Notes: Episode 18, The Space Race (Part 2)
As with every show, I’ll list any corrections or clarifications here. If there’s anything I’ve overlooked, please contact me by email or in the comments and I’ll edit the notes to reflect the new information.
10:48 – Voshkhod 2 flew on March 18, 1965.
13:55 – I couldn’t confirm that any town had actually lost any of their planets – this may be apocryphal, or simply
misremembered. There are numerous towns with scale models of the solar system, though, many of which seem quite
interesting.
17:47 – First of all, the unmanned training vehicles were actually called Agena Target Vehicles – not Aegis. I also
thought I’d clarify that the Gemini 6 Agena was destroyed due to a catastrophic failure in the second stage booster,
causing the entire craft to explode.
23:10 – I did a bit more digging, and I cannot for the life of me find more information on why the N1 delivery system
was called N1. It appears to be an almost arbitrary designation. It’s likely that Korolev had a reason for that name,
but he was considered especially secretive even within a society that didn’t reveal much of its information about the
space race to the world until its functional collapse.
38:18 – Looks like we need to split the difference on this one. The orbital period for Apollo 8 was about 88 minutes,
which means they would have been out of radio contact for around 45 minutes (though I couldn’t pin down an exact time
for this).
50:24 – It was indeed Apollo 15, and the astronaut was David Scott. You can see the footage here.
54:26 – A picture of the patch can be found here.
55:42 – And by ’70s I of course mean ’80s – specifically 1983. I honestly wonder how often I make slips of the tongue
like this in day-to-day conversation that I will never ever know about because it’s not recorded. In any case, Star Wars
was a colloquial term for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was a proposal to design anti-ballistic missile
systems to protect against nuclear strikes and tip the balance of power in favor of the United States by eliminating
mutually assured destruction. The proposal did contain some space-based concepts, but also incorporated land-based
missile shields.
57:05 – 16 countries either currently or at some point in the past did provide funding, support, construction, and other
contributions to the International Space Station.
1:00:04 – There are quite a few videos out there of failed NASA launches, but if you’re looking for somewhere to start,
this one gives you a pretty good idea of what makes a failed launch – it’s often far more complicated than a simple
explosion.
1:00:40 – Again, there are multiple sources available, but one place to find footage of the Apollo 11 landing is here. I
know it’s three hours long, but honestly, this is a moment that will be viewed as important for thousands of years and
we’re fortunate enough to have footage of it available for free on the internet. Taking a look won’t hurt any.
