Little Joe II

Nah… not the Little Joe from Ponderosa (that’ll age some of you, I’m sure!) but the Little Joe II that was used during our manned space program from back when we were getting ready to fly to the moon.

Checking over the timeline of this “little” (and that’s relative!) rocket, it was fabricated and checked out in less than a year!  Hard for me to think of something in today’s America as complex as rocket flight that could be done in that time span.  And by little, Little Joe II was not quite 25% of the size of the Saturn V rockets that launched our astronauts into outer space.

Little Joe II

You can see this beauty at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, which is a dandy of a little museum in Alamogordo, New Mexico – it’s well worth the visit if you’re in the area!

For the camera techies out there, took this image with in camera HDR, which allowed me to properly expose both the sky and the backside of the rocket, which was in total shadow… I think it turned out well – how ’bout you?

~ by Derrick Birdsall on November 26, 2012.