NASA

Sooner or later

By Dave English

“If you’re going to go to the Moon, sooner or later you’ve got to go to the Moon.” Flight Director Glynn Linney, summing up the rationale for the Apollo 8 ‘go’ decision, NASA meetings, 1968. Quoted in the 2019 book Shoot for the Moon. This was a huge decision, a quantum step from Earth orbit flights.  Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence going out into deep space, and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing and then returned to Earth. The three astronauts were the first humans to see and photograph … Continue reading Sooner or later

Listen to your plane.

By Dave English

Former NASA chief astronaut and USAF test pilot Charlie Precourt has a good article in the July edition of EAA’s Sport Aviation magazine. It’s on the normalization of deviance. That’s something we learnt about from studying the Space Shuttle accidents. And something we can apply every time we go flying. Listen to your plane. Don’t let standards slip. Don’t normalize deviance. (Picture is damaged TPS tiles on the Space Shuttle Endeavor, NASA S118-E-06229)