40th Anniversary of the First Man on the Moon
Memory experts will tell you with confidence that a human cannot remember anything from their first year of life. My mom knew this when, on July 20, 1969 — when I was eleven days from my 1st birthday — she set my crib in front of the television set and made me watch the Moon landing. Since then, she has asked me: do you remember that? — and you know, I could swear that I do.
(Although probably, I’m remembering subsequent missions. Because, God bless her, she put me in front of the TV for every one. Mom has always been a huge fan of outer space (and science fiction), and as I was growing up, her bookshelf was crammed with Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl, and all the other SF greats.)
Anyway, this is a big, big day. I don’t really know what to say other than this: 40 years ago today, we saw what is arguably mankind’s great achievement in all of human history.
Whether I really remember it or not, I was alive for it.
I’d sure like to be alive for an even greater accomplishment: putting a man on Mars. This fellow says we’re too spineless. I’d like to think he’s wrong. Hell, I’d even pay extra taxes to see it happen.
Who’s with me?
UPDATE: Who’s with me? Moon astronauts, that’s who!
I say we remove the checkbox for Presidential elections from our income tax form and put in a line to donate a portion to NASA.
tyree (d539f4) — 7/20/2009 @ 12:17 amPatterico, I was born about ten years before you, so I do remember the Moon landing. I looked so forward to the future, and even traveling Out myself. But things went wrong after Apollo for manned spaceflight.
I don’t know about giving the money to NASA, with all do respect to the heroes of the Apollo program. NASA seems to now be in the business of employing bureaucrats. You know the old saying: once the weight of the paperwork equals that of the payload, you can launch the rocket.
Now, it seems, the weight of the paperwork needs to equal the weight of the booster plus payload prior to launch.
Why not offer a “reward” to private industry reaching milestones in space travel? It worked before:
http://seds.org/archive/xprize/aviation-history.html
It worked with the X-Prize for Rutan:
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/041004_spaceshipone_x-prize_flight_2.html
It might work for our future in space:
http://spaceprizes.blogspot.com/
http://www.xprize.org/
How much was the stimulus package, by the way?
We spend a lot of time looking inward. It would be great to reach out toward frontiers again. And—not to belabor the point—it could cost a lot less than the money Congress wants to throw around.
Just my two cents.
Eric Blair (acade1) — 7/20/2009 @ 12:30 amNot moi. It seems going to the moon was more about the journey than the destination. If the moon itself had unique resources in it for mankind’s benefit — e.g., the sole, bountiful source of a mineral or metal more versatile than gold — we would have gone back there again and again and again rather than firing a shuttle up to launch satellites and maintain finite space stations.
I’m not going to support spending a trillion dollars so we can update the whiner’s favorite metaphor to “If ‘they’ can put a man on
L.N. Smithee (38ee9c) — 7/20/2009 @ 1:11 amthe moonMars…”Well Smithee, the moon does have deposits of Helium-3. NASA believes it can be mined and used as a safe and clean nuclear fuel.
Dawnsblood (a83e77) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:04 amI remember watching it on a 19″ Sears black & white TV in Fort Hood, Texas.
Perfect Sense (0922fa) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:38 amI watched this with my parents (on a black and white screen) – was ten at the time. I remember our baby sitter telling us a couple of years before this that “If God meant for man to go to the moon he would have given him wings!”
voiceofreason2 (10af7e) — 7/20/2009 @ 4:32 amAs for going to Mars I’d say do it. The technology spinoffs that resulted from the Apollo program were significant. Remember Tang? Okay, not a good example (Lol) but one of the spinoffs just the same.
Careful, Patterico. I’m all for space exploration and I too would love to see a man on Mars. But “Hell, I’d even pay extra taxes to see it happen” is a dangerous sentiment to encourage. The question isn’t whether you’d be willing to pay higher taxes, it’s whether you’d be willing to force everyone else to pay higher taxes too. Will you cede moral authority to proponents of, say, socialized medicine who declare their personal willingness to pay the higher taxes this would entail?
Voice of Reason (f912ba) — 7/20/2009 @ 5:42 am(p.s. no relation to #6)
Voice of Reason (f912ba) — 7/20/2009 @ 5:43 amI’m with you.
Jim S. (a50621) — 7/20/2009 @ 5:48 amRemember Tang?
Non-stick cooking (Teflon) and pens that write upside down, too.
nk (e56d9c) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:00 amI watched the landing with my father-in-law who worked for Hughes and we also watched the Hughes lander that preceded them. Those were the days when government could accomplish something. It was also before the Viet Nam anti-war movement wrecked the country. If all the baby boomers would die off, we might be able to get back to work.
