America’s moon landings gave us GPS. Without Galileo, Britain will be all at sea | John Naughton
It's funny the things that geeks notice. I've been a keen photographer since I was a teenager and so one of the fascinating aspects for me about the Apollo programme was the cameras that the astronauts used on their missions. On Apollo 11, the first moon landing, for example, they had three Hasselblad 500ELs.
Why is this interesting? Well, in those days, Hasselbads were - and remain- ferociously expensive devices. But the final straw came with Apollo 17, the final moon landing, when the commander, Eugene Cernan, left his Hass behind on the lunar surface, where it remains to this day. Even in the context of a space mission that was fabulously expensive, the casual abandonment of such a beautiful, precision-engineered instrument looked - to those of us who thought about these things - like a criminal act.
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