Post by ka9q on Nov 23, 2010 3:29:01 GMT -4
Duane is utterly unable to back down from any mistaken belief. Years ago he asserted, as a digression from a digression about the Apollo 1 fire, that Gus Grissom was panicked and terrified throughout his short Mercury suborbital flight -- he knew because his parents could see his face on TV during the flight.
I pointed out that there were no TV cameras in the cockpit during his flight. While there were film cameras on the Mercury control panel pointed at the astronaut's face, film cameras cannot produce a live TV broadcast. Gus's capsule sank shortly after landing along with cameras and film, so they couldn't have seen it after the flight either. (When Gus's capsule was located and recovered in 1999, the film had long been destroyed by immersion in seawater for 38 years.)
Grissom himself corrected a reporter's question during the post-flight press conference, also making it clear that there were no TV cameras on board his capsule. There are many other primary sources that back up this simple fact, and anyone familiar with the state of television technology in the early 1960s (e.g., from having read Dwight's book) knows that live fast-scan TV in the Mercury cockpit was simply out of the question. It wasn't until after several years of intensive R&D that the first workable TV camera could fly on Apollo.
Instead of conceding that his folks had probably seen a film of another Mercury flight, Duane simply would not be dissuaded from his position. To this day he insists that his parents watched Gus Grissom's face on live TV during his Mercury flight. Unable to actually produce said video (NASA wiped out all evidence of it, you see, because it would have ruined Gus's status as a martyred hero) he cites, as his sole piece of evidence, a single phrase in a secondary encyclopedia article written for children that says the Mercury capsules had TV cameras. Unless the author was thinking specifically of an experimental slow scan TV camera flown unsuccessfully on Gordon Cooper's Mercury orbital flight, this statement is easily shown to be incorrect.
But the facts simply don't matter. Once straydog stakes out a position he defends it to the death.
I pointed out that there were no TV cameras in the cockpit during his flight. While there were film cameras on the Mercury control panel pointed at the astronaut's face, film cameras cannot produce a live TV broadcast. Gus's capsule sank shortly after landing along with cameras and film, so they couldn't have seen it after the flight either. (When Gus's capsule was located and recovered in 1999, the film had long been destroyed by immersion in seawater for 38 years.)
Grissom himself corrected a reporter's question during the post-flight press conference, also making it clear that there were no TV cameras on board his capsule. There are many other primary sources that back up this simple fact, and anyone familiar with the state of television technology in the early 1960s (e.g., from having read Dwight's book) knows that live fast-scan TV in the Mercury cockpit was simply out of the question. It wasn't until after several years of intensive R&D that the first workable TV camera could fly on Apollo.
Instead of conceding that his folks had probably seen a film of another Mercury flight, Duane simply would not be dissuaded from his position. To this day he insists that his parents watched Gus Grissom's face on live TV during his Mercury flight. Unable to actually produce said video (NASA wiped out all evidence of it, you see, because it would have ruined Gus's status as a martyred hero) he cites, as his sole piece of evidence, a single phrase in a secondary encyclopedia article written for children that says the Mercury capsules had TV cameras. Unless the author was thinking specifically of an experimental slow scan TV camera flown unsuccessfully on Gordon Cooper's Mercury orbital flight, this statement is easily shown to be incorrect.
But the facts simply don't matter. Once straydog stakes out a position he defends it to the death.