Episode: 3960
Title: HPR3960: On The Road At Last
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3960/hpr3960.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:59:26

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3960 for Friday the 6th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, On the Road at Last.
It is part of the series travel.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
Things are done, and we start out on the road.
Hello.
This is Ahukah for Hacker Public Radio, welcoming you to another exciting episode in our ongoing
series on RV Travels and we're finally leaving.
After all of the preparation, the planning, the equipment maintenance, Wolverine freight
liner replaced our injector and we picked up the truck on the evening of December 15th.
Now we thought that loading the RV wouldn't take all that long, maybe an hour or two.
We were seriously mistaken in that estimate.
We spent all afternoon on the 16th and all morning on the 17th, so it was basically
a full day's work.
It was just as well that we made our travel legs shorter since we would once again arrive
at our first stop after dark, but we got to Lake Haven, just south of Indianapolis, and
they had us in a spot right by the entrance.
So it was pretty easy to get settled for the night.
Thankfully, we didn't have all of the problems we had with our first RV trip, so it was
a much easier departure this time.
Then on December 18th, up and early to drive to Marion, Illinois for our second stop.
Now it wasn't too bad of a drive since we learned to make each leg a bit shorter.
We got to the campground by 3pm, which is perfect, quickly got settled, but we're learning
about a big cold snap hitting the area we're driving into.
It's an Arctic air mass settling over the southern central US, and they say it is rare.
I suspectedably less rare going forward as this is exactly what climate change causes.
And I came down with a head cold that had me sniffling and sneezing, but I had to keep
driving in any case.
And I couldn't take drugs for the cold since they would reduce my alertness, and you don't
need that when towing our beast.
Thankfully, we now have a heated water hose that is good to 20 degrees below zero.
Now that's Fahrenheit, that's approximately minus 29 Celsius, if I've done the conversion
correctly.
But it turns out that we did make a small mistake, we survived it.
We had somehow gotten the idea that we should let the water drip from the faucet overnight
to prevent freezing, that only made our gray tank overflow into the shower and flood
the bathroom.
We won't make that mistake again.
But it meant dealing with the issue first thing upon getting up, which is always fun.
Now, after breakfast, we hit the road again to go to Memphis.
Memphis is right on the Mississippi River, and our RV Park is actually the Tom Sawyer
RV Park in West Memphis, which is across the river in Arkansas.
Now we went from Illinois, South, crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri down by the
Boatheal, and through there into Arkansas.
As we drove, we discussed the situation and decided not to actually do anything in Memphis
since I needed to rest up and throw off this cold.
I was happy to do so.
And Cheryl had brought along a few COVID tests just in case, so we tested me.
We got back a negative, so this was just an ordinary head cold.
Our RV was parked right in the bank of the Mississippi River, and we could see and hear
barges going up and down the river.
There were things I wanted to do in Memphis.
There's a Civil Rights Museum that I wanted to see.
There's some music stuff I wanted to see.
I had no interest in anything having to do with Elvis Presley, but in any event, throwing
off the cold was important, particularly at the start of several months of traveling.
So we spent a couple of nights there in Memphis as part of our policy of not spending too
many days consecutive days driving.
Then the next thing we did on the 21st, we left.
I was starting to feel better at this point.
We packed up and headed for our next stop, Huntsville, Alabama, which is home of the US Space
and Rocket Center, the Redstone Arsenal, the Marshall Space Flight Center, and you get
the picture.
This is where Werner von Braun and his German rocket scientists kickstarted the US Space
Program, and it was one of the NASA centers I wanted to visit on this trip.
Now the weather in Huntsville was reasonably mild when we arrived, but we knew that the
forecast for the following night had temperatures dropping well below freezing, and in an RV
you need to take measures.
So we planned on getting a full refill of our propane and bought some reflectics to put
in the windows to keep you in heat.
We expected that the US Space and Rocket Center would be closed over the weekend for Christmas
Eve and Christmas Day, but because of the cold, we learned it would also be closed on
Friday the 23rd, so Thursday and Monday would be our two chances to visit.