This entire phenomenon of ineffective government and leftist obstruction of anything worthwhile, while at the same time attempting to flog everyone into lunatic concepts like Gaia and global warming, is a frenzy of inappropriate self indulgence by an entire generation that was pampered and convinced they were the best and brightest by their parents who really were the best and brightest.
We are still living with this eternal adolescence in the next generation with people not becoming adults until they are 30 or even 40.
Rant over.
Mike K (90939b) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:01 amOn second thought, I shouldn’t suggest that the rant applies to all baby boomers, just Baby Boomers, the professional (so to speak) devotees of 60s attitudes to life. Contrast Eisenhower’s highway program, which was called The National Defense Highway Program, to the stimulus.
Mike K (90939b) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:09 amWhen talk turns to space exploration, the small, selfish Liberals crawl out to demand that any money be diverted to the same Liberal causes that Obama funded in the so called stimulus package which was nothing more than robbing the country to fund the whackjob left.
PCD (02f8c1) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:16 amI was working at the State Hospital in San Antonio and we watched on the TV in the Rec Room. Fascinating then, and just as fascinating now.
Patterico, you don’t remember the landing, but you have seen video and your mother’s constant reminding has inserted a false memory. It’s there, but it isn’t real. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it however, just like we enjoy movies that we know aren’t real.
GM Roper (85dcd7) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:28 amHappy 41st birthday, in arrears, Patterico. Why wasn’t there a post for it? If there was, I may have missed it. Still, may this life make more sense to you. And may you find joy in the simple things of life. Mostly family and loved ones. Cheers to the best blogger of all times.
The Emperor (1b037c) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:25 amPatterico, I remember staying up for the moon landing — I was 15 — but I think you may be right about memory. I vaguely remember riding a train at Disneyland on opening day in 1955. I was 17 months old.
Kevin Murphy (0b2493) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:44 amI was an eleven year-old beach rat in Orange County. I have to admit that I was switching channels between Cronkite and one of the local stations (prob KHJ) playing King Kong. I realized the importance of the event but I was also a hard core film nut and KK hadnt been on in years.
I have to say that walking outside later that night, looking up at the moon and having it starting to sink in that for the first time ever, men from earth were up there looking back at me was a feeling I’ve never been able to describe.
harkin (3769c8) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:45 amOne of the things that sticks in my mind about NASA is that, back in 1968 we all thought that Kubrick’s 2001 had the timeline about right. How wrong we were. I blame Nixon.
Kevin Murphy (0b2493) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:47 amHappy belated birthday wishes, Patterico.
I have to admit to being completely and utterly ambivalent about all of this space stuff. David Wolf is from here in Indy, and we get wall to wall coverage every time he heads up in the Shuttle.
My ambivlence grows every time International Man of Parody has an all-too-public orgasm about this.
JD (b09e6a) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:59 amI was born on the day of the second moon landing, which no one remembers.
I just saw a blurb on TV; apparently, 25% of Brits surveyed think that the moon landing was a hoax. ugh.
carlitos (ee9dcd) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:12 amJD, it’s a shame that we don’t get major coverage of shuttle launches everywhere. It’s such a huge thing for someone to do… basically take a 2% chance of dying in order to help run a science experiment.
I don’t know who David Wolf is. But whoever he is, I hope you don’t let him make you ambivalent about the space program. It really is a tremendously worthwhile thing. Even if the shuttle is a bit of a flawed concept, space travel is probably going to be one of the most important things the USA ever did.
Not to be preachy… I myself get ambivalent about NASA and pork and all the other details.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:20 amJuan – If memory serves, he has done at least 4 Shuttle missions, and was on Mir for quite some time.
JD (f3535f) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:28 amDon’t worry about IMP, JD. Not only did he help design the shuttle, he has flown it several times. He was there. What do you or I know?
Seriously, there are all kinds of people interested in space travel. Some are great people. Others, not so much.
Eric Blair (acade1) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:29 amBeing a bit older than Patterico, I recall the landings first hand. Very exciting at the time, although I did not have the sense then that I later gained of just what a near thing it was, and how dangerous.
One summer in the early ’80’s, I was a lowly engineering intern in Space Shuttle Operation at Rockwell / Downey. Among my exciting tasks was stamping “DECLASSIFIED” on a lot of Apollo / Saturn documentation.
