geekosystem

Neil Armstrong, hero to everyone who's ever dreamed of travelling to worlds beyond our own, died yesterday at 82, his family announced. According to multiple reports, Armstrong's death was caused by complications from heart surgery performed earlier this month to relieve clogged coronary arteries.

Ignoring the conspiracy theories about whether we landed on the Moon at all, the team behind the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, received the most questions prior to launch about the Apollo landing sites. What would we be able to see? Would we be able to see the American flags? As it turns out, yes. Detailed analysis of the images returned from the LROC has confirmed that the flags planted by most of Apollo missions are still standing where they were erected.

Launching objects into orbit, much less to the Moon, requires a lot of power and huge engines. Of course, those engines can't make it all the way up there, so we tend to just let them drop, usually into the ocean. Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos thinks this is a shame, especially when it comes to historic engines like those from the Saturn V rocket that propelled Apollo 11, the first mission to reach the Moon. That being the case, he's devoted some of his billions of dollars to locating said engines on the floor of the Atlantic, and now he wants to devote a few more to bringing them back up. Updated content follows after the original story.

If you're a conspiracy theorist, you know that half the fun is putting it all together. The other half is gradually losing the support of your friends and family as you slowly slide down the rabbit hole of paranoia and stop bathing and eating in favor of constructing ever more intricate tinfoil hats, but putting it together, that's were everyone gets hooked. With that in mind, Tamiya, a Japanese plastic model company, put together its "Put It Together" ad campaign featuring plastic model sets of famous conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately, these things don't actually exist, and neither do the model sets. It's rather fitting though, because every good conspiracy theorist knows that it's all about putting it together in your head, because the physical evidence is nonexistent. Putting it together in your head and then keeping it there with tinfoil.

Shuttle launches are momentous experiences for a number of reasons -- the engineering prowess, the uncertainty, the research ahead. But really, our little lizard brains like the fire and explosions the best.

This raw video from the launch umbilical tower of Apollo 11's Saturn V launch, taken on July 16th, 1969, manages to satisfy both ways of thinking: Shot at 500fps, it stretches out the first thirty seconds of the launch into eight glorious pyrotechnic minutes. But the spectacle is balanced out by knowledgeable narration by Mark Gray, the EP for Spacecraft Films.

Video after the jump: