Bloggers, Timezones and Apollo 8

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When it comes to blogging and emails, timezones are a pest. I dislike the daily communication voids I encounter due to time differences around the world. Especially when one portion of the earth is powering down their PC’s in readiness to go home, another slice of the planet is well along the highway listening to drivetime radio on the way home or cutting out the rest of humanity by wearing their iPods on the metro/tube/subway. Another section of the planet are opening up their bedroom curtains to welcome the sunrise while further west along the meridians, garage doors are being opened, commuters are at bus stops or on the platforms at train/subway/metro stations or in elevators to their offices.

While all this is going on, I sit alone, incommunicado.

Just like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 who were about to go where humans had never gone before - the dark side of the moon. For the very first time, humans would see the other side of the moon and experience utter isolation.

For 34 minutes on Christmas Eve, 24th December 1968, if something catastrophic occured to the CM (Command Module), there would be no way of knowing what happened to the crew of Apollo 8. As the first humans to experience the completeness and lonliness of being cut off and out of any form of contact from the rest of mankind on earth, they were on their own 200,000 miles from Earth preparing to burn their engine on the dark side of the moon to slow the command module down from 5,758 to 3,643 mph to allow the moon’s gravitational field to catch them and secure the spacecraft into lunar orbit.

If the engine fired but shut down too soon, they’d crash into the dark side of the moon. If it failed to burn, they’d slingshot around the moon back to earth and screw the mission up. This is what Apollo 13 did in order to get back to earth following the oxygen tank explosion that crippled the command module.

Apollo 8 was famous for:

1. The mission was the second flight in the Apollo program and the first manned flight on the Saturn V rocket. Saturn V launch vehicle with the Apollo spacecraft on top stood 363 feet (110 meters) tall.
2. Launched from Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center and marked the first manned use of the Moonport.
3. The five first-stage engines developed combined thrust of 7.5 million pounds at liftoff.
4. First humans to journey to the Earth’s Moon.
5. First pictures of Earth from deep space taken by astronauts.
6. New world speed record: 24,200 mph (38,938 km/hr).
First live TV coverage of the lunar surface.
7. Being the first space mission to carry humans behind the moon
8. Live TV broadcasts especially their Christmas Eve message here and this video of Earthrise
9. Iconic photograph of Earthrise (click here to see large photo)

Such is my lonliness as I follow other timezones and you into nightfall. I am in my own 34 minute zone of communication deprivation. Timezones are a right bugger when it comes to blogging and keeping contact. I crash n burn when you guys go home and blogosphere goes silent on me. Upside is I look forward to the new day when the blogosphere once again crackles with the buzz of conversations around the world and if you could hear it, the static of bloggers interlinking across networks.