Apollo Exhibit At NYC's Intrepid Museum

Space.com

Space.com's Tariq Malik gives you a preview of the 'Apollo: When We Went the Moon' exhibit at NYC's Intrepid Museum.

Transcript

00:00Hello space fans, it's Tarek Malek, editor-in-chief of space.com here at the Intrepid Sea, Air and

00:05Space Museum in New York City and they have this great new Apollo when we went to the moon that

00:12we're going to take a quick walk through. It'll run from late March to September of 2024 and it's

00:19pretty amazing. Of course this is where the Space Shuttle Enterprise is home, where it finds its

00:26home basically. You can come here to New York, see a space shuttle, well the first space shuttle

00:31actually, and they've kind of redecorated. This was like the 3-2-1 landing walk-through on the

00:38way in to see the space shuttle. In here, instead of that, you see JFK talking about his historic

00:49speech.

01:09But because they are hard.

01:19Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are willing to postpone,

01:26and one we intend to win. That's the September 12, 1962, his speech at Rice University.

01:36During the early days of the space race to the moon, of course by then Yuri Gagarin had already

01:41flown in space in 1961, and here's the entrance proper. You've got the logo for Apollo when we

01:48went to the moon. Sputnik above here, that's that beeping noise that you hear

01:56when it launched on April 12th, or pardon me, in October of, what was that, 1957? April 12,

02:0361 is when Gagarin launched, and of course in case you missed it, there's the Space Shuttle

02:09Enterprise right above me doing all of the fun things that it's doing.

02:14You come here, you'll see a Wernher von Braun's desk mock-up, including all the tools they used

02:21to use to calculate all of those. I see some calipers. I see a slide rule. You've got the

02:28desk themselves. Here's Wernher von Braun talking about satellite communications and whatnot,

02:34weather satellites. Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev, the Soviet space program chief.

02:44And the original rockets that launched Sputnik into space, as well as the Jupiter-C that launched

02:51Explorer 1, 2. After you see those early days, you'll come in and you'll see a spacesuit of the

03:03type worn by Yuri Gagarin on that first flight, including the rockets that they used. There's

03:11the wheel, the nose landing gear of Space Shuttle Enterprise. Then, these are one-seater

03:18spacecraft. You've got Vostok on the one side, right over here. And then of course, there's the

03:23Mercury-Redstone and the Atlas, the Mercury-Atlas for the Mercury flights, both suborbital and

03:29orbital. Then you get the Gemini and Voskhod, two-seater rockets. And then the Soyuz and the

03:37Saturn rockets for the three-seaters, plus the Saturn V, of course, which sent people to the

03:42moon. And the moon rockets, the Saturn V moon rocket with the N1 Soviet rocket, which never

03:50actually made it to the moon. You can see a launch of a Saturn V over here with Apollo 4.

03:57That's gorgeous. And then kind of a glimpse of what else was going on. It wasn't just NASA and

04:02the space race going on. You had, of course, the Civil Rights Movement. You had the Vietnam War,

04:07all going on at that same time. So there is a lot of context about it all.

04:14Of course, here's a Mercury space capsule. The USS Intrepid was actually used to retrieve

04:19one Mercury mission, as well as the two-seater Gemini mission. And over here is a

04:27theater to experience the Saturn V launch up close with the sound and the fury of its engines.

04:39Now, when they landed on the moon, it was one of the most watched events

04:46of all time, including that moonwalk there. So you've got kind of how everyone would have

04:52experienced it if they weren't home. They'd have to go to a...

04:57Can you hear that, Lissy? One giant leap for mankind. People watching it on the front

05:07of an electronic shop. You can see their spacesuits here, too. This is the Apollo A7L

05:16spacesuit. This is just kind of like the body part of it. You can see all the attachments and whatnot

05:21for it. But if you come over here, some newspaper headlines, you'll see the actual hand casts

05:31of the Apollo 11 astronauts used to make their customized gloves. You've got Michael Collins

05:37over here with his wedding ring still on his fingers, plus Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as

05:44well. And then this is what went around the internal parts of their gloves. You've got their

05:54glove covers here, their EVA gloves, their boot covers so they can walk on the moon.

06:01And their helmets, too. Right over here. Of course, this is the center helmet with a little

06:06pad for their head. And it's all glass. Then it has a visor cover. And then the visor itself to

06:12protect their skin, their eyes, and everything on the surface of the moon. And, of course, over here

06:19is a Saturn V, a scale version of it. But out of all that, only this part came back,

06:26the crew capsule part. They threw away the lander.

06:32They threw away all the rest of the rocket, brought everything back in this capsule.

06:37You'll also be able to walk on the moon, see what that was like here.

06:42You can see there's like a little lunar surface that you can walk on.

06:58You can get up close with the foot pad for an Apollo spacecraft and see a Soyuz spacecraft

07:06right here. And, of course, this is the what cosmonauts fly in. You can kind of

07:13get up and close inside and see. They've got three people in there.

07:21And, of course, over here is the first electric car on the moon.

07:34Looks like you can actually hop into the driver's seat and take it for a spin or at least imagine.

07:44But that is right underneath the back of the space shuttle. And, of course, you'll close out

07:52the exhibit by seeing kind of the early visions for going to Mars with this giant winged plane.

07:58Of course, now we have a helicopter on Mars that has finished its mission. We've got the

08:02International Space Station. We've got Apollo-Soyuz that followed Skylab after the Apollo program

08:09and Shuttle-Mir, which followed up on that international cooperation in the 90s and led

08:17to the International Space Station work, plus the Space Launch System kind of capping it off

08:23and leading to a new generation of moon exploration. Of course, Artemis I launched

08:30to the moon without a crew in 2022. And in 2025, NASA hopes to send four astronauts to the moon

08:39again to kind of circle it like Apollo 8 and then come back before the first crewed

08:46moon landing of the Artemis program, Artemis III, in 2026.

08:52But if you are in New York, this is definitely an exhibit you're going to want to see. You won't

08:57want to miss it, Space Fans. It's absolutely epic. It's the largest

09:02exhibit, traveling exhibit, that the Intrepid has ever put on.

09:07And it's only here through summer 2024. So with that, I'm Tarek Malek with space.com,

09:15and I will catch you all in the next one. Thanks a lot, Space Fans. Saturn V!

09:19Yes!

09:21Space Shuttle!

09:22That's a rerun.

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