SPQR (5811e9) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:39 amTang was not one of the spinoffs from the space program; it existed before NASA.
However, advances in medical monitoring and clean room technology (which transferred to surgery rooms, which kept people from getting infections) came as direct results from the space program.
My father was involved with this, heading up one of the subsystems on the LM. So, space has been in my blood for some time. However, I don’t remember seeing much of my father in the 1960s 🙂
Steverino (69d941) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:46 amI’m with you Mr. Patterico…
For all the hooey that Obama loves to spout about Science!, like all things with him it’s just words…
No, for now unfortunately, the Jesse Jackson mentality is winning out; the one that thinks the NASA budget would be better spent in the inner cities…
Just as with the Military budgets, regardless of defense actually being mentioned in the COnstitution, NASA’s budget has continued to me marginalized over the years; in FY 2008 it was 17 billion dollars. That’s a mere drop in the bucket compared to what is spent on malingerers, pork barrel earmarks, and the buying of votes from the 40 odd percent of Americans that don’t pay any taxes at all…
Admittedly, I am biased when it comes to this subject; full disclosure, I was an Aerospace engineer who worked on missles and strategic systems for many years for the US Navy once I could no longer fly the sexiest aircraft.
Obama like to talk a lot about science and innovation. But many of the most breathtaking discoveries of the modern era, as well as spin off technologies that we mundanely use and take for granted, are direct results if the US space program. And while their are arguments to be made about the privatization of that frontier in terms of commerce, travel, and development, those are far in the future. To maintain our technological and innovative edge we need to be actively traveling to other worlds, and engaging in the research and development to facilitate the same, especially in light of the Chinese and Indians attempting to do so. Otherwise, we risk squandering our last edge; all in the name of buying votes and assuaging our race guilty consciences…
Bob (99fc1b) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:52 amThe latest talk is that budget cuts are going to kill the Constellation program and the planned moon-mission-part-deux program; Shockah there, it was cooked up under eeeeevolll Boooooosh!, so it’s definately gotta go…
I guess we’ll all just have to resign ourselves to US satellites being launched by ESA, Indian, or Chinese space agencies in the near future; a revolting development indeed…
Bob (99fc1b) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:54 amI was ten, and have reams of photos taken of the TV from Apollo 8 and on (my first set was, alas, directly in front of the set and all I got was a roll full of flash images; subsequent sets turned out surprisingly well). For my kids, I need to dig out my old Today newspaper frontpages (“Today” covered the spacecoast, where I was fortunate enough to live throughout all of the Gemini and Apollo era.) Even as a kid, where everything is new to you and therefore accepted as “normal”, we knew that we lived in an exciting time. I watched all manned launches (and many unmanned) from either my front yard or, if in school, we went outside to watch, using those nifty folding binoculars and everybody had those high tech 10 transistor radios. Standard April Fool’s Day joke was “Look, a rocket!”, effective because it may very well have been so.
Chris (d098d0) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:02 amBob, you might be right about those Indian, Chinese, and ESA boosters. On the other hand, the pundits in the late 1950s and early 1960s were quite sure that the Soviets would “beat us” in the “Space Race.” Our boosters kept blowing up, or we could only orbit small items…while the Soviets could orbit things faster and larger than we could (sure, their boosters blew up, too, but they could hide that from the world). Space was theirs, many pundits thought.
But we found a national goal, and we made it happen. Until NASA made things boring (sorry, but it is true), and Nixon lost our momentum. The public is fickle and inattentive, but then our current President knows that, and used it last November.
If we can throw off our enchantment with irony and “hipness” and start looking toward goals that are grand and good, we can do pretty much whatever we envision.
Solar power satellites, anyone? Asteroid resources? We could do those things, and for a small amount of cash compared to our Porkulus.
And keep this in mind:
http://spacex.com/press.php?page=20090715
Sure, it is a small step indeed, but it is a start.
This seems to me like the exploration of the Americas: a few explorers, a long lag time, and then proper exploration. I just hope we are the ones to do the latter.
I thought it would be my generation. Maybe my children’s, or grandchildren.
I mean, listen to the press about how “difficult” it would be to go back to the Moon nowadays. Compared to 1959 – 1969? But the press knows things. Just ask ’em.
On the other hand, here is someone who has some interesting insights on the issue, Tom Wolfe:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19wolfe.html?_r=2
I’ll take what he knows, thank you.
Eric Blair (acade1) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:13 am‘eh… to some extent space exploration doesn’t need governments anymore.