We'll just have to make the most of it, and we'll have a three-day weekend off to relax.
We're staying at the RV Park of the Space and Rocket Center, it's nice, but fairly plain.
The roads definitely need work.
They are in awful shape, and it popped a piece of trim off of our RV, which Cheryl later
was able to fix.
There is also no Wi-Fi at this park.
Unfortunately, I prepared for this by purchasing a soulless light Wi-Fi hot spot, and it does
give us excellent connectivity.
Now, December 22nd at the US Space and Rocket Center.
So tonight we face the big freeze, so after breakfast we went to top off one of our propane
tanks and then went to the US Space and Rocket Center, which is not far from the camp
around.
In fact, when the weather's nice, it's within walking distance, but since it was the
end of December, we drove anyway.
The center proved to be a marvelous place.
If you've ever heard of space camp, well, this is where it happens.
In the summer, kids come here to go through some of the activities involved in astronaut
training and learning to work in teams.
There are rides aimed at the kids, but that's not what we were here for.
Knowing we would come back on Monday, we didn't try to cram in everything in one day,
which is a good thing, since my back was in bad shape by the time we left.
Now, we got our bearings at the front desk, where we were helped to pick items and buy
tickets.
We started with a fantastic Apollo 11 virtual reality experience, where they put the
headset on you.
You start at Kennedy, you blast off into space, went to the moon, landed with Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Alder, and then returned.
It only lasted about 20 minutes, but it was amazing.
Then we went to the adjoining hall to look at the exhibits for about half an hour before
going to the planetarium for a show about the new James Webb Space Telescope.
We then went back to the front desk to discuss what to do for the afternoon.
We decided we would get lunch, then take a couple of the included tours.
The first of the tours was about the ISS, the International Space Station.
This is a joint effort involving 15 countries, and all 15 have sent people up there to work.
The ISS is primarily a facility for doing scientific experiments, and we got to sit in a mock
cup of the control room of Marshall Space Flight Center located here in Huntsville.
There are three main NASA centers, Marshall, Houston, and Kennedy.
Marshall is responsible for managing the science activities.
Kennedy handles all of the launches, and Houston is where mission control is located.
Mission control is responsible for the overall mission, and in particular for the well-being
of the astronauts.
We got a 15-minute presentation on the ISS, then walked through a mock-up that showed
a lot of the equipment and facilities available to the astronauts when they're on the station
in orbit.
From there we walked outside, because it still wasn't very cold, and checked out the mock-up
of the shuttle rockets before walking over to the Saturn building.
There is a full-size replica of a Saturn V rocket outside, and it's very large, though
the new space launch system is slightly smaller, oddly.
We went inside and met Dale who would do our tour.
At first it looked like we might be the only ones, but a few more people showed up just
as we were getting started.
Dale started at the beginning, talking about pioneers like Robert Goddard, Constantine
Seal Kofsky, and Herman Oberth.
Then showed us a replica of the V2 rocket the Nazis developed.
And of course the leader of the German team, Werner von Braun, made very sure to surrender
to the Americans and not the Russians, as World War II was coming to an end.
He and his team were integrated into the Army's missile team, and when the Army decided to
centralize all of their missile researchers at the Redstone Arsenal here in Huntsville,
von Braun came here.
The US thought they were ahead in this research, until in 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik.
Eisenhower, who was president at the time, had initially assigned the Navy responsibility
for the US satellite launch in response.
But the Navy rocket crashed on the launch pad and was called Kofutnik by the press.
Von Braun's Army team begged to be given a chance and did ultimately succeed.
For the next few years the Soviets kept ahead though.
The Soviets launched the first animal into space, a dog named Leica in November of 57.
The first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in April of 1961.
And that flight was also an orbital flight, so that was the first orbital flight.
And the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkoda, in June of 1963.
