13 Minutes to the Moon

***I received no compensation of any kind for this post.***

I love podcasts and I'm always looking for interesting ones to listen to. I found a good one recently produced by the BBC World Service called 13 Minutes to the Moon. It's about Apollo 11 and the first moon landing.

They could have focused solely on the first moon landing itself and I would have been riveted because I'm super into space stuff. (Probably why I started off writing Science Fiction Romance stories.) The BBC did more than this, though, giving us all kinds of fascinating episodes into other things that impacted the mission in some way.

The first episode covered the Soviet space program and how that propelled President Kennedy to set the moon as our goal. Other episodes that I've listened to so far include mission control and the fact that most of those guys were in their 20s. The lunar module. Apollo 1 and the fire that killed three astronauts. There was also an episode covering the computer and the software running on the computer that landed the astronauts on the moon. Even topics I didn't think would be that interesting ended up being incredible!

I wish I could listen faster!

One of the really cool things is how many interviews are included. Some of the people were interviewed by NASA before their deaths, but many were interviewed by the BBC. Many of the men and women interviewed mentioned things I'd never thought about or simply took for granted because they've always been part of my life.

If you have any interest in the Apollo program, I highly recommend this podcast. If you search for the title on any podcast app, it should show up.

Five stars (Through episode 5)

Moon Walking

Some of the video podcasts I downloaded this week involved NASA and the space program. Specifically, the Apollo missions and how we landed on the moon. It was fascinating viewing.

I guess I take landing on the moon for granted since I don't remember a time when we hadn't been there. These short podcasts interviewed some of the astronauts, engineers, and specialists who played a part in getting us to the moon. Incredible stuff and I was glued to each of these podcasts.

One of my favorites--and I loved all of them--was an interview with astronaut Alan Bean. He was the 4th man to walk on the moon on the Apollo 12 mission. The part that really grabbed my attention, though, was that he resigned from NASA, deciding to let others fly the space shuttle, so that he could paint his experiences in space. He says something in the interview like if he didn't do it, no one else would. From what I saw, he was an accomplished artist and the paintings were cool!

Another podcast interviewed the mission leader and a third one of the engineers that helped get Apollo 13 down. Another podcast was with a woman who became one of the first female astronauts and there were many more.

These were ALL available on iTunes for free! I love free. :-) I think the Discovery Channel also has podcasts available on their website, but I wasn't able to find the space ones, so I'm not linking there.

You know, switching from a plain old MP3 player to an iPod was such a good investment! Now I can watch video podcasts, something I couldn't on my old player, I've discovered a ton of information on a wide variety of things on iTunes--from podcasts to video podcasts, to college classes--and I'm educating myself with something different every day. How cool is that?