I know that sounds far fetched when talking about moon bases. I suspect greatly that if we would recognize a property right for settlers on the moon and mars, we’d leap into the future.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:18 amI vaguely remember, as a young lad, getting up at O-dark thirty in suburban L.A., to see if I could see the glow on the horizon of the above-ground atomic test in Nevada. Memory plays tricks, but I am thoroughly convinced that we did see that glow once.
AD - RtR/OS! (083442) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:21 amDear Juan: that is what Virgin Galactic (what a name…), SpaceX, and Bigelow are all about. And I do think that the idea of having the government award “prizes” for technological goals is an interesting one. If private individuals can do it (like the Ansari X- Prize), governments could, too.
And they did, with aviation in the 1920s.
Eric Blair (acade1) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:29 amAgain, Bigelow is making some progress:
http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/
To be sure, people will say it ain’t much. But it is pretty impressive in context. And it may reflect the future pretty well.
If there is money to be made, industry will get there.
Eric Blair (acade1) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:31 amEric, I know that, and I’m really excited about that kind of thing.
At the end of the day, they will have to move on to bigger and better things, as they have themselves said. I think the key is abandoning the nonsense UN resolutions and international law claiming that you can’t own property on the Moon or Mars. We could easily promise 500 square miles to squatters who live there for ten years and see some REAL free market principles at work. Think of your X Prize and multiply it by a million.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:37 amPatterico really might remember it.
I remember when Andrew Sullivan went all BS over Bush for suggesting a Mars mission. Sully said it was fiscally irresponsible.
Funny, I do not hear him saying the same about Da One.
Joe (a32cff) — 7/20/2009 @ 10:25 amEric you make a good point, one that I alluded to in my comment.
The fact is that there is a lot of talk in the astronautics community about getting government out of the way. These folks believe that the real advances in space exploration, and maybe more importantly, utilization and commercialization, will take place when private industry takes tha ball and really starts to run with it. And they rightly point to the breathtaking adbances in aeronautics that took place in the 20th century once it was no longer completely the purview of governments.
I believe that too, but that being said, governments will still have to lead the way interms of exploration much as they did during the era of world exploration by the west in the 15th through 18th centuries.
Perhaps the model will be private enterprises incentivized by the promise of the profits they can make; none of us can see the future. In the meantime I believe that an approach where private concerns exploit LEO, engaging in satellite commerce and spae stations-for research and enjoyment, while NASA engages in more long term, big picture, exploration might be a better model to look toward…
Thanks for the links and the thoughtful rejoinder…
All the best
Bob (99fc1b) — 7/20/2009 @ 11:18 amMaybe we need a Queen Isabella, Bob!
It sounds like many of us are on the same page, and I hope I didn’t seem to imply otherwise.
Americans do best with frontiers. I hope I live to see it happen.
Eric Blair (b033b3) — 7/20/2009 @ 11:41 amI watched the moon landing live, during school hours – the entire nation was transfixed then, and well they should be; we had accomplished a remarkable goal in far less time than was ever predicted (except by JFK).
I also agree with Eric’s sentiments regarding more funding for NASA – the agency is hopelessly FUBAR in terms of their staffing and internal jockeying by scientists more interested in their resumes than in the organization’s achievements. The last Shuttle that blew up over Texas is a searing indictment regarding NASA’s obstinancy and inertia, not to mention their haplessness. Give it to the private sector, please.
Dmac (e6d1c2) — 7/20/2009 @ 12:35 pmThere sure are a lot of good ideas and thoughtful comments here on this subject. I’m just happy for the high visibility moment to discuss the topic…
Now if only Obama would honor his rhetorical comittment to Science!
Eric, no offense taken on my part at all. I don’t know your background, but can assure you thatI’ve been in some real furball’s when it came to engineering design problems! And for a bunch of geeky rocket scientists, there was sure some pretty heated discussion of whose ideas were really the best!
But even those usually calmed down after actual numbers, both performance and costs, were associated with the creative concepts…
But it never hurts to dream big, and get there in small, positive, steps…
All the best
Bob (99fc1b) — 7/20/2009 @ 1:02 pmWow…
Here’s a stinging indictment of NASA since the Apollo program by those same moon-shot astronauts themselves…
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE56J4O020090720?sp=true
ISS? A veritable boondoggle acording to them…
Good read
Bob (99fc1b) — 7/20/2009 @ 1:32 pmSunday in Marine Corp Boot Camp is different than other days of the week. One of the differences was that we could get a newspaper. Careful planning meant that four of us had access to four different Sunday papers, and we were elated to discover that mankind was going to land on the moon. Then we were bummed that we were not going to get to watch it on TV with the rest of the planet. After lunch, we heard that it was a successful landing, and were set to “make and mend”, along with the studying letter writing and whatever that we occupied ourselves with on Sunday afternoon.
