BWCA Astronauts in Ely Boundary Waters Listening Point - General Discussion
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JackpineJim
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08/15/2019 09:27PM   (Thread Older Than 3 Years)
I ran across this article about the NASA moon missions Moon Rock Mineralogy It mentions astronauts training in Ely.
… In preparation for their landing in the Hadley-Apennine region, the instructors along with Scott and Irwin, visited volcanic sites like Hawaii and areas “where they would see the kinds of rocks we expected to find as part of that primitive crust,” Lofgren noted.
These sites included the San Gabriel Mountains, Ely, Minnesota, the Rio Grande Gorge and the San Juan Mountains. Their training paid off in spades. Leon T. Silver, an Apollo 15 instructor from Cal Tech, called the mission the “apotheosis of all the things we’d been planning to do… it was the coming together of developing the technical capabilities, preparing men to be explorers as well as many, many other things.”...
 
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inspector13
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08/16/2019 07:30AM  

If they were looking for moon-like rocks and minerals such as anorthosite, they should have stuck to the North Shore, especially between Silver Bay and Lutsen. You can still see some old quarries where early 3M mined anorthosite thinking it was corundum.

 
Doc_of_the_bay
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08/17/2019 07:30PM  
Speaking of astronauts in Ely...

I met Buzz Aldrin in Babbitt one time.

My college roommate and I made our first-ever trip to the BWCA in 1975, starting on Labor Day. We rented a canoe from Duane's Outfitters in Babbitt, and stayed in the bunkhouse there on the night before and the night after our trip. The night we stayed there at the conclusion of our trip (Fri or Sat, I don't quite remember) Buzz Aldrin was speaking in Babbitt, maybe at the high school gym. Elsie Arvola, Duane's wife, asked if we'd like to go hear him, and let us ride into town with her. After he spoke we got a chance to meet him and shake his hand.

This was only six years after we had watched him walk on the moon!
 
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