Celebration & Mourning

[starmalachite]

This is the day to commemorate 2 of the most important things in my life.

1st, it's the birthday of my dear husband stevemb .  Happy birthday, sweetheart.  I love you.

2nd, it's the 40th anniversary of the single greatest achievement of the human race, the Apollo 11 moon landing.  It's hard to believe now how quickly it was followed by the abandonment of

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The fallacy here is that the resources used for the space program would simply have vanished if it hadn't existed. We don't know what would have been done with them, but certainly something would have been.

This may be a little clearer if we include World War II, without which the space program (and therefore all that followed it) wouldn't have existed in the form we know it, in the equation. No war, no missiles. No missiles, no space program. Should those who consider World War II a bad idea be writing with quill pen and parchment? In the absence of a war, people would have had the resources that weren't consumed or outright destroyed. We don't know where that would have led, but stagnation is the least likely possibility.

[patches023]

Thank you for sharing this. It is very moving.

[wcg]

Thanks for that bit of poetry. I hadn't seen it before.

I'm here at work at GSFC, wearing my Apollo 40 year anniversary t-shirt. 40 years ago today I wouldn't have believed anyone who told me I'd be here today, and I'd certainly not have believed anyone who told me our lunar ventures would end in fewer than 4 years, and that 40 years later we'd all be looking back on the glory days of Apollo with a not yet completed space station in low Earth orbit and no capability to loft humans any further than that.

But hey, at least we have spiritrover and opportunitygrrl roving around Mars for us. That does mean a lot.

[fiddledragon]

2nd, it's the 40th anniversary of the single greatest achievement of the human race, the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Really? Better than democracy, or sequencing the human genome, or women's rights, or heart transplants? The Apollo program was definitely huge, but I'm skeptical of whether it achieved anything that couldn't have been achieved by, say, putting that effort into international peace efforts that would have resulted in resources not getting used up in constant war.

It also strikes me as more of a one-off thing. We put a man on the moon. Wow. Seriously, wow. But the "wow" factor of putting someone on the moon again, or putting someone on Mars, or even building a colony on the moon, drops off significantly. We also don't have as much of a "we must get there first" impetus anymore.

[starmalachite]

I stand by my original statement.

Democracy and women's rights? Not in most of the world. And not perfectly implemented anywhere.

Sequencing the human genome in nifty, but the real test is what we will do with it.

The first heart transplant was made possible by medical research done by the pre-NASA Air Force bureau charged with determining whether manned space flight was feasible. (I came across this while researching a paper in college 30+ years ago. Wish I could find the relevant papers online, but they're so old it seems no one's gotten around to putting them up yet--if ever.)

I'm skeptical of whether it achieved anything that couldn't have been achieved by, say, putting that effort into international peace efforts that would have resulted in resources not getting used up in constant war.And exactly how would that have made a difference? To quote Rocky the Flying Squirrel, "That trick never works," and never will as long as someone with political & military power thinks he/she has more to gain from war

[jannyblue]

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:wPwtBBMTdPkJ:www.allstardoms.com/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/4454/an/0/page/6

Author's name is W. W. Cooper.

[starmalachite]

Thanks!