Sans avoir promis la lune à nos lecteurs et lectrices, nous honorons l'engagement pris sur ce blog il y a cinq ans, dans un article intitulé « AD ASTRA PER ASPERA . (Par des sentiers ardus jusqu'aux étoiles)...Annonce d'un article à paraître le 20 juillet 2019 (!) »
À l'époque, j'avais mentionné les efforts fournis pour conserver à ce blog son intérêt et ses attraits, et je les ai décrit comme un échange constant d'idées, de suggestions, de résultats de recherches et de dur labeur permettant de poursuivre ce bien modeste projet.
Par la suite j'avais écrit :
« Dimanche dernier, le 20 juillet 2014, en conduisant ma femme au marché des agriculteurs d'Hollywood, j'ai garé ma voiture près d'un Starbucks sur le Walk of Fame (L'allée des Illustres / La promenade des célébrités ), juste à l'endroit où une étoile a été dédiée aux trois astronautes du programme spatial américain Apollo, qui ont atterri sur la lune exactement 45 ans plus tôt – le 20 juillet 1969.
Tout cela pour assurer nos lecteurs que nous avons bien l'intention de poursuivre et de développer le blog ad astra, tout en sachant que nous n'y parviendrons que per aspera.
Comme Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin et Michael Collins, nous visons haut. Et parce que nos articles sont programmés longtemps à l'avance, nous avons déjà coché dans notre agenda la date du 20 juillet 2019, afin de nous rappeler qu'il faudrait, ce jour-là, célébrer le 50ème anniversaire du premier alunissage.
De la sorte, nous ferons un deuxième petit pas pour l'homme et un deuxième pas de géant pour l'humanité – et pour nos lecteurs ».
Maintenant, - après une période de cinq longus années, qui nous paraît depuis des lunes - nous présentons ci-dessous, un article rédigé à notre intention par Donna Scott, dont le mari, Terry Hampton, se tient à l'extrême droite de la photo de groupe dans l'image qui accompagne l'article.
Nous recherchons quelqu'un possédant une excellente maîtrise du français pour traduire l'article ci-dessous.
Jonathan G.
Los Angeles
One Small Letter, One Giant Leap For All
Left : Donna Scott, who wrote the article that follows for Le Mot juste. Donna's contributions to this blog always reach great heights and in this one she throws much (moon)light on an aspect of space missions not always known to the public.
Right : 1995 - Astronauts Charlie Precourt (a veteran of four space flights, who logged over 932 hours in space) and Bonnie Dunbar (a veteran of five space flights, who has logged more than 1,208 hours) with Terry Hampton, Donna's husband, on the extreme right. Terry has been an engineer for forty years, working throughout the United States on various projects. His space specific projects have been for 15 space shuttle missions, the International Space Station and the Delta Rocket. He is now co-owner with Donna Scott in the Hampton Scott Group, an engineering company specializing in satellite design work.
It began as one man’s inspirational speech challenging his fellow Americans: the President of the United States wanting to put an end to Russia’s space superiority. It climaxed with one man’s words as he stepped onto the Moon. Those words bestowed the Americans’ glory upon all the people on Earth.
It was the height of the Cold War when President Kennedy proclaimed in 1961 that by the end of the decade Americans would go to the Moon. NASA had already told him there was just a 50/50 chance of successfully making it safely there and back. For the remainder of the decade, America transformed from a technically naïve nation to one that succeeded in its Mission, taking along half a billion witnesses out of a global population of three billion.
The July 1969 issue of Esquire magazine showed little faith in the words the astronauts would utter upon landing on the Moon. “While the space program is poised on the brink of a truly epoch-making triumph of engineering, it is also headed for a rhetorical train wreck,” it pompously reported. “The principal danger is not that we will lose the life of an astronaut on the Moon, but that the astronauts will murder English up there.”
And, so, it featured in that issue, titled Le Mot Juste for the Moon, musings of famous people on what the astronauts’ words should be. Charles Fishman, author of “One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon,” cites a sampling of contributions by notable novelists and poets; Ayn Rand: “What hath man wrought?” Gwendolyn Brooks: “Here there shall be peace and love.” Vladimir Nabokov: “You want a lump in (the astronaut’s) throat to obstruct the wisecrack.” Kurt Vonnegut: “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?” Truman Capote: “So far so good.”
There were more such quotations, but they only go to prove that none of them could have, or did, do better than Neil Armstrong, when he said: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” He always insisted afterwards that the microphone in his space helmet dropped out when he uttered that “a.” Without that smallest of letters, “a”, it’s merely a redundant statement, because “man” and “mankind” becomes synonymous (one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind). His actual utterance distinguishes the single man’s step being for all mankind: inclusive brotherhood of the entire earth’s human race.