Then we were (strangely) formed up and marched out into the sand off the three-mile running path. There was a mess tent set up, but it had no sides, no tables, … just the canopy. One of the DI’s appeared with several huge extension cords. Several recruits were told to run the extension cord over there, by where the ambulance was parked, maybe a hundred feet away.
One of the Corpsman then emerged with a card table, and the senior DI with a 12″ black and white TV. The card table was placed in a corner of the shade cast by the tent, and turned on. “If you behave, we’re going to watch Man walk on the Moon!”
Cheers.
No picture, no sound. After a couple of minutes, one of them remembered that I had worked in broadcasting, and asked if I could determine why it wasn’t working. Easy; no antenna. We’ll have to give up, then. Is there some wire? You can make a TV antenna from wire? SIR YES SIR! They scrounged up some 14 gauge from somewhere, we cut two five foot pieces, hooked them to the terminals (300 Ohm, for those who don’t remember life before cable), steered them about, and Shazam!
TV.
Sitting in the sand, watching Armstrong step onto the moon, life couldn’t be much better that day.
htom (412a17) — 7/20/2009 @ 1:36 pmPatterico:
In a way, I’m sorry you were born too late and cheated of experiencing the challenge of reaching the moon. It was a wonderful time to be alive as a child to witness the march to the moon and a superb study in management to reflect on as an adult. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate Apollo 8 in equal stature with Apollo 11 and the subsequent landings. Apollo 8 essentially ended the space race and Apollo 11 confirmed it.
About a decade ago I stopped by a garage sale in Los Angeles and came across a box of old reel to reel audio tapes for sale. Three of the reels were oddly marked “Appolo” in faded pencil. I took a chance, bought the box, and to my utter delight I discovered pristine, unedited real time recordings from July 16 and July 20, 1969, of the Apollo 11 lanuch, the first moon landing unedited, ‘the way it is’– or was, and the entire moonwalk itself as reported by the late Walter Cronkite.
So there it was. The pinnacle of a $24 billion project, the most significant achievement in human history to date, sold off as clutter at a yard sale for five bucks.
And that’s as it should. Because Americans are a people who, when properly challenged and led, have always achieved great things, linger little and press on to new challenges.
I’m proud to say I’m old enough to have managed to be by a television set to experience every American manned space launch since Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight on May 5, 1961. So I admit a severe and life long bias in support of human spaceflight, particularly by Americans, albeit tempered over time with a critical eye as well.
The history of Apollo is a triumph of organization and planning– and well documented. Those who choose to read about it know how the money was spent (right here on Earth,) where wise decisions were made and where the mistakes occurred. And those who worked in it know what they did. Its legacy is all around us in our daily lives. My late grandfather, who was born in early 1903, remained awed by the fact that in the span of his lifetime, the age of flight had soared from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility. He often mused about the mindset of a people which in his youth, insisted a trip to the moon was technically impossible and by his golden years argued that manned lunar and planetary explorations were impractical due to cost, not feasibility. “Go figure.”, he’d say. In my life I’ve had the honor and good fortune to have met several of the key people who made Apollo a reality. Americans did things differently then. It’s hard to convey to the gen-x or gen-y crowd, beset with shortening attention spans and use to instant gratification, how the United States was caught short as the space race began. Or how long (a decade) it took to catch-up through the 1960’s. It makes those who chide the current stimulus package as a failure after just five months seem laughably trite, short-sighted and defeatist, if not immature.
In that era, every launch was front page news, every mission televised ‘live’ and followed in offices and classrooms across the land. And kids knew the rosters of astronauts and mission profiles as well as the the stats of any ball team– and in ’69, the team to watch was the Amazin’ Mets. Most boys, and a few girls as well, had a shelf full of spacecraft manufactured not by Boeing or Grumman, but Aurora and Revell. We cheered listening to Ed White’s spacewalk and cried when he died along with Grissom and Chaffee in the Apollo fire. The space race was truly a golden thread through a very dour decade.
