Space.com's Tariq Malik gives you a preview of the 'Apollo: When We Went the Moon' exhibit at NYC's Intrepid Museum.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00Hello, space fans. It's Tarek Malik, Editor-in-Chief of Space.com here at the Intrepid
00:04Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York City. And they have this great new Apollo when we went to
00:12the moon that we're going to take a quick walk through. It'll run from late March to September
00:16of 2024. And it's pretty amazing. Of course, this is where the Space Shuttle Enterprise
00:24is home, where it finds its home, basically. You can come here to New York,
00:28see a space shuttle, or the first space shuttle, actually. And they've kind of redecorated.
00:33This was like the 3-2-1 landing walkthrough on the way in to see the space shuttle. In here,
00:42instead of that, you see JFK talking about his historic Rice speech. Why does...
00:52We choose to go to the moon, he says.
00:58We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are
01:09easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best
01:16of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win for the others, too.
01:28That's the September 12th, 1962, his speech at Rice University during the early days of the space race to the moon. Of course, by then,
01:40Yuri Gagarin had already flown in space in 1961. And here's the entrance proper. You've got the logo for Apollo when we went to the moon.
01:49Sputnik above here. That's that beeping noise that you hear when it launched on April 12th. Or, pardon me, on October of...
02:01What was that? 1957? April 12th, 1961 is when Gagarin launched. And of course, in case you missed it, there's the space shuttle Enterprise right above me.
02:11It's doing all of the fun things that it's doing. You come here, you'll see a Warner Von Braun's desk mock-up, including all the tools they used to use to calculate all of those. I see some calipers, I see a slide rule.
02:28You've got the desk themselves. Here's Warner Von Braun talking about satellite communications and whatnot, weather satellites.
02:36Warner Von Braun, and Sergei Korlev, the Soviet space program chief, and the original rockets that launched Sputnik into space, as well as the Jupiter-C that launched Explorer 1, 2.
02:53After you see those early days, you'll come in and you'll see the space suit, a space suit of the type worn by Yuri Gagarin on that first flight, including the rockets that they used.
03:10And there's the wheel, the nose landing gear of Space Shuttle Enterprise.
03:14Then, these are one-seater spacecraft. You've got Vostok on the one side, right over here.
03:21And then, of course, there's the Mercury-Redstone and the Atlas, the Mercury Atlas, for the Mercury flights, both suborbital and orbital.
03:30Then you get the Gemini and Voskod, two-seater rockets.
03:35And then the Soyuz and the Saturn rockets for the three-seaters, plus the Saturn V, of course, which sent people to the Moon.
03:43And the Moon rockets, the Saturn V Moon rocket with the N-1 Soviet rocket, which never actually made it to the Moon.
03:52You can see a launch of a Saturn V over here with Apollo 4.
03:57That's gorgeous.
03:59And then kind of a glimpse of what else was going on.
04:01It wasn't just NASA and the space race going on.
04:04You had, of course, the Civil Rights Movement.
04:06You had the Vietnam War all going on at that same time.
04:09So there is a lot of context about it all.
04:14Of course, here's a Mercury space capsule.
04:17The USS Intrepid was actually used to retrieve one Mercury mission, as well as a two-seater Gemini mission.
04:23And over here is a theater to experience the Saturn V launch up close with the sound and the fury of its engines.
04:36Now, when they landed on the Moon, it was one of the most watched events of all time, including that Moonwalk there.
04:49So you've got kind of how everyone would have experienced it if they weren't home.
04:54They'd have to go to a...
04:57Can you hear that? Let's see.
04:58One giant leap for mankind.
05:03People watching it on the front of an electronic shop.
05:10You can see their spacesuits here, too.
05:12This is the Apollo A7L spacesuit.
05:17This is just kind of like the body part of it.
05:19You can see all the attachments and whatnot for it.
05:21But if you come over here, some newspaper headlines, you'll see the actual hand casts of the Apollo 11 astronauts used to make their customized gloves.
05:36You've got Michael Collins over here with his wedding ring still on his fingers, plus Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as well.
05:44And then this is what went around the internal parts of their gloves.
05:51You've got their glove covers here, their EBA gloves, their boot covers, so they can walk on the Moon.
06:00And their helmets, too, right over here.
06:05Of course, this is the center helmet with a little pad for their head, and it's all glass.
06:09Then it has a visor cover, and then the visor itself to protect their skin, their eyes, and everything.
06:14On the surface of the Moon.
06:16And, of course, over here is a Saturn V, a scale version of it.
06:23But out of all that, only this part came back.
06:26The crew capsule part.
06:29They threw away the lander.
06:31They threw away all the rest of the rocket.
06:34Brought everything back in this capsule.
06:37You'll also be able to walk on the Moon, see what that was like here.
06:44You can see, you can see there's like a little lunar surface that you can walk on.
06:55You can get up close with a foot pad for an Apollo spacecraft, and see a Soyuz spacecraft right here.
07:08And, of course, this is what cosmonauts fly in.
07:12You can kind of get up and close inside and see they get three people in there.
07:16And, of course, over here is the lunar rover.
07:31The first electric car on the Moon.
07:33Looks like you can actually hop into the driver's seat and take it for a spin.
07:41Or at least imagine.
07:44But that is an epic right underneath the back of the space shuttle.
07:50And, of course, you'll close out the exhibit by seeing kind of the early visions for going to Mars with this giant winged plane.
07:59Of course, now we have a helicopter on Mars that has finished its mission.
08:02We've got the International Space Station.
08:05We've got Apollo-Soyuz that followed Skylab after the Apollo program.
08:09And Shuttle Mirror, which followed up on that international cooperation in the 90s and led to the International Space Station work.
08:19Plus, the space launch system kind of capping it off and leading to a new generation of Moon exploration.
08:28Of course, Artemis 1 launched to the Moon without a crew in 2022.
08:35And in 2025, NASA hopes to send four astronauts to the Moon.
08:40Again, they're going to circle it like Apollo 8.
08:43And then come back before the first crewed moon landing of the Artemis program, Artemis 3, in 2026.
08:53But if you are in New York, this is definitely an exhibit you're going to want to see.
08:57You won't want to miss it, space fans.
09:00It's absolutely epic.
09:01It's the largest traveling exhibit that the Intrepid has ever put on.
09:07And it's only here through summer 2024.
09:13So with that, I'm Tariq Malik with space.com.
09:15And I will catch you all in the next one.
09:16Thanks a lot, space fans.
09:18Saturn V!
09:21Space Shuttle!
09:22That's the rear end.