.
The American public never quite caught space fever.
Yes, they cheered on the launchings, but by Apollo 12, the second landing, even America's patriotic silent majority began to question the necessity of more moonshots.
But since it is an old Washington joke that the letters NASA, N-A-S-A, stand for, quote, never a straight answer, end quote, nothing much came of it.
All right, baby!
Here we go with another call out of the station.
Can you dig it?
Uh, yeah, listen, you got any more of those secret agent spy scopes?
Hip for it on the stethoscope.
No, no, the secret agent spy scope, man.
That pulls in the moon, the stars, the planets, and the satellites, and the spacemen.
You must have the wrong number, partner.
If you want to jitterjive, bust around, let him in!
Tell me what's wrong with me!
I want somebody to tell me what's wrong with me.
I ain't anymore in the military.
Sorry. .
I barely made it.
Baby, won't you please come home?
For the day, baby, won't you please come home?
Though I ain't been enough, but I'm just a new man, no.
I can't help you, baby, fall down the line.
I can't help you, baby.
Fall down the line.
I'm on a nose, baby.
Now, boy, I'll win my time.
Ah, despite it all, NASA's Public Relations Department was equal to the task.
They kept grinding out action scripts right on schedule, and if I had known about the mysteries back then, I would have known that if anything was going to happen, it would have happened on Apollo 13.
The number of death and resurrection.
And that's exactly what happened.
The liquid oxygen storage containers on Apollo 13 exploded between here and the moon.
And a nation waited breathlessly, glued to their television sets.
to watch the astronauts die, hoping, of course, that they wouldn't, and magically A death mission, just exactly as the number predicts, was resurrected and it was reborn and brought back to the earth.
Apollo 14 had trouble with the limb while landing on the moon.
On Apollo 15 they were drowning in the capsule.
Then Apollo 16 suffered strange vibrations.
Apollo 17 saw the end of the space opera despite NASA's previous plans for many more landings.
In the meantime, we were being devastated by racial rebellions.
That's right.
You remember those?
Shortly after leaving the Air Force, I remember going to Los Angeles to Englewood, which wasn't then as it is now.
And I stayed in an apartment with a friend of mine and his family, his mother and father, who had just got out of the Air Force a short time before I left.
And one night we looked out the window down below and saw a gasoline truck pulled into the driveway, and members of the black community We're filling cans with gasoline which they were passing down the driveway to people who were filling bottles with these gasoline and sticking rags in the mouths of the bottles and we called the police immediately and disappeared for several days.
That was a time of riots and flames and death in the streets.
Campus riots and a simmering anger as the poor began to realize that they paid most of the freight for all those grandiose adventures.
At least that's what they tell us.
I've never been able to figure out how the poor paid for anything.
In fact, it's a myth, ladies and gentlemen.
The middle class is what really pays for everything.
And when the middle class goes, there won't be anybody to pay for anything.
There was a slight surge of interest when the lunar rovers were introduced.
They, too, soon grew boring, despite the fact they were now broadcasting live color television.
Had we known at the time that each throwaway rover cost over twelve million dollars, we probably would have had more right.
And I've never been able to figure out, ladies and gentlemen, how they ever got twelve million dollars into that little go-kart.
That's all it was.
Very sophisticated go-kart.
Run on batteries.
Also, the end of the Apollo program saw a shift in direction.
from the professed scientific toward military and commercial ventures.
Mr. Hurt said it succinctly.
Henceforth, the Space Agency paid only lip service to the noble theme etched on the plaque of Apollo 11.
that the astronauts left on the moon.
We came in peace for all mankind.
The first series of shuttle flights pioneered the commercialization and militarization of space, forsaking manned exploration of the solar system to concentrate on the pursuit of profits and the development of a Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, also known as Star Wars.
Perhaps Mr. Hurt's position is closer to reality that we believed, and his conclusion may change.
Of course, after he reads this book.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, three, four.
