Apollo 50: Apollo VIII, part 1

"There's no question that it was a coffin, and I'd have flown it gladly."
-Frank Borman to Congress, after the Apollo 1 fire

In spaceflight, there are "good" missions and "bad" missions. "Good" missions are the milestones: first man in space, first orbit, first spacewalk, first flight of a new vehicle, first lunar landing, first use of a lunar rover. "Bad" missions are the dull, routine ones: a two-week endurance test, for example, or a repeat flight of the previous mission.

Frank Borman began his NASA career getting bumped from a "good" mission to a "bad" one, and ended it getting bumped from a "bad" mission to a "good" one.

Apollo 7, part 3

"You've added two burns to this flight schedule, and you've added a urine water dump; and we have a new vehicle up here, and I can tell you at this point TV will be delayed without any further discussion until after the rendezvous. [...] We do not have the equipment out; we have not had an opportunity to follow setting; we have not eaten at this point. At this point, I have a cold. I refuse to foul up our time lines this way."
-CDR Wally Schirra to CAPCOMs Jack Swigert and Deke Slayton, 23 hours into Apollo 7's 11-day mission

"It was like having a ringside seat at the Wally Schirra B[****] Circus. [...] I told Deke [Slayton] straight out that this crew shouldn't fly again."
-Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft, in his 2001 memoir Flight: My Life in Mission Control

"I hope that the recognition you received today will restore some of your faith in your fellow travelers. We gave you a hard time once but you certainly survived that and have done extremely well since. You've done well by yourself, you've done well for NASA and I am frankly, very proud to call you a friend."
-Chris Kraft to Walter Cunningham, 2008

Apollo 7, part 2

"Deke [Slayton] said that we of the original seven are done, there's a whole new crew now. That I even got that Apollo flight was unusual. The second group was brought in to go to the Moon. We were supposed to be out of there by then. It just turned out they needed me, so I stayed for the Apollo 7 flight. That was unique."
-Wally Schirra

"By 1968, I saw a bureaucracy developing - the fun days were over."
-Wally Schirra

On February 26, 1966, six months to the day before a Command Module dubbed CM-012 arrived at the Kennedy Space Center and with five Gemini missions still to go, NASA launched its very first Apollo mission. Dubbed AS-201 (A for Apollo, S for Saturn), this launch consisted of the first flight of a Saturn IB and unmanned Apollo Command and Service Modules (CM and SM, respectively; CSM together).

Apollo 50: Apollo VII, part 1

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."
-John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

"All of us in the flights that followed were dependent on the Apollo 7 crew doing their job, so thanks Walt and Wally and Donn."
-Neil Armstrong, October 20, 2008

"23:58:03   (Music - JINGLE BELLS - from Spacecraft VI)"
-official Gemini 6 radio transcript

Righto. We've hit the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned Apollo mission, so it's time for me to nerd out at you.

Apollo 7 launched on October 11, 1968, but to tell the full story, you have to go back six years and start on October 3, 1962. That was the day that Wally Schirra, who would later command Apollo 7, orbited the Earth six times as the fifth American in space.

Lucas TTS 4: Puke Flytalker

PAAAAAAAAAART FOUR

If the Lucas had a text-to-speech device, episode 3

(the following day)

LI: Good morning, my liege.

GL: Good morning, interchangeable faceless lackey.

LI: Did you sleep well?

GL: Actually, after I rebooted, I found a movie on the internet called Jurassic World. Parts of it made my brain hurt but on the whole I found it a rather inoffensive soft reboot.

LI: Uh-huh.

If the Lucas had a text-to-speech device, episode 2

(after the Lucas AI has been given a stuffed Chewbacca doll to cling to, the conversation continues)

GL: Okay. So this crew of incompetent fucksticks were content to let Rian Johnson shit verbal diarrhea all over a script and then they went and shot it without doing any edits or asking anyone if it was any good.

LI: Basically, yeah.

GL: And part of this involved a romantic subtext between Rey and the guy with the stupidest fucking name ever.

LI: Kylo Ren.

GL: I forbid you to ever say that name ever again.

LI: Understood, my liege.

If the Lucas had a text-to-speech device

In the year 2058, with Disney's Star Wars lying in tattered ruins, one lowly Lucasfilm intern gets the idea to ask George Lucas for help restoring it. Unfortunately, Lucas has long since gone to the Great Big Death Star In The Sky, so the intern does the next best thing, reconstructing an AI out of old Lucas interviews (from before the prequels, naturally). The following is a transcript of their first conversation:

Legends of Tomorrow 3.17 - "Guest Starring John Noble"

Make America Grodd Again

The confused morality of Star Wars

I realized midway through Rogue One that I was actually watching a terrorist hagiography, so let's talk about that. (This post should not be taken anywhere near as seriously as my other rants, but I do intend it to be more serious than the "Alderaan had it coming" mentality some corners of the internet have. I may veer into r/EmpireDidNothingWrong territory here occasionally, and I hope you will take it as inoffensively as possible.)

ROGUE ONE is a movie, I guess

After squatting over the franchise and curling out The Farce Awakens, Disney decided to do a movie that didn't have any Skywalkers or Jedi in it. Finally! Because that was what the fans wanted!

