| Apollo Project | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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| Airdate | August 30, 2005 | ||
| Curriculum | Science Engineering & Tech | ||
Apollo Project launched in BrainPOP Science/Engineering & Tech August 30, 2005.
Summary
Appearances
Trivia
- The red bus at the beginning has the number 1138.
Transcript
Errors
- The Apollo 13 mission was launched on April 11, 1970. However, Tim said it started in March of 1970.
Quiz
FYI
Language
Why were they called the Apollo missions? To honor the Greek and Roman god Apollo!
In mythology, Apollo was the son of Leto, a mortal woman, and Zeus, the leader of the Olympians, the twelve gods who lived on Mount Olympus. Apollo was the god of music, prophecy, medicine, archery, poetry, dance, and also the intellect—that’s a lot of responsibilities for one god!
Apollo was also considered a god of light, and one of his other names was “Phoebus,” a Greek word meaning “beaming” or “radiant.” Because of his association with light and the sun, he was often paired with Helios, the Greek sun god who pulled the sun across the sky every day.
Interestingly, Apollo was also associated with colonizing missions—one of his titles was “Archigetes,” which means “leader of colonists.” One legend even claims that he helped found the city of Troy!
Famous Faces
President John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, took office in 1961 after one of the closest elections in history. He had previously served for 14 years as a senator and representative from Massachusetts.
One of Kennedy’s major concerns was the so-called “space race,” an unofficial competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to explore space and land on the moon. Early in his presidency, Kennedy stated that he wanted to land a man on the moon within the decade of the 1960s.
Unfortunately, Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, allegedly by a man named Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was never brought to trial—two days later, he himself was murdered! It was an eventful end to a short but action-packed presidency: Kennedy was in office during events such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and missile crisis in Cuba; the building of the Berlin Wall in Germany; the beginning of the Vietnam War; and much of the American Civil Rights movement.
In 1969, almost six years after President Kennedy’s death, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin fulfilled his wish when the Apollo 11 lander module touched down on the lunar surface.
Real Life
When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he planned to say the phrase “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But that’s not what the hundreds of millions of television viewers who were watching at the time heard!
Instead, most people agree that it sounded like he said “That’s one small step for man.” For years, critics claimed that Armstrong flubbed one of the most famous lines in human history. Armstrong himself claimed that he did say the missing “a,” but it was obscured by static and poor communications equipment.
In September of 2006, a new report claimed to confirm that the “a” really was spoken, but speech researchers haven’t verified the report’s findings. For now, Armstrong asks that quotes include the “a” in parentheses: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Etc.
Some people believe that the whole lunar landing never really happened—that it was a hoax. These people claim that technology just simply wasn’t up to landing on the moon, so scientists produced movies acting out the Apollo program in order to convince the Soviets—America’s enemies at the time—that we had already won the Space Race!
What is some of the “evidence?” Conspiracy theorists point out that photographs from the landing don’t show stars, which should be visible. But photographers answer that it would have been impossible to capture the bright white of the astronauts’ suits on the same film as dim, faraway stars.
Disbelievers also say that the flag in the pictures seems to be waving in the breeze—which doesn’t exist on the moon. But astronauts point out that you have to wiggle a post back and forth to plant it in the ground, which naturally makes the flag wave, breeze or no breeze!
If you’re still not convinced, consider this: 12 astronauts—carrying cameras!—landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972, and those who are still alive continue to assert that they did, in fact, go there, walk on the moon, and carry back a total of 841 pounds of rocks. Scientists all around the world have studied these rocks and agree that they simply couldn’t have come from Earth.
FYI Comic
Primary Source
Photographs from NASA that were put to the Internet on July 5, 2013.