Apollo 15, Jim Irwin's historical narrative in review

So far the Apollo 15 crew are involved with 3 different stamp collectors:

Herrick Herrick, retired film director, who lived at 870 NE 182nd St. in Miami.
Herman Seiger, the German stamp collector who opened Swiss Bank accounts for the astronauts.
Al Bishop, who worked for RCA, Hughes on top secret satellite projects.



What could be so special about those envelopes/stamped covers that Chris Kraft went so far as to fire 3 astronauts?
Did these envelopes contain moon dust samples, money or something more?

reply to post by SayonaraJupiter

Not just an ordinary guy, this is Al "I possess the largest space collection in existence" Bishop, is deeply connected with the secret space programs of the early 1960's.

He did everything but work for the CIA. How disappointing for you.

reply to post by SayonaraJupiter

What could be so special about those envelopes/stamped covers that Chris Kraft went so far as to fire 3 astronauts?

They went to the Moon on taxpayer money.

Originally posted by DJW001
reply to post by SayonaraJupiter

 

What could be so special about those envelopes/stamped covers that Chris Kraft went so far as to fire 3 astronauts?

They went to the Moon on taxpayer money.

And free Corvettes. But Chris Kraft only gets upset when the A15 astronauts are smuggling stamp covers. Maybe Chris Kraft was upset because the astronauts were getting so many good kickbacks and he wanted in on the Howard Hughes money action.

How long were those envelopes held in custody by NASA? 20, 30 years?

reply to post by SayonaraJupiter

And free Corvettes. But Chris Kraft only gets upset when the A15 astronauts are smuggling stamp covers. Maybe Chris Kraft was upset because the astronauts were getting so many good kickbacks and he wanted in on the Howard Hughes money action.

Or maybe because it was in direct violation of the rules.

How long were those envelopes held in custody by NASA? 20, 30 years?

No idea. How would it be relevant?

I am really excited about all of this and that is why I posted in two different threads, hoping to get help. I have been searching and searching and searching. I discovered James Irwin's ship Apollo 15 actually took many photographs of the lunar sky with a Fairchild 35 mm, lens 76 mm, stop at 2.8 and shutter 1.5 . However, I combed Irwin's personal sites, Nasa's dedicated to Apollo 15 and so on, nothing for me there.

Irwin, Scott and Worden took hundreds and perhaps thousands of stellar pictures to image the constelations above the lunar landscape they were mapping :

history.nasa.gov...

Then they would orient the terrestrial photo given what they knew abpout the star location within the celestrial sphere. THIS WAS HOW THE MOON WAS MAPPED , at least for these trips.

But I cannot find any of these images. I wrote to NASA general information, the ALSJ general information, and some historical-astrophoto buffs, and I am getting nowhere. I want to create my own website. I have a program, a fancy Huggin/stitich program. I'll plan to put all of the pics together and create a Night Skies Of The Apollo Mission Sites. It will be so cool. I just need the photos. They cannot be that hard to find.

reply to post by chrisblood


Interesting find! Although I've spent many hours poring over the Mapping Camera's surface images, I had not been aware of its associated stellar camera. Once I started looking, I found all kinds of info, notably here and here.

Quote from the 2nd link:

The stellar camera, on the other hand, has a 3-inch (76-mm) focal length, f/2.8 lens. The format is 1¼ inches x 1 inch on 35-mm film and the stellar coverage is a 24° cone with flats. Exposure time for the stellar camera is 1.5 seconds fixed. Film capacity for the stellar camera is 510 feet (155.4 metres) compared to the 1,500 feet (460 m) capacity for the metric camera. The critical interlock angle between the metric and stellar cameras is 96°. Correspondingly, the laser altimeter is mounted with transmission and receiving optical axes parallel to those of the metric camera.

The 24° field-of-view poses a problem for the project you propose. If you hold your hand out in front of you with your elbow bent ~45° and your fingers spread, then 24° is roughly the visual angle from the tip of your thumb to the tip of your pinky. I just did a quick experiment with my digital camera and found I had to zoom ~2X to get a ~24° width-of-frame. Since the stellar camera was at a fixed 96° angle to the main camera, and the CSM kept a pretty standard orientation during the mapping runs, it only covered a small area of the sky - not an overall sky map. The main purpose of the stellar camera seems to have been to help define the precise orientation of the camera (and therefore the photographed surface features).

Apparently, the stellar camera images have not been scanned & uploaded to the 'net. If you are still interested in finding them, try contacting Arizona State University's Apollo Image Archive at the address at the bottom of their homepage.

Hope this helps.