Personally, I support the Apollo crews desire to see Mars as the next ultimate goal for human space exploration. Neil Armstrong said in 1989 on the 20th anniversary of the moon landing that, “Someone will go.” I’d like it to be Americans. If perfecting the techniques and hardware for such long term missions include revisiting the moon along the way, all the better. It would be akin to the long forgotten Gemini program, which perfected techniques essential for Apollo to succeed. There is much to be said for sending unmanned probes out ahead of humans to Mars, as was done by NASA ahead of the lunar landings. NASA strives to be a can-do agency and it’s a tribute to the engineers and managers, smart people all, in government, universities and private industry who worked together as a team for a decade to make the moon landings a reality. They brought them in ahead of schedule and under-budget. It was paid for by the Americans of that era, too. Not bad for government work.
The NASA of today, like the America of today, is far different, and a strong dose of Apollo management style is needed at the agency along with some stellar leadership and goal setting from the President. But like every administration since Nixon, I have doubts we will see it from President Obama in this current economic climate. And NASA has become far too bureaucratic. To be sure people will be killed in spaceflight, and the shuttle is a marvel on engineering rivalling Apollo. But losing 14 astronauts and two multi-billion space shuttles because of sloppy management and bureaucratic complacency is simply unacceptable and the agency need a good strong house cleaning. Because in the end, it is a national treasure and it needs polished and cleaned up.
Nixon did great damage to NASA and its Kennedy/Johnson legacy. The Carter and Reagan years weren’t much better. Reagan, particularly, pushed the silly notion of making a massive R&D organization a profit center. A quaint idea but long in the future given the resources and scale of space projects in out time. the push to privatization increased risks and in the end contributed to loss of life. And in the Bush years, NASA was poisoned by the politics of theocrats seeping into the agency’s science teams. Weak leadership all around.
To be sure the immediate debate around the Constellation program, the costs, contracts, the methods of propulsion and techniques needed to return to the moon and voyage beyond need to be examined and flushed out, much as they were during the early planning days of Apollo. It has been long overdue. Four decades. And retiring shuttle, leaving at least a five year gap between vehicles, seems very deja vu to the time between Apollo and shuttle– and short sighted. The irony of Americans relying on the Russian Soyuz, a spacecraft designed in the 1960s to compete with Apollo, to access the ISS has nto been lost on those of the Apollo era. As my grandfather noted, it has come down to cost, not capability. Go figure. But as Armstrong said, someone will go.
The United States will be challenged in space in the near future by China. They will most likely be the next people to make a lunar voyage. The have the means to pay to try and perhaps more importantly, the desire to put such a voyage as their claim on the 21st century.
But today, July 20, 2009, it’s worth pausing to reflect on just what the people of the United States are capable of achieving when they set their minds to meeting a complex challenge, be it national healthcare, finding Bin Laden— or losing 20 pounds.
To someone born after 1969, that might seem like asking for the moon. To those of us born before ’69, it brings a smile.
DCSCA (9d1bb3) — 7/20/2009 @ 2:05 pmBob, engineers do things. They build things. I am a geneticist, and do research and teach students. What I do is important to me (and hopefully to granting agencies and organizations), but no one will really think my own contributions to anything were Earth shattering. Least of all, me.
Not so for aerospace engineers. And the Apollo crews—astronauts and engineers—did something truly unique.
I hope it is just the beginning.
Eric Blair (0b61b2) — 7/20/2009 @ 2:16 pmAnd htom? That was a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing it.
Eric Blair (0b61b2) — 7/20/2009 @ 2:17 pmNice post DCSCA, but I notoced Clinton’s name noticably absent from your list of Presidential NASA mishandling.
There are many in the business that lament the ISS. For, despite the technical acievement of the station itself, there were compromises made, unnecessarily by the measure of some, in order to quickly get the project up and running…
Among those? No rotating section to provide centrifugal artificial gracity, a terrible orbital plane that neither surves any useful extra orbital injection nor makes it easy to reach from US launce sites. I could list a few more, but suffice it ti say that ISS has cost NASA plenty, mainly to service our alleged “partners” space research; it is meant to celebrate a mythical globalist outlook at our expense…
The reason that there is hole in the development pipeline at NASA, as well as the demise of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas, is due to the dramatic cost overruns of the ISS; originally sold as a 15 billion dollar effort…
With all due respect
Bob (99fc1b) — 7/20/2009 @ 2:40 pmWhat I find even more amazing is to see how fast it came about. In 1969 there were still a few stragglers remaining from the age of sail. People who had gone from a life before internal combustion engines through cars and airplanes and then Apollo all in the span of a human life.
Soronel Haetir (2a5236) — 7/20/2009 @ 2:54 pmHundreds of billions for Mars, or for access to healthcare? Oops, silly me, I forgot.