Revenge of the Sith is awful

Fine. I'll do it.


I still can't get over a franchise called Star Wars - "war" being right there in the title - thinks that war is so egregious and abnormal that it has to highlight the fact that the galaxy is at war in the very first sentence of the opening crawl.

Attack of the Clones is awful

Right, I forgot that Clones is considered by some to be the worst Star Wars movie. There's a case for that, so long as you don't count the Disney Trilogy as Star Wars movies, a position I endorse.

Comics catch-up

Spoilers...

The Phantom Menace is not as awful as The Force Awakens

To demonstrate how bad The Farce Awakens was, I will now do a recap of The Phantom Menace in the same style.

The Farce Awakens is awful (again)

I feel the need to go back and explain in detail why this movie is awful. I will use the term "Empire" interchangeably with "First Order" because they are not significantly different. Same for "Rebellion" and "Resistance."

The difference between drawing an inference and writing the story yourself

I have a long, unhinged rant against The Farce Awakens in the pipe, but I need to make a fairly large digression, so I'm going to do that in a separate post. That's what this is.

Good writing and bad writing have something in common: they won't spell everything out for you. Good writing will allow you to draw your own inferences to fill in the gaps without forcing you to play logic games. Bad writing will basically force you to put up a big chart on your wall with strings running everywhere in order to justify some holes.

Let me give you an example of each.

In A New Hope, R2 is looking for Obi-Wan, who just happens to be living near Luke Skywalker. This feels like a contrivance to get Luke involved in the plot, right? Except, Obi-Wan was very good friends with Luke's father, and could reasonably be assumed to be living near Luke in order to watch over his (Obi-Wan's) unofficial godson. This is a) the truth, as revealed by Episode III, but it's also b) perfectly deducible from the information we're given in A New Hope itself. This is good writing.

For an example of bad writing, I'm going to go after my biggest quibble with the sacred cow of the franchise. That's right: there's actually an example of bad writing in The Empire Strikes Back. I have analyzed this five ways to Sunday and it makes no sense, and I'm sorry if I'm about to ruin the movie for someone. Here it is: when the Imperial fleet arrives at Hoth, Vader kills Admiral Ozzel because "[he] brought us out of lightspeed too close to the system," thus alerting the Rebels to their presence. I don't understand this. Wouldn't the Rebels detect the Empire as they came in-system anyway? Wasn't the smartest move possible to come out of lightspeed right on top of the Rebel base? Isn't that what Ozzel did? Didn't the Rebels already have their shield up because they'd found the probe droid and knew the Empire was on their way?

Okay, so the only way that this makes sense, that "bringing us out of lightspeed too close to the system" is a problem, is if Star Wars sensors work like the ones in the Honorverse. In that franchise, it's easier to detect a ship translating out of hyperspace than it is to detect one coasting into the system. In that case, the best plan for the Empire would have been to come out of lightspeed outside of the Hoth System and coast in. The problem is, this doesn't square with what little we see of military tactics elsewhere in the franchise. For example, in Return of the Jedi, the Rebels do the exact same thing in their assault on Death Star II; they come out of hyperspace practically right on top of it, and are surprised that the Empire knows they're coming. We're meant to believe that Admiral Ozzel is incompetent, and yet Admiral It's A Trapbar makes the exact same mistake in the very next movie?

So in this case, not only does it require a massive logical leap to make sense of Vader's line, but on closer examination, that logical leap doesn't hold up. This is bad writing.

Why I hate Kylo Ren: A Rant

So at this point it should be clear that I think that Disney's Weekend at Yoda's trilogy is worse than garbage. It is an abomination. It is like that one comic story where the villain brought a bunch of dead heroes back, except as evil, defiled zombies. (BTW, Blackest Night is excellent, READ IT.) Disney has murdered Star Wars and paraded its mutilated corpse around and demanded we pay them for the privilege of witnessing it all, or at least give them a thorough tongue-bath and pretend it's at least better than the prequels. Which it is not.

And there is nothing that infuriates me more than praise for The Actor Adam Driver (the words "The Actor" appearing by contractual obligation to remind us all what it is he's actually trying to do, although he was surprisingly good in Lincoln which only goes to show that he can, in fact, act when given proper writing and direction) and his character, Kylo Ren fuck that Kyle Ben fuck that Lord Hiltsaber fuck that Darth Wannabe no fuck that, we'll call him by his stupid made-up name. What the fuck is that? "Kylo" sounds like either a Space Lego or a bastardization of "caelo," the Latin for, I shit you not, "heaven." Okay, "caelo ren" would then conjure up imagery of splitting the heavens in two, which is badass as fuck, not that Kylo does anything of the sort, but only super-nerds would get that, and there's probably already a 40k character or weapon or ship or concept named Caelo Ren, because of course there is.

No, Rian, Force Flight is an abomination

SPOILERS for Disney's Weekend at Yoda's 2: The Next Cash-In

STAR WARS has a villain problem.

By Star Wars, I mean Disney's Star Wars, which is not Star Wars.