40 Years Ago Today

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...