One, two, three, four. three, four.
The hour of the time, ladies and gentlemen, is brought to you by Swiss America Trading.
It's the only place that I can, with a clear conscience, recommend you to for real money.
Precious metals in their various forms.
Your letter the other day from a guy, I don't know if I told you about it, said that he didn't care.
He was going to go to the cheapest place, even if it bought it from our enemies, he didn't care.
In fact, he put it in stronger language than that.
I've got to caution you against doing things like that, ladies and gentlemen.
Number one, the prices at Swiss America Trading are very competitive.
Number two, They give you a guarantee which I back with my own personal guarantee.
Number three, everything is recorded so nobody can lie to anybody and nobody can con anybody and nobody can cheat anybody.
And they use only the recognized grading organizations for grading numismatic coins.
Of course, you don't have to worry about that if you're not purchasing numismatic coins.
And also folks, I recommend that you get your hands on some real money, not to make any killing on the market, the commodities market or the stock market or any place else.
Because I'll tell you something, if you really look at the metals market and you understand anything about spot sell and spot buy and all of this kind of stuff, it's got to go up quite a bit before you make any money anyway.
Now that's not always true with numismatic coins, which market is volatile sometimes.
And coins have been known to appreciate quite a bit, literally overnight.
They've also been known to depreciate quite a bit, literally overnight.
So you have to know what you're doing.
You have to be very careful.
If you're doing any kind of commodity investing, I don't care what it is, wheat, gold, silver, Moon dust, you name it, I don't care.
Because you could lose everything.
But if you're going to purchase and take into possession real money, And specifically I'm talking about precious metals in the form of gold coins, whether bullion or numismatic, I don't care.
But if you're paying any more than 15% above the value of the metal in the coin, then you're into numismatics.
And I don't recommend that unless you're doing it for investment purposes.
But that's up to you.
You have to make your own decisions about that.
Ladies and gentlemen, Throughout the history of the world, those people who have managed to accumulate and hold on to real money, gold or silver coins, when bad things have happened to economies of nations, those people have come out the winners.
They have survived.
Some of them have become incredibly wealthy, simply because they had some real money when everything else turned into dust.
If you'd like to be one of the smart ones, and if you'd like to deal with someone who can give you all of the things that I've just discussed, plus another one that I didn't mention, a buyback policy.
They guarantee to you, no matter what the market does, if it crashes overnight, and I'm talking about the gold and silver market, and you think that you've got to sell it, there's a prearranged price that they have already agreed upon, when you purchase your metal from Swiss America Trading, they will buy it back.
For instance, if you purchased a gold coin, for let's say $380, are $400 are $410 I'm just using the price as an example it doesn't matter what it really is and the next day the market plunged to $1
If they had agreed to buy back that coin from you, and you paid $380 for it, and they had agreed to buy it back from you for $360, they will still buy it back for that agreed upon price.
So, you don't get this with anybody else.
Swiss America Trading takes care of its people.
It especially takes care of the listeners to the hour of the time.
And they'll work out a program with you that no matter how poor you think you are, no matter what kind of shape you think your finances are in, they will arrange for you to have some plan to buy whatever amount you can afford, no matter how small, over a period of time on a regular basis or however you want to work it out.
So call them.
1-800-289-2646.
They care about you.
They care about this broadcast.
They care about the message that we deliver.
They've been loyal to our cause.
And the only way we're going to be winning this battle, ladies and gentlemen, is to be loyal to those who are loyal to us.
To support our causes and our people.
And if we can't do that, I'm going to tell you right now, if you're like the jerk that sent me the letter that said he didn't care, If everybody feels that way, we're going to lose this battle.
In fact, the moment that that kind of attitude prevails, we've already lost the battle.
I hope you're smart enough to understand that.
I know most of the listeners to this broadcast are.
So call Swiss America Trading 1-800-289-2646 or if it's easier for you to remember 1-800-BUY-COIN.
