Apollo Exhibit At NYC's Intrepid Museum

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Space.com's Tariq Malik gives you a preview of the 'Apollo: When We Went the Moon' exhibit at NYC's Intrepid Museum.

Transcript

00:00Hello Space Fans! It's Tarek Malek, Editor-in-Chief of Space.com here at the Intrepid Sea, Air and

00:05Space Museum in New York City and they have this great new Apollo when we went to the moon that

00:12we're going to take a quick walk through. It'll run from late March to September of 2024 and it's

00:19pretty amazing. Of course this is where the Space Shuttle Enterprise is home, where it finds its

00:26home basically. You can come here to New York, see a Space Shuttle, well the first Space Shuttle

00:31actually, and they've kind of redecorated. This was like the 3-2-1 landing walk through on the

00:38way in to see the Space Shuttle in here. Instead of that you see JFK talking about his historic

00:49speech, why does we choose to go to the moon, he says.

01:03We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing not because they are easy but

01:10because they are hard.

01:29That's the September 12, 1962, his speech at Rice University

01:34during the early days of the space race to the moon. Of course by then Yuri Gagarin had already

01:39flown in space in 1961 and here's the entrance proper. You've got the logo for Apollo when we

01:45went to the moon. Sputnik above here, that's that beeping noise that you hear

01:53when it launched on April 12th, or pardon me, on October, what was that, 1957? April 12th,

02:011961 is when Gagarin launched and of course, in case you missed it, there's the Space Shuttle

02:06Enterprise right above me, doing all of the fun things that it's doing.

02:14You come here, you'll see a Warner Von Braun's desk mock-up including all the tools they used

02:19to use to calculate all of those, I see some calipers, I see a slide rule, you've got the

02:27desk themselves, here's Warner Von Braun talking about satellite communications and whatnot,

02:33weather satellites, Warner Von Braun and Sergei Korolev, the Soviet space program chief and the

02:42original rockets that launched Sputnik into space as well as the Jupiter-C that launched Explorer 1,

02:512. After you see those early days, you'll come in and you'll see the spacesuit that a spacesuit

03:00of the type worn by Yuri Gagarin on that first flight, including the rockets that they used

03:08and there's the wheel, the nose landing gear of Space Shuttle Enterprise.

03:13Then, these are one-seater spacecraft, you've got Vostok on the one side,

03:18right over here, and then of course, there's the Mercury-Redstone and the Atlas,

03:22the Mercury-Atlas for the Mercury flights, both suborbital and orbital.

03:27Then you get the Gemini and Voskhod, two-seater rockets, and then the Soyuz and the Saturn

03:36rockets for the three-seaters, plus the Saturn V of course, which sent people to the Moon.

03:40Then, the Moon rockets, the Saturn V Moon rocket with the N1 Soviet rocket, which never actually

03:50made it to the Moon. You can see a launch of a Saturn V over here with Apollo 4.

03:57That's gorgeous. Then, kind of a glimpse of what else was going on. It wasn't just NASA and the

04:03space race going on. You had, of course, the Civil Rights Movement, you had the Vietnam War,

04:07all going on at that same time. There is a lot of context about it all.

04:14Of course, here's a Mercury space capsule. The USS Intrepid was actually used to retrieve

04:19one Mercury mission as well as the two-seater Gemini mission.

04:26Over here is a theater to experience the Saturn V launch up close with the sound

04:35and the fury of its engines.

04:39Now, when they landed on the Moon, it was one of the most watched events of all time,

04:47including that Moonwalk there. You've got how everyone would have experienced it if they

04:53weren't home. They'd have to go to a... Can you hear that, Lissy?

04:59One giant leap for mankind. People watching it on the front of an electronic shop.

05:10You can see their spacesuits here too. This is the Apollo A7L spacesuit. This is just the body

05:19part of it. You can see all the attachments and whatnot for it. If you come over here,

05:23some newspaper headlines. You'll see the actual handcasts of the Apollo 11 astronauts used

05:32to make their customized gloves. You've got Michael Collins over here with his wedding ring

05:38still on his fingers, plus Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as well.

05:46And then this is what went around the internal parts of their gloves. You've got their

05:51glove covers here, their EVA gloves, their boot covers, so they can walk on the Moon.

05:58And their helmets too, right over here. Of course, this is the center helmet with a little pad for

06:04their head and it's all glass. Then it has a visor cover and then the visor itself to protect their

06:09skin, their eyes, and everything on the surface of the Moon. And of course, over here is a Saturn

06:16V, a scale version of it. But out of all that, only this part came back, the crew capsule part.

06:28They threw away the lander. They threw away all the rest of the rocket, brought everything back

06:35in this capsule. You'll also be able to walk on the Moon, see what that was like here.

06:46You can see there's like a little lunar surface that you can walk on.

06:58You can get up close with the foot pad for an Apollo spacecraft and see a Soyuz spacecraft

07:06right here. Of course, this is what cosmonauts fly in. You can kind of get up and close inside

07:14and see if you have three people in there. And of course, over here is the first electric car

07:33on the Moon. Looks like you can actually hop into the driver's seat and take it for a spin,

07:41or at least imagine. But that is right underneath the back of the space shuttle.

07:51And of course, you'll close out the exhibit by seeing kind of the early visions for going to

07:56Mars with this giant winged plane. Of course, now we have a helicopter on Mars that has finished

08:01its mission. We've got the International Space Station. We've got Apollo-Soyuz that followed

08:07Skylab after the Apollo program, and shuttle Mir, which followed up on that international

08:14cooperation in the 90s and led to the International Space Station work. Plus,

08:20the 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. And in 2025,

08:37NASA hopes to send four astronauts to the Moon, again, to kind of circle it like Apollo 8,

08:43and then come back before the first crewed Moon landing of the Artemis program, Artemis 3,

08:50in 2026. But if you are in New York, this is definitely an exhibit you're going to want to

08:57see. You won't want to miss it, space fans. It's absolutely epic. It's the largest

09:02exhibit, traveling exhibit, that the Intrepid has ever put on.

09:07And it's only here through summer 2024. So with that, I'm Tarek Malek with space.com,

09:15and I will catch you all in the next one. Thanks a lot, space fans. Saturn 5.

09:21Space Shuttle. That's the rear end.

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