Ken Mattingly, astronaut scrubbed from Apollo 13, has died | Hacker News Reader

Ken Mattingly, astronaut scrubbed from Apollo 13, has died

nytimes.com

126 pointsStratoscope51 comments

Come on NYT, going to the Moon with Apollo 16 is more notable than not not going to the Moon with Apollo 13.

The headline is honestly quite disrespectful

Anything to get clicks

When we stop clicking headlines we disagree with then eventually they will change the strategy. That starts with all the smart people here.

I don’t think we have the numbers to make a meaningful impact.

This was literally my first thought. Yeah, it's worth mentioning in the article; it's definitely not the thing he himself would brag about/headline in his life.

"Apollo 16 astronaut..."

Who?

"Astronaut scrubbed from Apollo 13..."

Oh yeah! I know that guy, I remember him from the movie.

If I'm assuming good faith, I'd say that Mattingly is, as the lede notes, best known amongst the populace for being scrubbed from 13. If you weren't alive to witness 13 or 16, the movie is probably where most people get all their Ken Mattingly information. This does him a disservice but is probably what people will know him best for.

Truth be told, I think most people won't know the name or even Apollo 16, but will know Apollo 13.

>Truth be told, I think most people won't know the name or even Apollo 16, but will know Apollo 13.

To be fair, when I saw a headline on another service, it mentioned "Apollo 16," and I legitimacy thought it was about "Apollo 13," because that is the only Apollo I know.

You know Apollo 13 but not 11?

Yup. The crew and achievements of 11 are far more famous, but most people couldn't tell you which number their Apollo mission was.

Even at my age I can learn new words - though why I've never come across this before is a mystery - lede.

You may have heard the expression "to bury the lede"

Lead is the normal word for something that is at the front. For some reason journalists spell it incorrectly as a form of in-joke/slang term among their profession.

You'll see it frequently mis-unused when people use the phrase (in writing) "bury the lead".

To be fair, his involvement didn't end with "not going to the Moon"; he was instrumental in saving the lives of three other people who didn't go to the moon, and arguably therein saving a generation of science and cosmology from being lumped in with recklessness and death.

The cold start procedure is probably in the top 100 most notable on-the-fly hacks in human history (though my understanding is that it was actually _less_ challenging in real life than is depicted in the film, once the test pilots got together and compared notes).

The headline is unfair, I agree. But his contribution to the Apollo 13 mission was significant.

I don't think there is any boy from my generation who didn't say "Astronaut!" to a bewildered careers advisor. Though my opinions about space travel have changed, all of these men and women, from Yuri Gagarin to the last shuttle crew, shaped our lives. RIP.

If you haven't seen the film Apollo 13, do it. It's one of my favorites. Ken Mattingly is played by Gary Sinise, great performance.

I highly recommend the BBC podcast, “13 minutes to the moon”. Second season is dedicated to Apollo 13 and has a long bonus interview with the commander and one of the mission controllers.

Awesome. Thanks for the recommendation!

I highly recommend the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi...

And the book on which it's largely based, A Man on the Moon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_on_the_Moon

Seconded. The miniseries gives the subject the space and scope that it deserves. And Chaikin's book is well written, but also detailed and well sourced.

I also recall enjoying Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz.

And Flight by Chris Kraft. (Chris was Gene's direct superior)

I'd also put the documentary, For All Mankind[0], as a must watch. It's available on the Criterion Channel right now.

Mattingly is one of the narrators.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(film)

Wow, that's a good excuse to go rewatch the series :)

I'd say the first two seasons were more focused on the Space Race between USSR and the USA.

The writing in the third season has fallen off with some absurd scenarios with trained professional astronauts, and frankly lots of drama and less about the overall mission.

I do love the show but wish they'd focus more on hypothetical science and space related aspects and less interpersonal drama :(

That matches my sentiments with the show perfectly. I actually stopped watching after the second season. I'm glad it sounds like I haven't missed much.

You should check out the documentary, if you haven't already seen it. It looks like it might be on HBO and Fubo as well, according to Justwatch: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/for-all-mankind.