1-800-BUY-COIN.
Or if it's easier for you to remember, 1-800-BUY-COIN. 1-800-BUY-COIN.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think that you will be very happy.
Very glad that you did.
I've been searching for you girls Bobby socks and a pony tail.
When I saw her standing there, I had to pick her up, I couldn't fail.
Cause I knew I had to make her mine.
She's so cool, she's so fine.
Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh.
She's so cool.
Oh, this music this music brings back a lot of memories for me.
I don't know about you.
That one really does.
I can remember sitting in the band room at Monroney Junior High School in Midwest City.
My class was the first class that attended that school.
And I saw this beautiful blonde-haired little girl sitting across from me.
I played the trumpet and she played the clarinet, and I just, feeling my oats and, you know, feeling what little boys feel, winked at her and almost fell out of my chair when she winked back.
From that moment on, I carried her books after school and walked her home.
Some night we're going to have to play some of this old music and just talk about some good things for a change.
And that's one of the reasons why the Oklahoma City bombing affected me.
Because I know so many people there whom I went to school with as a boy.
My father was stationed at Tinker Air Force Base for a period of time.
I'd like to talk about these kinds of happy things all night, but I've got to get back to the topic at hand.
Unfortunately, on evenings back then, ladies and gentlemen, and even now where I'm at, you see I live at 7,500 feet in the White Mountains of Arizona, and I can walk out my door And see stars that most of you will never see in your life where you live.
Not because the stars aren't there.
But because at lower altitudes, some of those stars just can't be seen even on the clearest of nights because of the thickness of the atmosphere and the diffraction of light and all kinds of different things.
And for many of you who live in cities and densely populated areas, there are so many pollutants and waste materials in the air that you're lucky if you can see the brightest stars on any given night.
And I have seen times in Southern California when I lived there that you couldn't see anything in the sky for nights upon end, even though there were no clouds at all.
The sky here where I live, right outside my door, if I just walk outside my door and look up, is breathtaking.
It's overwhelming.
And on evenings when the sky is clear, as the day's light fades, From this fluorescent.
Atmosphere of ours, some of us look up seeking the first star of the night.
At such times, those of us still young at heart remember the old litany that someone at some time taught us in which we ask the God or gods, whatever you believe, for one small, measly little favor.
Remember starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight.
Wish I may, wish I might.
Have this wish come true tonight.
We remember squinching up our eyes shut real hard and telepathically broadcasting our wish up into the heavens.
The ancient magical chant.
I don't know how old it is, but I think every child that's probably ever lived in this country has said it at one time or another.
Most of us quit the practice as we get older.
We quit because we noticed that very few of those wishes ever came true.
And like I have become jaded with the vast herds of sheeple out there, we become jaded about the innocent things of childhood.
And for the few wishes that did come true, we usually soon came to regret making that particular wish in the first place, especially when it involved sex, jobs, or money, all the really neat things in life.
Indeed, sometimes a granted wish is so hard to get rid of that we desperately attempt to make it go away by again eliciting the same God or gods or spirit or star or whatever who granted it.
To do this you have to try again and again and again and again.
Right?
Y'all remember that?
And for all you fanatics out there, I'm not practicing blasphemy here.
I don't believe there's anybody who did not Worship on a star when they were a child has nothing to do with the mysteries or being unfaithful to God or anything else.
It has to do with the innocence of childhood and the willingness to believe that anything was possible.
I had to say that because some nut is going to write me a letter.
They always do.
Always.
By human standards, The Fickle Stars have a very distorted sense of humor, giving us what we ask for only, when it is not what we truly want.
Despite that fact, we sometimes have an idea why they do what they do.
You see, they sock it to us because most people wish on a star.
Ladies and gentlemen, that isn't even a star at all.
Isn't that incredible?
The two brightest objects in our sky are the planets Venus and Jupiter.
