Neil and Buzz landed on the Moon on this day. It’s now been over half a century since the last man kicked up the regolith there. I’ll be on The Space Show this evening (1900 PDT) to talk about it, and space in general.
[Late-morning update]
Anniversary thoughts from Rick Tumlinson. He worries too much about the “climate crisis,” though. And he’s fooling himself if he really thinks that China is worried about it.
A review of Ashlee Vance’s latest book. Highly recommended.
Assif Siddiqui says that we need new ways to think about it: “We need to let go of our nostalgia for Apollo and move on and work with different models to the old 1960s space races.”
I’ve been saying this for years.
Glenn Reynolds writes an elegy to Mark Hopkins.
“For years, the phone would ring at random times, and when I’d answer it was always the same: ‘This is Mark Hopkins.’ (He always started exactly the same way.) Then followed some sort of problem, usually leading to either a request for advice, or for me to do something.”
Yes. I and many others had the same experience. Sometimes we would do them, other times not. But we always answered the phone.
Ed Driscoll reviews a new documentary about Apollo 8.
That event, not Apollo 11, is when we won the race, because the Soviets quietly threw in the towel at that point, pretending that they’d never been racing.
In spaceflight, it’s a necessity.
…is in big trouble.
My biggest fear is that if they can’t play in the sandbox, they’ll crap in it, which they are perfectly capable of doing. It’s always much easier to destroy than create, which is what they’ve been doing in Ukraine.
[Afternoon update]
Sorry, link is there now.
NASA was right not to do it.
On the other hand, I never thought it should have been named for him in the first place, and not because of the “Lavender Scare” thing. It just didn’t seem appropriate.
Hard to believe it’s been two decades now. Of the three tragic NASA anniversaries, this was the only one that occurred after I started blogging. Here‘s what I wrote about it at the time. Posts are in reverse chronological order, so scroll to the bottom and work your way up.
Thanks for the birthday wishes. Here is what I wrote in 2010 about Challenger.
[Update a while later]
On the thirtieth anniversary, there were still lessons to be learned. In fact, many remain to be learned today, on the thirty-seventh.