Tranquility Base

on the listener app because uh it's time for a new segment

tranquility base here the eagle has landed roger tranquility i mean can you believe we can put a man on the moon but we can't okay we're gonna be busy for a minute oh okay

So putting someone on the moon is an incredible achievement, and if we can do that, surely there's things in our day-to-day lives that we shouldn't have to worry about now.

I think about this sort of stuff all the time, and you raised this last week, and I thought about it all weekend, and I've come up with one.

Put a man on the moon, but I can't speak.

On 131060, we're asking.

Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

Now using his astronomy software to model the positions of stars relative to the moon, Hoagland uncovered something unbelievable.

When he plugged in that timestamp at precisely 33 minutes post-touchdown, Sirius, which is in ancient Egypt, Isis, the one who raised Osiris from the dead, this star, well, it was sitting right over Tranquility Base, where we first landed and walked, and it was at 19.5 degrees up from that position.

Now, 33 minutes is

already

Hoagland raises an interesting question that ties into all of this.

How do you fail to find a clear patch in a vehicle that lands vertically and is under 30 feet wide only, over 5 miles, burning so much fuel that the mission is almost aborted? Well, this is his answer to this.

Tranquility Base was the one and only place in the entire predetermined Apollo landing zone, stretching along almost the entire visible equator of the moon, where Sirius would be hovering at 19.5 degrees 33 minutes after Apollo 11's touchdown, the night of July 20th, 1969.

Richard C. Hoagland, Dark Mission, The Secret History of NASA, 2007

This first lunar flyby was an important one.

Orion I would be traveling over sights visited by its predecessors, such as Tranquility Base, where Apollo 11 landed, or the sites of Apollo 12 and Apollo 14.

Traveling close to the lunar surface would be a good dry run.

Excellent practice for any future missions where they need to drop off cargo or personnel.