Most people seeking to make a wish are too anxious, you see.
They usually mistake one or the other of these planets for the first star of the night, so their wish doesn't even count.
And when it doesn't come true, we just can't figure out why.
It wasn't a star, see, and you have to wish upon a star.
I can see some of you out there shaking your heads.
Where is this guy going with this?
What's this all about?
We'll be clear in a moment.
These planets are usually the first visible celestial objects.
But from the viewpoint of the gods, we are ignorant and greedy.
You see, if we're thinking as children, if there really were gods up there, if the stars could really grant us a wish, here they are, seeing us, not even waiting to wish upon a star.
They see us as ignorant and greedy because we grabbed this planet.
Ignorant for not knowing the difference, and greedy for not waiting a few more moments.
Had we but waited, we would have had our pick of the brightest stars, the important stars used by navigators.
You see, when I was in the United States Navy, ladies and gentlemen, I was a navigator.
My rank was quartermaster.
Now don't get that confused with the Army, where a quartermaster is what we called in the Navy a storekeeper.
Quartermasters take care of supplies in the Army.
In the Navy, the Quartermaster is the one that in the old ancient Navy was in charge of the quarter deck, the ceremonies, the navigational instruments, navigating the ship, keeping the charts.
The man who stood at the helm and steered the ship.
That's what a Quartermaster in the Navy does.
You see, another ten minutes in the darkening night, provided we weren't legally blind, would have allowed us to see at least a hundred stars.
And if you were at an elevation where I live, hundreds of thousands of stars.
You could spend your lifetime trying to count them.
It is breathtaking.
It's as if the sky is a huge lens and everything is magnified.
I've seen people come up here to visit from the city and I've taken them outside at night and just made one simple request.
Look up into the sky.
And the look on their face, to me, is worth a million dollars.
When they see what they have never seen.
The incredible beauty of the natural universe.
And then, mere minutes later, a thousand would peep through in all their various shades of color and varying degrees of brightness.
Amen.
That's just going from the planets, about ten minutes later, to a hundred stars, and then a few moments later, a thousand stars, and then where I live, Tens of thousands of stars and then hundreds of thousands of stars from horizon to horizon in a crystal clear atmosphere.
Despite the fact that most of us live at the bottom of the atmosphere, we are not alone.
What's called the atmospheric well by some.
Which is laden with dust, humidity, smoke, particles, and pollen.
This despite ground light pollution from house and street lights, headlights, lighted signs, and smog which destroy our night vision.
That's another reason we can see the heavens so well here.
There are no bright lights anywhere.
There's no light pollution on top of this mountain where I live.
Professional and amateur astronomers, along with a few hundred million other folks all over the world, know that the higher the elevation, the less the ground lighting, the less the moonlight, the colder and drier the air, the more stars there are that can be seen.
In fact, tens of thousands of stars are visible to the naked eye, and hundreds of thousands particularly at higher elevations on cold, dry nights.
Star watchers are entranced people who have been known to drag their kicking and screaming friends out into the dark night just to get them to stare up at the sky.
I am guilty of that.
In fact, when one friend came from Maryland, she brought her telescope with her, and we stayed out half the night looking at the stars through her telescope.
I'm a dragger.
I've urged many a friend out of warm sleeping bags when camped out on hunting and fishing trips in my younger years.
I've hauled them from warm cabins and cars on sub-zero nights and even run them out of the warm cabin on my boat when I had my boat, 43-foot pacemaker.
Without exception, no matter how cold the night was, the racious complaints stopped instantly once they looked up at the magnificent heavens that most people do not ever even pay the slightest attention to.
Now the point here, folks, is that in my entire life I've never met anyone who was star blind.
In fact, I had no idea that the condition even existed.
Everybody I know personally, that's hundreds of people with the exception of those who are truly blind, can see the stars.
And I can remember being on the bridge wing of a ship, far out at sea, at what we called star time.
