Wednesday evening or Thursday morning, depending on which time zone you are in, my graduate institution hosted a distinguished lecturer in the person of Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director for the Apollo missions. More excitingly, a live stream was provided so that those not physically present could watch. I welcome the future of technology. Webcasts for everyone! This would have been more exciting still had it not required me to get up at 3am, but it is sometimes necessary to make sacrifices of sleep. Besides which, Mr. Kranz was mentioning things like the NASA satellite tracking station on Zanzibar in the 60s, and how back in the day the term "computer" referred to a woman with a calculator, and computing machines were as big as rooms, so I was completely justified in spending class time talking about this lecture, right? Also, while my students are more than willing to repeat after me that one should keep learning even after graduating and becoming a teacher, if they are like many teachers I have encountered, they won't, so I should at least set a good example and let them know that I am attending a lecture.
Ok fine, I just wanted to talk about this because moon missions are cool. Especially from the point of view of the man in the control room who heard the screams of the crew of Apollo 1 as they died and remembered how good the cigars tasted after the crew of Apollo 13 was recovered safely. For all that the lecture was occasionally sidetracked with platitudes (because I think Gene Kranz had been told to make the lecture about the importance of teamwork so he would abruptly go into talking about how mission control had had to learn teamwork and about themselves without providing any detail beyond buzzwords), just hearing the flight director tell us the story of the Apollo missions was well worth the price of 3am sleep.
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