Meanwhile the US launched the Explorer I in January of 1958, three months later than
the Soviets, a monkey named Ham in January 61, three years later than the Soviets, Alan
Shepherd in a suborbital flight in May of 61, a month later than Yuri Gagarin's flight,
and John Glenn in an orbital flight in February 1962, ten months later.
And finally the first American woman in space was Sally Ride, and that was in June 1983,
twenty years later than the Soviets.
So the Linkennity asked Congress to make the commitment to the moon landing in May 1961.
We had lagged the Soviets at every step, and had only succeeded in sending a man on a suborbital
flight.
That meant it was a very ambitious program.
Now Mercury was the first phase.
This involved sending up a single astronaut at a time.
The third Mercury launches when John Glenn did the first US orbital flight.
Mercury was using redstone rockets, named after the redstone arsenal where Von Brown's
team was working.
Phase two is Gemini, where pairs of astronauts were sent up.
We saw mockups of both the Mercury Castle and the Gemini Castle, and they were really
small.
Gemini was where they experimented with spacewalks and with rendezvous and docking procedures.
Phase three was the Apollo program where teams of three astronauts would test the procedures
for leaving Earth orbit and heading for the moon and ultimately landing.
We saw all of the parts of the Saturn V rockets they used and the equipment.
The Saturn V rocket was made up of stages, because it took enormous amounts of fuel to
develop the thrust to live everything, and much of the fuel was burned just to lift the
rest of the fuel.
The first stage would get the rocket up to a speed of about 4,000 miles an hour, which
is not nearly enough to get an orbit.
Orbital speed is about 17,500 miles an hour, but when the fuel in the first stage was used
up, the stage was jettisoned to reduce weight.
The second stage would get you to 15,000 miles an hour, then it too was jettisoned.
The third stage would get you to 17,500 miles per hour, that gets you in the orbit, and
then the engine would shut off.
When you were in the right position to hit the moon, it would be restarted to move you
out of orbit and on a course to reach the moon.
Leaching the moon takes longer than you think.
The moon is about 240,000 miles from the earth, and if you start with a velocity of, say,
20,000 miles an hour, you might think you'd get there in 12 hours, but it actually took
days.
There's two reasons for this.
First the moon is moving, so you can't go straight to it, and you don't have the
ton of fuel to play with, so you use a human transfer orbit, which looks like a gentle
curve that lets you arrive at a point where the moon will be in some days.
Now secondly, this is what people often forget, the earth's gravity is slowing you down
as you move towards the moon.
You are still being tugged by the earth's gravity, so between those things, the trip takes
three days instead of 12 hours.
At the moon, the lunar excursion module, LEM, took two of the astronauts down to the
moon while the third astronaut stayed in the command module in orbit around the moon.
The LEM had two components, the lander and the return.
Now the lander was the base and it stayed on the moon.
The return had just enough fuel to blast off from the surface of the moon and rendezvous
with the command module in orbit around the moon.
Later missions added a rover to the LEM.
Once the return had docked, the last bit of the LEM was jettisoned, and then later flights
was deliberately crashed on the moon because they had placed seismometers there to measure
ground vibrations.
Then, with all the three astronauts back in the command module, it would return to earth.
Now at earth, the astronauts would get into the capsule for landing and the command module
would be jettisoned.
The capsule would then enter the earth's atmosphere, but a heat shield would protect the astronauts.
Three parachutes would help to slow the capsule before it hit the ocean.
We saw one of the parachutes and the actual capsule from Apollo 16, and we could see
how burned it had been.
We also saw a mock-up of the capsule which you could get in, and Cheryl did.
I decided not to because the question was not whether I could get in, but could I get
out again.
My back was getting pretty sore by this point, and I did have the VR experience of being
in the capsule.
We left after this, but it was a fantastic day, and there was still more to see him
do on Monday.
Back at the RV we made dinner, Cheryl cut out reflectics panels to put in the windows.
At around 9.30, the wind got pretty strong, and the RV was shaking, but eventually it
calmed down.
But we knew the bad weather had arrived.
Well, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging
you to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye!
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