Stepping out into the cold with my sextant in my hand and looking up, getting my bearings, identifying the stars, and then taking the evening fix.
I would go back in and spend an hour at the chart table plotting the results.
And then I would send a report to the captain.
I would repeat that in the morning.
Sunlines at noon.
Sunlines at mid-morning and mid-afternoon.
Local apparent noon, I should say, at noon.
And on nights when the full moon would hover at the zenith directly overhead the ship, I could go out and shoot moonlines and shoot the stars by moonlight.
Because the moonlight would give me a horizon.
I I really enjoyed doing that.
Everybody I know personally, that's hundreds of people with the exception of those who are truly blind, that's hundreds of people with the exception of those who are truly blind, can
Yet, ladies and gentlemen, after NASA poured through thousands of service records in 1961, and after multiple screenings and batteries of tests, NASA selected seven truly exceptional men for astronauts training.
Eventually, one of them, Alan Shepard, was put in a tin can and blasted into a ballistic arc barely touching what NASA called space, close space is a more accurate term, a place where many men had already been flying the X-15 and in high-altitude balloons and had reported seeing millions of stars brighter and clearer than they had ever been able to see the stars standing at any elevation a place where many men had already been flying the X-15 and in high-altitude balloons and
Alan Shepard went up.
Despite the G's thrust on him from the cannon shell they called a redstone rocket, Shepard reported seeing no stars.
That's where I'm going with this, ladies and gentlemen.
Every photograph you've ever seen that NASA has ever taken in the space program has never contained even one star.
If somebody strapped me in a tin can atop a redstone rocket and pulled 4G's acceleration, I think I would have seen stars.
Don't you?
But unbeknownst to us at the time, though, this was the first recorded case of star blindness in the whole world.
Alan, the poor guy, had all the right stuff!
But Alan, ladies and gentlemen, was star blind.
Isn't that incredible?
So, Star blind.
Next, NASA spent three and a half months setting up another lightweight tin can.
This time, Virgil Grissom duplicated the ballistic arc for the same 15 minutes or so.
And when he was recovered and questioned, believe it or not, he hadn't seen any stars either.
Isn't that amazing?
No stars.
Think about it.
Thank you.
Down here at the bottom of an atmosphere, filled with dust and clouds and moisture and pollution and all kinds of things, we can still see the stars.
At least the brightest ones.
Unless you live in L.A.
on a smoggy night.
The higher up in elevation you go, the better you can see the stars.
Yet, these guys with the right stuff could not see the stars.
Never mind those who had been up there in aircraft could see the stars.
So what's going on here?
Can you tell me?
No?
Thank you.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you'll be here tomorrow night, I'll tell you.
And, uh, this last one sort of fits the bill.
It's also Annie's favorite.
Good night, folks.
And God bless each and every single one of you.
They asked me how I knew my true love was true.
I am mostly blind.
Something here inside cannot be denied.
One day said someday you'll find all who love are blind.
Oh, when your heart's on fire.
Amen.
you You must be alive.
Smoke gets in your eyes So I tell them and I gave them that To think they could die To think they could die
Yet today, my love has burned away.
I am without my love.
Without my love.
Now, laughing friends deride.
Tears I cannot find.
Oh, I can't say.
When a flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes.
Oh, I can't say.
Sunday, Monday, happy days!
Tuesday, Wednesday, happy days!
Thursday, Friday, happy days!
The weekend comes!
My cycle honks!
Ready to race to you!
These days are all, I feel free These days are all, share them with me Goodbye gray sky, hello blue.
There's nothing can hold me when I hold you.
So right, you can't be wrong.
Rockin' and rollin' all we've found Sunday, Monday, happy days Tuesday, Wednesday, happy days!
Thursday, Friday, happy days!
Saturday, what a day!
Groovin' all week with you!
These days are ours!
Share them with me!
These days are ours!
Happy and free!
▲
Export Selection