We can do it all!
Until we get a firm grasp on just how much more weakened the U.S. economy has been made in the past 18 moths, and we figure out a way to disincentivize bureaucratic “scientists,” space exploration is just not smart. If a private entity can make it work, then great.
What happens if red China decides to invest in space and not our debt?
Ed from SFV (fabfbd) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:16 pmBob, the ISS is pretty damn annoying. Not only just because it preaches the myth of globalism.
Space exploration is about excellence. It’s one of our pinnacles. It’s not about ‘everyone is just as good as everyone else’. The competitive spirit of the space race is part of why it worked.
I don’t mind hearing that another nation is trying to compete. I wish we still had that kind of idealism.
I do suspect that we’ve learned at least a few things from the ISS. Probably at far too great a cost, but I’ll take what I can get these days.
It’s interesting to think of all the real stimulus Obama could have proposed instead of this petty Chicago payoff garbage.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:20 pmMy mother, who wrote letters to soldiers in WWI, and remembered travel by horse and buggy, watched the landing on the moon. She remembered the sinking of the Titanic. Fortunately, she missed 9/11 dying the month before it changed so much of the world.
Mike K (90939b) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:24 pmMike, that’s not a bad run for her. We lost a lot of freedom on 9/11, and a lot of the things happening since have made me proud of the USA, but only in a convoluted way.
66 years from Kitty Hawk to the moon, and 40 years from the moon to thinking about going to the moon again is not good enough.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:39 pm#45- Bob- An oversight on my part. Clinton wasnt much of a space person. Ironically, Hillary is. Kudos to you for your efforts and to the serospace industry. I agree with you on the ISS. It wasted a generation of resources and space engineers. I once had an argument with Laurie Garver over it and she is now an associate administrator at NASA which may not bode well for the future. ISS was just make work and really should be sold off after completion and the focus put back on the Moon and Mars. There already was a ‘space station’ in orbit, 240,000 miles away. The ISS should not be afloat 250 miles up but firmly anchored to the floor of the Ocean of Storms.
DCSCA (9d1bb3) — 7/20/2009 @ 3:41 pmDCSCA, is Bush 43’s involvement with NASA fairly characterized as theocratic?
I think that’s pretty damn unfair. And I think Bush is probably the best NASA president we’ve seen in quite a while. He’s the one who set the course of getting to Mars, getting back to the moon, and coming up with new vehicles. In the wake of the Colombia disaster, no less. I hope Obama is not so petty as to cancel these projects just because they aren’t his, but that’s exactly what my tea leaves are pointing at.
Seems like a lot of Bush’s ideas were good ones. If all of his plans came to fruition, wouldn’t that be excellent? Why must everything Bush did be distorted?
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 4:12 pmSpace travel is so extraordinarily expensive that undertaking the goal of sending humans to Mars would benefit from the joint effort of as many nations as possible. I know that would undercut much of the national pride that a NASA-only program would generate, but to keep the per-person, per-taxpayer expense to a manageable level requires that a lot of “customers,” if you will, be a part of the initative. So a pooled populace of North Americans, Asians, Europeans (if not others too) getting in on the program — meaning millions and millions of taxpayers — would be helpful.
Mark (411533) — 7/20/2009 @ 5:20 pmI remember it. I was 7 and I watched. It was all those sci-fi books and Popular Sciences I read as a kid come to life. Amazing still. It’s well past time to go back.
JEA (9c25cd) — 7/20/2009 @ 5:57 pm“Mark” #53, that’s pretty silly really. If you look at other “international” space programs like the space station, you will find that the US funds other nations’ “contributions” as well as our own.
SPQR (26be8b) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:00 pmIs the International Man of Parody done with its public spunk-fest yet?
JD (f086e6) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:07 pmMark, space travel isn’t nearly as expensive as you are claiming. It’s cost a tiny fraction of our budget to run NASA. Compared to what we’re doing with bailouts, we could probably fund 1000 missions to Mars.
also, you claim that we benefit from sharing with other nations because of cost, but I seriously doubt that costs are really shared all that fairly. Competition and pride mean an awful lot.’
No… you have an agenda. you think globalism is good, in and of itself, and that’s just that. But it’s not. The USA is exceptional in a way the rest of the world just plain isn’t, and the space race already proved it.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 6:23 pmWhat would be the per ton extraction cost? What would be the per megawatt operation costs of a helium-3 reactor?
