NASA TV to Air ‘Spirit of Apollo’ Tribute from National Cathedral

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#1 NASA TV to Air ‘Spirit of Apollo’ Tribute from National Cathedral

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December 07, 2018
MEDIA ADVISORY M18-183
NASA TV to Air ‘Spirit of Apollo’ Tribute from National Cathedral
Contrasted against the stark, crater-marked lunar surface, the Earth is seen rising above the moon on Dec. 24, 1968. As Apollo 8 orbited the moon, Earth is 240,000 miles away. The sunset terminator is seen crossing Africa.<br />Credits: NASA/Bill Anders
Contrasted against the stark, crater-marked lunar surface, the Earth is seen rising above the moon on Dec. 24, 1968. As Apollo 8 orbited the moon, Earth is 240,000 miles away. The sunset terminator is seen crossing Africa.
Credits: NASA/Bill Anders
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This month marks the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission, which was the first to bring humans to another world as they orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve, 1968.

To commemorate this historic event in human spaceflight and NASA’s history, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum will present “Spirit of Apollo,” a program celebrating the milestone Apollo 8 mission, which brought humanity together and pushed the limits of exploration. The event will take place at 8 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 11, at Washington National Cathedral, 3101 Wisconsin Ave., N.W., Washington.

While the event, which requires tickets, is sold out to the general public, it will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

The evening’s program will include remarks by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Apollo 8 astronaut James Lovell, as well as Ellen Stofan, the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the National Air and Space Museum. There also will be remarks by leaders from the National Cathedral and Episcopal Church, including the Most Rev. Michael Curry, who will discuss the spiritual meaning of exploration. In addition, the program will include video presentations and a choral performance recreating the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast, as well as a lighting of the National Cathedral and its space window.

Media who wish to attend the event must contact Alison Mitchell at mitchellac@si.edu or 202-633-2376; or Amy Stamm at stamma@si.edu or 202-633-2392.

To learn more about the Apollo 8 mission and hear the crew’s Christmas Eve message to the people of Earth, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/history/fea ... llo_8.html

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#2 Re: NASA TV to Air ‘Spirit of Apollo’ Tribute from National Cathedral

Post by luke strawwalker »

Interesting, since the "reading from Genesis" got NASA sued by the Godless libtard atheists of the day, though it ultimately (and quite correctly) came to nothing in the end... just more intolerant douchebags making asses of themselves... Many people at the time, after all the protests in Vietnam, the terrible riots and divisions in the country following things like Kent State and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and all the other nonsense going on at the time, many people said that Apollo 8 "saved 1968"... It was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year with little to hold our head high for... and cemented the fact that we had "beaten the Russians to the Moon", at least the first to orbit it (and Apollo 11 seven months later would seal the victory in the Space Race once and for all).

You know, history is really amazing when you stop to think about it. This past November 11th was the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War (World War I), which ended on 11-11-1918, in what came to be known as "Armistice Day" and later was named "Veterans Day". It brought an end to four years of bitter fighting and warfare on a scale and level of savagery and killing never before seen by man, as the fruit of the Industrial Age was brought to bear on modern warfare-- the first use of poison gas, and the widespread use of machine guns, heavy rapid-fire artillery, airplanes, dreadnoughts, and tanks. It marked the first large-scale genocide, which would be a recurrent theme and would multiply in enormity as the 20th century wore on... Yet on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, 100 years ago, the guns at last fell silent. It was only 15 years after the Wright Brothers had first flown their first plane at Kitty Hawk...

50 years, 1 month, and 13 days later, the first men had reached the Moon, and were orbiting 60 miles above it at about 2,300 mph, in Apollo 8... 245,000 miles from home. Having been hurled 3 days across the void after accelerating to a speed 10 times faster than rifle bullet atop the Saturn V... And now the radio waves washing back across Earth, weren't the feeble transmissions of early Marconi radio sets with garbled reports from artillery spotters in wood and cloth biplanes over the Western Front in Flander's fields or the shattered French countryside, but the faint, distant sounds of men looking down with their own eyes for the first time on the barren, forbidding surface of the Moon, shattered and churned into tumultuous craters-- not by shells and mines of a pointless war that ended up changing everything in its aftermath, but by the ongoing processes that formed the solar system and made life possible countless ages ago, and continue to this very day... The voice of men, coming not as conquerors or the vanguard of an invading army, but as people, trying to express through words their wonder at the world they were themselves seeing face to face, as no other men had ever done before in all of time, and trying to convey their hopes and dreams for all mankind, as ambassadors and explorers for all the rest of us who had to remain behind... and expressing them using the timeless words transcribed from the Creator from time immemorial...

Just 65 years had passed since that first feeble flight at Kitty Hawk, flying a short hop in the air across the sandy ground not even as long as the wingspan of a modern passenger jet... Now men were circling another world...

SO, here we are, 50 years on from that "silent night", when the whole world stopped for a moment to listen to the Bible being read by three men, a quarter of a million miles from home across the void of space, circling the Moon... What have we done since??

What have we done since?? How have we built upon what they did, what the generations before did to make it possible to put those men there? All I can see is, we laid the torch down after getting out of the starting gate; as soon as possible after declaring the victory, we tossed it all aside and turned away from looking outward, looking only inward (as in "navel gazing", not any great exercise in self-awareness or self-discovery).

SO, now, 50 years on, 100 years from the terrible end of what at that time was the most terrible war in human history (yet as was prophesied, was only a "cease fire for 20 years", and WW2 would far outstrip the barbarity and suffering of WW1) we look to bask in the glory of the achievements made 50 years ago, when humankind reached out its hand into the universe and left this Earth for the first time... Just four short years later, it was over. December 1972, the dream ended, mankind turned away, turned inward, dropped the torch, sat back down in the mud, and pretended it never happened... so much so that the technologically and scientifically illiterate now claim boldly it never happened and never COULD happen, mired in their own ignorance and stupidity.

So where do we go from here?? What do we want people, 50 or 100 years from now, to remember about US... about OUR time?? We'll all be gone... I've been watching "The Great War" on YouTube (I HIGHLY recommend it-- it's a week-by-week retelling of the events of the First World War, as they happened, in real time, 100 years after the events originally unfolded... it just celebrated the end of the Great War on Armistice Day on November 11th, but all the videos are still there for the entire series.) It's haunting, looking at the old film footage, looking at a world that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Oh, we can go to the same places, still see the same buildings and same fields, see the same objects from that past age, but when you watch those old films, every living thing you see, every person, every animal, is long-since dead... even a newborn infant would be over 100 years old now... and maybe 1 in a million has survived this long, let alone any who were actually photographed. In 100 years, we'll all be dead too... Oh, perhaps a FEW will have, by some miracle of modern technology or medicine, still be breathing, but probably not in any condition to do much else... IF the world continues on the prosperous and more or less peaceful path it's been on. If not...

But what will people remember about us?? What did we do?? What have we done since??

In 100 years, in a thousand years, if people still exist and didn't nearly obliterate themselves and destroy their civilization and all memory from it, people WILL remember when mankind first left Earth for the Moon. They won't remember the stock market, they won't remember the Kardassians, they won't remember the idiots kneeling at NFL games or the empty ponitification of politicians, hollow words from hollow men (and women), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing... They won't remember rap music or empty non-culture or silly fashion fads, or who won the baking championship on Food Network... What WILL they remember about us?? "Oh yeah, THOSE guys-- those generations that just sat around navel gazing for decades, until FINALLY *something interesting happened* (hopefully not "something TERRIBLE happened") and *someone else* came along and picked up where the first ones left off... "

What have we done since??

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
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