Michael Laprarie has an essay related to mine over at Wizbang.
[Via email from Paul Spudis, who must be thrilled that “Moon” was capitalized throughout my essay]
8 thoughts on “More Apollo-At-Forty Thoughts”
Comments are closed.
Michael Laprarie has an essay related to mine over at Wizbang.
[Via email from Paul Spudis, who must be thrilled that “Moon” was capitalized throughout my essay]
Comments are closed.
Nah — I only get “thrilled” at out-of-the-ordinary things. 🙂
Set “Moon” to “Noom”, and see if that gets a tingly thrill up Mr. Spudis’ leg.
🙂
Laprarie article suffers from some of the same faulty history that Rand’s piece does. For example, Walter Mondale was not an early opponent of Apollo; aside from his grandstanding after the Apollo Fire, his opposition to human space flight came later.
The big enemy of Apollo in the Senate was William Proxmire, who actually managed to get its budget cut shortly before JFK was shot. The funding was restored after Dallas, of course.
Rand,
Glad you decided to follow the IAU guidelines on it 🙂
Re: 1963 budget cuts; Tom Wolfe anectdote
Also lost in the hubbub over 1969 was the post-67 cuts in Apollo Applications program and Mars/Venus flyby research (not to mention Mars Voyager and Grand Tour), which basically doomed the entire Apollo infrastructure long before Armstrong took his step.
Will you now start capitalizing Space as a destination?
“The Final Frontier of Capitalization, Space: these are spaceflights that take us on a five-year mission to explore a geographic location like Captain Cook going to the Pacific Ocean.”
I saw the Nova PBS TV show “Astro Spies” for the second time last night. It basically covered the American MOL and Russian Almaz programs for manned orbital reconnaisance.
If the spy satellite biz could not find a roll for a crew member in space that could not be met by ground control of an automated spacecraft, how is it that humans are needed on the surface of Mars?
Maybe the cancellation of MOL has a roll in the lack of enthusiasm for humans in space.
Although the human stuff on the moon is not the scientifically important part of the mission, it will be very interesting to see the Apollo landing sites as well as the Russian probes and stuff. It will also be interesting to see some of the Soviet probes and unmanned moon stuff. I know at least one of the probes sent to the moon by the Soviets failed just before landing and the reason is unknown. They think it might have hit a mountain. Maybe this could tell if there is a crater and crash site there.
It won’t convince conspiracy theorists. Even if a country other than the US sent back pics from a probe, they’d come up with some explanation of how NASA paid them off or something. Even if you took them there, they’d say it is fake. Those people are just desperate to confirm their own beliefs.