Ad Astra by Dallas Campbell

Author:Dallas Campbell [Campbell, Dallas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

There are great similarities between how we dreamt we would go to the moon and how we actually did it.

Well you know what, there’s even a better one. Jules Verne wrote about three guys that went to the moon in a capsule, just like we did.

And they left from Florida!

Cape Kennedy or Canaveral was his launch site. He had that part of it all figured out, and he didn’t know anything about rockets. Do you think that he was right about so much of what he wrote because he knew enough about it even back then? Or did somebody read his book and say, that’s what we’ve got to do? I’ve never really resolved that question. But he was way, way ahead of us. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to get fired out of a cannon at 25,000 mph. Would there be anything left of you? I think you might be a puddle.

I think a lot of early rocket design solutions came as a direct result of trying to solve Jules Verne’s fundamental projectile design flaw.

Robert Goddard was part of that, Tsiolkovsky was part of it, Korolev was a big, big guy in that, von Braun was huge.

You must have known von Braun.

He was a very interesting guy. I met him at the Cape for the formal launch and I introduced him to my parents, by name: Tiny and Helen. And about three years later he was doing a series of talks through the country and he stopped at my hometown and gave a talk at the college there, Jackson Community College. My folks found out he was coming in town so they went to the talk. They were sitting about halfway back, he saw them there, and he called them out by name: ‘Hey Tiny, hey Helen. Nice to see you.’ And I thought, man, there’s one slick politician.

He was a real showman, wasn’t he?

Oh he was. Very charismatic. Very convincing and I think he made the whole thing possible.

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