With that singular letter (a), we are reminded that it takes individuals to step forward to achieve collective goals, which is highlighted in another of Fishman’s anecdotes: the making of the space suits by Playtex, the makers of the bras and girdles of the 1950s and 1960’s.
The technical challenges the space suit would have to meet were many. However, it also had to be flexible enough to give them the freedom to move about, bend, twist, to climb and move their arms and hands. Their gloves had to allow them the nimbleness to get things done.
Playtex brought skilled seamstresses over from its consumer products factories to sew the suit’s 21 layers. “I was sewing [latex] baby pants,” said Eleanor Foraker, who would go on to be a spacesuit assembly supervisor, “and an engineer came to me and asked me if I would mind trying something else.”
Seams in the spacesuits had to be sewn to the precision of the width of a single straight pin. Every stitch of every inch of spacesuit seam in every layer was counted to ensure quality and safety.
But that was just one problem to be solved. At the start of the program, there were no computers small and fast enough anywhere in the world that were needed to accompany them into space. A small computer was equivalent in size to 3 or 4 refrigerators lined up together. NASA couldn’t even send a computer the size of one refrigerator to the moon. MIT was hired to design and write the programs that would take Apollo to the Moon. They pioneered the technology of integrated circuits. The Apollo space flight computer was the first to use computer chips. A computer not much bigger than a briefcase, became the fastest, smallest, most nimble computer on earth.
But we also didn’t have great computer memory manufacturing technology at the time. And, so, once again craftswomen were brought in to solve the technical problem. However, this time it was weavers from textile mills factories who were brought in to weave every circuit by hand. It took two dozen women eight weeks, using long needles with wire to weave together the wires. With absolute attention and precision, every single 1 and 0 in the computer’s memory required a wire in exactly the right place. A single mis-wired strand meant the computer’s programs wouldn’t work properly—and might fail at some critical, potentially disastrous moment.
And then there were the three parachutes used in those crucial last 15 minutes to land the capsule into the earth’s sea, which were each 7200 square feet. Each one had to be hand sewn and folded for the mission. In the U.S., all persons who fold parachutes for human use must be certified by the FAA. At the time, there were only three individuals, two men and one woman, who had certifications. They were so important to the Mission, they weren’t allowed to travel in the same car together.
We love space. The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum on the Mall in Washington together with its companion facility at Dulles International Airport is the most-visited museum anywhere in the world, even more than the Louvre.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson are working on making affordable space travel available to ordinary people. Bezos is set on sending "space tourists" into sub-orbital flight. He says Blue Origin will be selling tickets next year, with company insiders suggesting they could go for up to $300,000 each. Like Blue Origin, Musk plans to one day send people into space on commercial flights. Virgin Galactic, Branson's company, plans to offer space flights for $250,000 per ticket for 2.5-hour flights.
Cultures have expressed our desire to touch the Moon and Stars for years. Adults repeat beloved childhood stories and rhymes to their own children e.g., “The Little Prince,” "Goodnight Moon” and “…the cow jumped over the moon.” Sinatra’s “Fly me to the Moon” and Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of “Moon River” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” are songs still played; the expression that something or someone sends us over the Moon are recognizable expressions that are part of our language.
But I have to look no further than my own engineer-husband, Terry Hampton, to know this.. As an aerospace engineer, he has worked on intriguing projects from the B-2 Bomber to James Cameron’s ride through the Pandora world of Avatar at Disneyworld. His favorite projects? Hands-down engineering design on 15 space shuttle missions as well as work on the International Space Station. “The coolest engineering experience has been to know that some of my work has gone up into space,” Terry says
He worked with Russian engineers to create a docking mechanism that would allow the space shuttle to dock with the non-standard hatch size of the Russian space station MIR. More important than docking was incorporating a design that allowed the shuttle to very quickly disengage from the MIR in case of fire. Terry’s favorite project was designing an oxygen valve that could not be turned off accidentally by astronauts during extra vehicular activity. Part of the engineering research involved taking into account the size of the astronaut’s finger and thickness of the space suit glove (successfully designed for flexibility by Playtex) to insure that only a deliberate action would cause the oxygen flow to stop. He’s yet another individual, like countless others, who have contributed to the dream of venturing into the great unknown.
Neil Armstrong understood the power of language. His emphatic insistence that his statement included an “a” before “small step” reminds that it takes the accumulation of all those singular people to achieve something monumental.
Carl Fishman says that even 50 years later, people around the world don’t say that America went to Moon; they say “we went to the Moon”. Neil Armstrong understood the power of simple language and gave that gift to all of us.
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