We launched the rocket that took a living being from the Earth to the Moon, landed them there, and then brought them safely back again for the first time.
And when I say "for the first time", I mean that during the entire 4.6 billion year history of the Solar System, such a thing had never happened before. We forget that context far too often. Hell, as unlikely as it is, for all we know such a thing had never happened in the entire 14 billion years that had elapsed between the Big Bang at July 16, 1969.
Of course, while science fiction geeks had been predicting spaceflight long before NASA existed, nobody foresaw we'd see it on teevee, or that the lunar landing module would be conned by two men with names (Neil Armstrong and his trusty sidekick Buzz) that would have gotten them laughed out of John W. Cambell's office as too impossibly hackneyed to be taken seriously.
Or that we'd have to wait 30 years for "The Onion" to be brought into existence so that we could finally, finally get
the headline right.
40 years ago we were a nation that spent billions of dollars on the crap shoot of putting three men on top of 3,200 tons of hellfire wrapped in an aluminum skin and firing the whole thing at a dead rock 240,000 miles away because our destiny demanded it.
40 years later we are a nation that will not spend billions to keep its 300 million citizens alive, healthy and productive because the insurance industry lobbyists who own our politicians forbid it.
The shrieking of nothing is killing
Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I
Ain't got no money and I ain't got no hair...
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I've never heard anything in the space program be attributed to nixon... except his nearly drowning it in the bath tub. Certainly not at all in our house when it was happening. It was a BIG deal in our house. Much like The Onion's headline in fact :D
Certainly we have lost our imagination as a country...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/16/gop-creates-colorful-char_n_235411.html
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0267.shtml
I remember watching the moon landing with my Dad who said to me "Do you realize how special this is in history?"
And I said, "Of course."
And it rocked my world as we discussed JFK's dream and the murders of both him and his brother.
Different times.
Thanks, Dg,
You rock (always)!
S
2x http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5gaIXI2Mn4
mikefromtexas
Spot-fucking-on as usual Drifty.
Also, in the 50s & 60s we had help from German Scientists such as Von Braun. I'm told that after the war the Russians took many of the German engineers to Russia and thus were able to quickly make usable rockets. We got the theorists and sort-of had to start from the beginning. Or so I am told by my brother, who (cough) really is a Rocket Scientist.
Nowadays (or at least during Bush) we won't accept any assistance or improved expertise from other countries- I am thinking of the offer by Holland to help fix our levys at New Orleans, which was refused, and quite rudely, too.
8-)