We lost a true legend this week with the passing of NASA astronaut Jim Lovell at the ripe old age of 97. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back in 1970, and along with crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise — along with just about every person working at or for NASA — he managed to guide the mortally wounded Odyssey command module safely back home. While he’s rightly remembered for the heroics on 13, it was far from his first space rodeo. Lovell already had two Gemini missions under his belt before Apollo came along, including the grueling Gemini 7, where he and Frank Borman undertook the first long-duration space mission, proving that two men stuffed into a Volkswagen-sized cockpit could avoid killing each other for at least two weeks.
Lovell also served as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to lunar orbit. Apollo 8 was notable for its many technical and scientific accomplishments, but it’s perhaps best known as the mission where Lunar Module Pilot Bill Anders, who died only last year in a plane crash, proved his photography chops by capturing the iconic Earthrise image, as well as (probably) the first full-disk image of Earth from space. Along with Gemini 12, Lovell racked up four flights, making him the first person to reach that number, and spent nearly a solid month in space. He was also the only person to make it to lunar orbit twice without having landed on the surface, which we’d have found int½olerable, but which he always seemed to take in stride.
We harp on about the Apollo era all the time not only because we’re rapidly losing its alumni — with the passing of Jim Lovell, only five astronauts from the program are left, and every one of them is in their 90s — but because the achievements from that program were so definitional and formative to many of us who went into STEM. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics played a similar role, too, which is why we were excited to find out about this massive online trove of PM issues stretching all the way back to 1902. The digitized volumes are maintained by a variety of archives, including The Internet Archive and Google Books, and it looks like every issue through the end of 2005 is included and free of charge to browse. We were charmed to learn that the classic “Written so that you can understand it” tagline made its first appearance on the masthead way back on issue 6. In a lot of ways, Hackaday is the spiritual successor to PM and other magazines like it, but with 123 years of publication under its belt, we’ve got a ways to go to catch up.
It looks like the speaker schedule for HOPE_16 is filling up fast, as you’d expect since the conference is next weekend. The lineup looks fantastic; our early unofficial award for best talk title goes to Kody Kinzie’s Meshtastic talk “Spooky Action at a Discount.” If you’re planning to attend the conference, we’d love to get a heads-up on talks we should cover once the videos are published, so hit us up at tips@hackaday.com.
And finally, we’d have sworn the era of building dams was long gone in the United States, but it seems we were mistaken. A massive dam project, the Chimney Hollow Reservoir Project, is nearing completion in Colorado, and Aaron Witt got to take a second look at the project after first checking it out in 2023. The earthen dam, which will be 350 feet tall and over 1,000 feet wide at completion, is somewhat unique in that it doesn’t impound an existing stream, but rather will collect water from the Colorado River via a tunnel through the mountain that abuts the dam. Also unique is the asphalt core of the dam. Most earthen dams use a layer of packed clay to prevent the flow of water, but since clay was hard to come by locally, they used an extra gooey wall of asphalt two feet thick. As is typical for Aaron, he geeks out on the heavy equipment, which we can’t complain about at all, but it’s the civil engineering that really caught our fancy. Enjoy!
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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