Why Apollo 11 astronauts signed tons of autographs – then stowed them away | Hacker News Reader

Why Apollo 11 astronauts signed tons of autographs – then stowed them away

bigthink.com

48 pointsBrajeshwar26 comments

> NASA did offer an insurance scheme, but in the early days of space exploration, it didn’t cover the actual space flight part.

The assumption that NASA or some other branch of the government wouldn't take care of the families of dead Apollo 11 astronauts is preposterous. We're talking about a project that was costing the country several percent of its GDP and it can't set aside a few million for the families? The government paid out an average of US$1.8 million for each of the 9/11 victims, for thousands of people, for something that the government wasn't responsible for. The astronauts may have signed some autographs for something extra, but even if there were no written insurance contract, it seems very unlikely that anyone would have been seriously worried that the families would end up on skid row.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11th_Victim_Compensa...

If there had been a catastrophe that called the whole program into question, NASA might have ceased to exist. Those with authority to pay out would have lost their power, and budgeted money would have vanished. These astronauts surely hoped they'd be among the first of many to explore space, but in that moment it was still possible they'd merely be the last of few.

I know very little about 1960s American culture, so I don't know how well something like GoFundMe would have played back then. If the income-earning person in a family were incapacitated, was the societal expectation that the family should henceforth be taken care of by others? Or rather that the family identify a new income-earning person?

The insurance policy would be made with an insurance company by the employer. NASA being dissolved wouldn’t affect the payout.

In the 1960s insurance companies loved offering life insurance policies to federal employees. Federal employees were young, well educated, and in good enough health to work.

These policies excluded extremely dangerous activities (like going to war).

Even going to war involved a huge mass of people, which made it easier to get statistical safety for the insurance company. For writing insurance the fact that just 24 people ever (even to this day!) have left Earth orbit meant that the risk pool just wasn't very large. Very small group and large, unknown risk- that's the sort of thing that an actuary really doesn't like working with. Like, if Apollo 13 didn't make it home, that's 1/8th of the total insurance population right there. What kind of price do you need to charge to cover that level of risk?

Actuaries could assume 100% death rate per astronaut per launch, and the large number of non-astronaut employees and small number of launches would lower the premiums a lot.

That was probably the calculation... and the reason for not insuring them.

You might be replying to a different thread. We were discussing an extraordinary circumstance in which the government might "take care of the families of dead Apollo 11 astronauts" to make up for the space-exploration exclusion in the insurance that NASA actually offered.

In other words, we know for a fact that there was no insurance.

> These policies excluded extremely dangerous activities (like going to war).

Or possibly, climbing into a rocket?

And the government also has yet to pay out for victims of Radiation poisoning at Rocky Flatts, a facility that was part of the Manhattan project.

For every case where the government did right by these kinds of folks, there is another where they didn't.

Rocky Flatts has some very interesting history. It's the only time when one us federal agency (FBI) raided a facility of another (DOE).

Any attempt to judge the US based on what it did decades later, or decades earlier, actively ignores the fact that the US isn't a stable country and simply changes heads of state, but is a country that radically changes what it considers the norm to be with every new president elected.

> Given the huge risks involved, a lot of different parties planned and scripted for the possible bad news. The truth, though, was that there was no Plan B. If things went sour, there was no way to fix it, and everyone involved knew it. As Christopher Klein put it, “Under the worst-case scenario, NASA planned to end communication with the [Apollo 11 crew], leaving them to either run out of oxygen or commit suicide with no further earthly contact.”

That's seems fantastically cruel. You'd think they would at least let their families radio them for some time, to say goodbye.

I'm pretty sure the quote means that they planned to eventually cut comms [with the consent of the astronauts, most likely] and let them die with dignity.

Richard Nixons speechwriter prepared a packet to be opened if the astronauts were stuck on the moon.

It contains the most beautiful speech never given.

http://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/events/centen...

Wow, I'm three paragraphs in and I'm breaking up, bawling.

It was not possible for NASA to maintain 24/7 radio contact with them because of the rotation of the Earth and the Moon. There could have been a situation where the astronauts were likely to die while out of contact. That's what it is referring to.

The communication cut off would have happened AFTER the astronauts said their goodbyes.

I am curious as to what NASA did for the families of Grissom, White and Chaffee after their deaths. Since it wasn’t an actual flight did the ‘normal’ insurance pay out?

Baseball players do something similar at the start of the season but for different reasons. They sign tons of balls while traveling for various gifts and promotions and stuff at the start of the season so they don’t need to do it later

> As it turns out, getting to the Moon was the least risky part of the mission. The more dangerous — not least because it was unknown — was getting off the Moon. Collins was orbiting the command module, and it was hugely difficult to dock. Then there was the possibility of a computer malfunction or a broken ascent engine. There was the fear that the astronaut’s spacesuits could just combust because of the lunar dust interacting with oxygen in the module.

Was this whole mission way riskier than we even imagined? It seems like we got very lucky with these things succeding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc1SzgGhMKc Apollo 11 lunar landing audio and film

yea, it was a bit of a heart stopper

I'm sure they're still worth money, did the families ever sell them?

"But then, in the 1990s, Robert Pearlman says, the insurance autographs started showing up in space memorabilia auctions. An Apollo 11 insurance autograph can cost as much as $30,000."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/30/160267398/what...

Yes, but the non-insurance ones (that actually went to space) are worth a lot more. Here's a brief segment from Antiques Roadshow: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/season/20/charleston-sc/ap...

403s for me.

Sorry, might be geo-restricted. PBS.org is the US public broadcasting network. I’m not sure how they license content internationally.

Brass balls folks - brass balls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com