I'll take this opportunity to promote to the technnically inclined, that it is so worth checking out a beautiful Apollo-related project called NASSP which has been trying to faithfully allow you to simulate all the Apollo missions. The computer in the simulator, even, is running a port of the real apollo guidance computer, matched to their exact version for each mission, thanks to the work of volunteers and incredible folks who not only have gone through the effort to find and document all of it but even to bring a real apollo guidance computer to life (check out the CuriousMarc youtube channel... just mind blowing).

Like many people, the 13 movie obviously sparked my curiosity and wonder about the whole ordeal, but despite habitually visiting the Smithsonian, all the reading, etc., nothing has brought me as close to an appreciation for just how remarkable the whole endeavor was than to try to live it in this simulation.

Apollo in Realtime [1] is also fantastic. They’ve got all the mission audio from all channels so you can listen to it as it happened.

[1] https://apolloinrealtime.org/

RIP. He made a later flight to the moon, as a command module pilot, the same thing he would have done on Apollo 13. So not on this chart: https://xkcd.com/893/

God bless Artemis.

He also commanded two shuttle flights: STS-4 and STS-51-C. Spent 21 days in space according to Wikiepdia. I hope his NASA career brought him well deserved satisfaction.

This is bizarre. We put 11 people on another celestial body in 5 years, and then never any more for 50 years afterwards…

NASA took up a good chunk of the US economy at the time.

Space is awesome but people have to eat. Exploration is only really practical at current budget levels, percentage-wise.

Apollo was very early. The tech has to bring the price of a moon landing way down, and the safety level way up for us to do it again. It will be soon though.

Check your math here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

I think that <5% is small (de minimus) and NASA ha been below that number for a long time

And yet at ~0.5% now vs 4% in the apollo years, in 2022 dollars we're only at about half the funding we had then; not 1/8th. I feel like we could be getting a lot more for that money.

Without the very-public moon goal and lots of eyes on them, seems like they've got a worse pork problem now. See: the SLS.

ISS might also be pretty expensive to maintain? Not sure. Dunno how much scientific value it's delivering, but it's pretty low on the "cool" factor compared to... almost anything else they do, really.

Are you kidding?

5% of the US government budget is massive.

Experimental scientific expeditions are critical, but the correct allocation is far below 1%.

I love NASA and the moon landings. It’s super admirable and a huge milestone in winning the cold war. Reading up on it, it’s unbelievable what they got done with ancient technology. But they were really early, and that’s why it was so expensive. It’s much more reasonable to go back in the next decade or so.

No, I'm not kidding. 5% (at the peak) is not a good chunk. A good chunk is like >20%

  > NASA took up a good chunk of the US economy at the time.

This is not true, even if it is often repeated. Many other programs took far larger chunks, such that NASA's moon budget would not have greatly affected taxpayers.

And the benefits were felt in every single industry, from the bra industry to project management to teaching methods to computers and most obviously to the science and aeronautics communities.

12 in 3 and a half years, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_wa....

Why does that strike you as bizarre?

Because we developed better rover tech that doesn’t put humans at risk where rescue is impossible.

>He made a later flight to the moon, as a command module pilot, the same thing he would have done on Apollo 13

Apollo 16 let Mattingly do something he would not have done on 13: A deep-space EVA during the return to Earth to retrieve film from the service module. Only occurred on 15-17.

‘Are the flowers blooming in Houston?’ RIP

WTF is this headline, NY Times?

Another chance to share a great book recommendation: Sunburst and Luminary, by Don Eyles. About programming the lunar lander computer - super well written so we can all understand, and entertaining. With a blog of historical recollection thrown in. This is a HN classic of a book.

http://sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html

I hope this becomes a trend on HN: <some person>, <how one might know them>, has died.

I'm so used to seeing names I do not recognize, having to take the time to read the article.

Imagine an achievement so historic, that not being able to take part in it would make you more notable than 99% of humans that have existed.

Oh no...RIP

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