Michael Ejercito (833607) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:39 pmYour work could lead to a cure for Down’s syndrome.
And whatever is responsible for Vice President Joe Biden’s mental condition.
Michael Ejercito (833607) — 7/20/2009 @ 7:41 pmWhat is IMHO the most chill-inducing, thoughtfully written, majestically sung, perfectly-produced pop song ever recorded is about the squandered promise of Apollo 11.
Below is a link to the video on YouTube, but trust me: Minimize your browser or hide your tab in the background and listen to the song first without watching the video, which distracts from how magnificent the track is. It’s doubtful a song like this could be recorded by a major label today because the immensely talented vocalist doesn’t have “the look” and the lyrics are too complex for young chowderheads who get bored with music without a synthetic backbeat and white noise.
Excuse me, I have to put down my bowl of Quaker Oatmeal and chase some of those confounded kids off my lawn. But first…
{{{Casey Kasem impersonation}}}
And now, from 1992 … here’s the UK’s Tasmin Archer …. with “Sleeping Satellite.”
L.N. Smithee (38ee9c) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:22 pmIf you look at other “international” space programs like the space station, you will find that the US funds other nations’ “contributions” as well as our own.
Then that means we’ve really been too much the soft touch if we’ve looked the other way as other countries have happily expected us to pick up all or most of their tab.
Mark, space travel isn’t nearly as expensive as you are claiming. It’s cost a tiny fraction of our budget to run NASA.
Is that claim correct when there hasn’t been a program (or certainly a fully active, fully formed one) — and its corresponding expenditures — to send an astronaut to another body in space since the 1970s? I thought virtually all of NASA’s budget over these past few decades has been devoted to the shuttle and the international space station, and launching a few probes here and there.
Now, of course, those initiatives are expensive in their own right, but not nearly as costly as what will be required to develop and activate a plan to send humans to Mars, or even back to the Moon again. And since Obama is the ultimate spendthrift, and since we probably will be facing a truly huge economic quagmire in the next several years, treating anything that will add noticeably to government deficits and not shuddering in the process is tempting fate.
BTW, how you translate my concern about spendthrift budgeting run amok as also somehow related to a desire to foster a global agenda is puzzling to me.
Mark (411533) — 7/20/2009 @ 8:56 pmMark, I am glad to hear that by “I know that would undercut much of the national pride that a NASA-only program would generate” you were not actually saying such pride wasn’t worth a hell of a lot as a force that got us to the moon in the first place.
I misunderstood you.
I think the spirit of competition makes a lot more sense than using a bunch of out countries to share to cost of space exploration. It just doesn’t cost nearly as much money as other initiatives… hell, it doesn’t cost anything in net. We get much more out of these programs than be we put in… if we challenge ourselves.
Which is exactly what can’t happen when we make a multinational committee of idiots who build less useful contraptions like the ISS. Look at Airbus. Things work better when a clear vision and clear leadership structure exist. What are we supposed to do when we get to Mars? Should we poll China, Russia, and India to ask what they think we should do?
Or should be colonize it and develop it as much as we can reasonably do?
I just have a fundamental aversion to these multinational groups, and I guess I just don’t see any merit to them whatsoever. Since we don’t really get any cost savings (if anything we spent far more on the ISS than we otherwise would have), I just assumed you thought a global togetherness was its own value. At least we agree that it has no value.
Juan (bd4b30) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:05 pmA postscript. It’s worth catching the broadcast of the presentation on CSPAN at the NASM on July 19 by the Apollo 11 crew, John Glenn and Dr. Christopher C. Kraft. Particularly Kraft’s presentation. It’s stellar stuff. And chances are we’ll seldom see these individuals gathered together again on an occasion such as this.
DCSCA (9d1bb3) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:33 pmHoly barking Jeebus, does this one ever quit babbling and babbling and babbling and babbling. There is going to be a run on Lithium any day now …
JD (bdcd86) — 7/20/2009 @ 9:50 pm.
Nice, but I would nominate Michelle Obama making it to #98 on Maxim’s Hot list. That was stretching both gravity and reality.
Vermont Neighbor (4126d0) — 7/22/2009 @ 1:18 pmAfter a few days of public masturbation, International Man of Parody seems to have crashed. That was one heck of a bender …
JD (f4f0f3) — 7/22/2009 @ 1:21 pmI personally felt sorry that these 3 men, actual heroes, had to stand next to Zero. God knows what they were thinking.
Vermont Neighbor (4126d0) — 7/22/2009 @ 1:29 pm