posted 09-04-2018 01:53 PM               

Producer David Kestenbaum tells the story of an astronaut who returns with a very unexpected view of the great beyond.

posted 09-08-2018 01:50 AM               

In many interviews from early post Apollo days, he sang a similar tune to the status quo, perhaps he tired of the same questions and answers sooner that others, only he knows.

I doubt he would have been chosen as the astronaut representative on the Apollo 1 investigation, and give evidence to hearings, if he did not fully understand and appreciate significance of the job at hand. Saying that, our perspective of said job differs from the time, and the program has been analysed, politicized and romanticized since.

I like to think he is of similar traits as Neil Armstrong, where the flying meant more than the exploring.

posted 09-08-2018 12:53 PM               

Since Apollo 8 he's been defined by that flight's achievement, and I know he appreciates the flight's historical significance. But during the segment I wondered if Borman wishes folks would talk to him about anything other than spaceflight. It's on something like talking about his favorite movie that you hear him engage in a neat way you don't expect.

posted 09-08-2018 04:20 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by ea757grrl:
But during the segment I wondered if Borman wishes folks would talk to him about anything other than spaceflight.

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posted 09-08-2018 06:08 PM               

I felt sorry for the reporter, but I also thought "were it me, I'd have mixed it up some." In my case, since I know Yeager's a big outdoorsman, I'd have talked to him a little about what his favorite hunting rifle is, or something like that. It's a basic reporting tool I teach my students: try to find some way to connect, preferably in a way that's pleasantly unexpected. It helps in ways both practical and personal, especially if you're talking to someone who's talked about a given thing a hundred times before.

posted 09-09-2018 09:09 AM               

I'd like to think that Borman's rather harsh sentiment on poets was primarily due to the tight interior and reduced space of the capsule, that necessarily limited the number of the crew, and not to the virtues of poetry!

As Shelley wrote in "Defence of Poetry," poets are "...the unacknowledged legislators of mankind," and that poetry is, "...at once the centre and circumference of knowledge."

As is well known, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from Genesis, in a sense reading some of mankind's oldest "poetry" right there for the first time away from our planet. Poetry is appropriate to space travel!

I suspect that Alan Bean — of course a well- known artist himself — would not have had such a harsh thought as Borman's... admittedly not going as far as having Allen Ginsberg suit up next to him in a WSS!