Apollo Moon Mission Big Island Training Photos

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

With the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 approaching, there will be a large number of tributes and celebrations over the next month. Big Island played an essential role as a training ground for astronauts. Here’s a series of photos, mostly on Mauna Kea, but the last one is captioned Kapoho, now most likely under solid lava:
https://www.businessinsider.com/old-phot...aii-2014-6

The entire Apollo 11 mission, interactive, courtesy of NASA:
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

[Obie]

I believe that was near Sanford's cinder pit and the location near the 1960 eruption.It was not covered except it is now overgrown with jungle.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

50 years ago on July 16th, Apollo 11 blasted off for the moon. The crew visited Hawaii before & after their mission. From Smithsonian Magazine:

While most of the astronauts’ fieldwork was done at sites over the course of a day or two, the Apollo 11 crew spent an extensive amount of time in January 1965 training on the ground in Hawaii thanks to its abundance of volcanoes. It was during these excursions both on foot and via airplane that the astronauts got a chance to study the different physical aspects of volcanoes, including gas and lava vents, lava lakes, pit craters and more. During the final days of their stay, they hiked to the top of the 13,677-foot Mauna Loa, known as the world’s largest volcano, to observe its summit crater.

Four years later they would revisit Hawaii again upon completion of their lunar mission, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean via the Command Module Columbia. To trace their footsteps, there are two ways to ascend to the top of Mauna Loa. One involves obtaining a permit, but the other is a more gradual roundtrip hike of 13 miles.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/go...180972452/