Story on you are astronaut who finds something strange on the moon for Bs Students
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At first, liftoff was slow and smooth. Surprisingly so, given the explosion happening more than 300 feet below him at the business end of the Saturn V rocket. Blasting off to the moon was like a car drifting forward when “you take your foot off the brake,” said Al Worden, who flew on Apollo 15 in 1971. Then the rumbling began, though not nearly as violent as he expected.
Charlie Duke, who flew on Apollo 16, had a different experience. The rattling was so intense, he wondered: “Is this thing working right? Is it supposed to shake this hard?”
Nearly three decades later, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger had the same sensation, but on a different rocket. Flying on space shuttle Discovery, she felt “the biggest kick in the back I have ever felt. I didn’t play football or anything. I don’t know if there’s any equivalency there. But it’s intense. And then all of a sudden everything is shaking. You’re shaking. The vehicle is shaking. . . . Our commander was like, ‘Wow, it’s like a lot of energy.’ And our pilot was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really something.’ And I was like, ‘Um, it’s crazy! Let’s put some perspective on this!’ ”
For former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, the math of the shuttle liftoff — applying 7 million pounds of thrust to get the 4.5 million pound rocket off the pad and then accelerate it to 24 times the speed of sound in 8.5 minutes — added up to an experience that made her body feel like it was ready for marshmallows and a mold: “It was like Jell-O inside.”