True. Maybe it would have come from somewhere else, human ingenuity is a wild and weird thing. But in the real world, which I rarely inhabit anyway, the program had a lot to do with it.
Maybe I’m just another hopeless romantic. I can live with that.
Sorry, it ain’t me (Hey I’d give ya an “A” just for being a poster here if it was me!).
I really appreciate the fact so many of you are in agreement with me (Hey, we’re all Dopers, right? So we’ve got to understand how important this is.) and I know that there’s people out there with real money who feel the same way. Tom Hanks, before he ever did Apollo 13 said that he wanted to know where the space stations and lunar colonies were that he’d been promised when he was a kid. Somehow, all of poor 'uns and the rich ones like Hanks have got to find a way to get our miserable little selves off this wad of dirt, because its obvious that NASA ain’t gonna do it for us.
I am in complete agreement with the OP. However, I wonder if I am the only one here to think that all the cool stuff we are impatiently waiting for is still going to happen. Perhaps I am just an incurable optimist, but I see Apollo et al as a “false dawn”, sped up artificially by the cold war. I do believe we are going to get Out There…it is simply too much a part of our nature as human beings for it not to happen. I just think it will be slower and less spectacular than it was in the 60s. And the really interesting stuff will be done by private enterprise, not the government.
The main detrement to space exploration is the enormous cost: Sending stuff into space takes lots and lots of energy. Generating lots and lots of energy requires lots and lots of fuel. Lots and lots of fuel costs lots and lots of money. The construction of a giant railgun or an orbital tether might make things easier, but you’re still dealing with construction on an incredible scale, and either one would require serious advances in technology to be possible.
Took me awhile to find it, Tuckerfan. But this is for us. 
Dancing On the Moon
as sung by Diana Gallagher-Wu
Ordinary men and women stand
Earthbound and wishing for the stars
So very far away
Beyond the reach of today
And the Moon seems just as far.
I want to go dancing on the Moon.
I want to frolic in zero gravity
I want to hear Jupiter sing
Tour Saturn’s rings
When will space be open for me?
Ordinary men and women stand
Earthbound and wondering when
The Space Shuttle run and the moon will become
Open to ordinary men.
I want to go dancing on the Moon.
I want to frolic in zero gravity
I want to hear Jupiter sing
Tour Saturn’s rings
When will space be open for me?
Well, let us dispell a couple of myths here.
(1) The reason that the USA invested a gazillion dollars in the Apollo program was, simply, so they could beat the Russians to the Moon. It was purely part of the Cold War, and had very little to do with scientific exploration and absolutely nothing to do with a sense of exploration or “the good of all mankind.” And guess what … we won.
(2) The USA has not been in a position of scientific/intellectual leadership for a number of years, and we probably won’t for a while. This country has gotten hung up on religious dogma (from Evolution to Cloning) and more recently, litigious dogma (we can sue, we can sue, we can sue). Face it, without an enemy as scary as our propoganda painted the Soviet Empire (“rally round the flag, boys”), there is no way that we could put a man on the moon in the next decade. Oooh, someone might get hurt. Ohhh, we might damage the environment. Ooooh, with all that money would could fund a whole new division of the DEA. Heck, they’ve been arguing in my town about whether to put a Shaw’s Supermarket in a disused minimall for three fucking years now, and the town planners have approved it twice!
(3) Hi Opal
(4) The other part of the exercise is that it takes a long time to make scientific or engineering progress. Politicians are elected to office; even the President starts campaiging for re-election after a couple of years. No elected official is going to stand behind an expensive, dangerous program that will not come to fruition until long after he or she has faced re-election.
So we are basically fucked. The movie “2001” came out while I was in college; I remember (strongly) wondering if I would be able to go into space before I died – I think the answer is NO.
America as a nation has lost it’s courage. Enough of the people can be vocally opposed to almost any plan to ensure that nothing much of anything happens – “genetic engineering – bad!”, “space program – bad”, "evolution – “bad”, “personal responsibility – bad”. However, America as a nation is in a position to bully other braver, more intellectually honest nations into compliance with the new American dream – “safety first, no matter what the cost”.
I look at products of the '50s and '60s, products of war and fear, things like the moon landing, the SR-71, the Saturn V, the foundations of modern computing laid down then, and I realize that these people did these things in a world that’s hard to imagine now. They had the gall to build things that were huge and wondrous, projects on a scale that modern humans seem to have forgotten. We have made leaps and bounds in the delivery of pornography and advertising; we have enough television channels to reduce entire nations to mindless stupor. We have made massive leaps in our own comfort, in the creation of insular worlds to protect us from adversity, while only pioneers in spirit remember that the harsh, unimaginable beauty of the cosmos awaits. We had the chance to reach out and stamp our mark on a tiny corner of existence, and we squandered it so we could stay home and watch sports from the barcalounger, glutted and insensate from cheap bear and fried snack food. I no longer believe, as I once did, that new men and women will remember the achievements of their ancestors and boldly strive for the stars. They will cite costs, earthly concerns, their own petty worries with soccer practices, disobedient children, and absurd workplace complaints. They will forget those who always explored, always sought the unknown, always saw opportunity where others saw only tiny dots of light. To know that there are still True Believers around almost makes me want to weep.
Testify, Tuckerfan. Preach it long enough and hard enough, and maybe some will remember.
Damn, Arden you really make me want to move to Oklahoma! 
You wouldn’t happen to have an MP3 of that tune you could shoot my way? (Assuming, of course, its legal for you to do so.)
Yeah, I know landing on the Moon was our way of thumbing our noses at the former USSR and saying, “Nyah! Look what we can do! Betcha can’t beat us!” And they couldn’t, and the world’s a better place for it :rolleyes: .
It kills me, JFK, may not have been the greatest President ever, there are lots of people who’re happy he got it in Dallas, but the man had vision! When was the last time we had a President with a vision? (Well, I mean other than seeing some intern shed her panties.) Since JFK we’ve had Lyndon “It Don’t Hurt if You Pick 'Em Up By the Ears” Johnson, Richard “I Am Not A Crook” Nixon, Gerald “Whoops” Ford, Jimmy “One Termer” Carter, Ronald “Where’s Mommy” Reagan, George “I’m A Jimmy Carter” Bush, William “I Did Not Have Sex” Clinton, and George “I’m Not My Father’s Son, Oh Wait, I guess I Am” Bush. Every one of those guys talked about space to a degree, but none of them had the balls to stand up before the American people and say, “We’re going. We’re going because we have to. We’re going because if we don’t, someone else will.”
I’m telling ya, if the US government shelled out as much money on developing a low cost method of getting into space as it does on worthless programs like the National Missile Defense program, pork barrel projects, and the other rot (I’m not bashing education or anything else that really is necessary here, just the crap that we all know the government blows money on.), we could have a cheaper way to get to space. Give that technology to private enterprise and let them make a profit off of it and get my ass of this planet!!!
It’s not hard to do. There’s plenty of research out there, done by legitimate scientists, which proves that with a little more money, WE COULD BE BUILDING COLONIES ON THE MOON BEFORE THE END OF THE GOD DAMN DECADE! Hell, even some of NASA’s own scientists have come up with drive systems that might work if they only had a few million dollars for more research!!!
And you know, if they did it, if they had the fucking balls to spend that money on something useful, instead of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, $600 toilet seats, and all the rest of the worthless shit that our government pisses away our hard earned tax dollars on, we’d get something that’s worth more than money: A sense of wonder.
I can remember when I was little and the last of the Apollo astronauts were heading towards the Moon, walking outside after dark, looking up at the sky and thinking that there were people up there. To know that a quarter million miles away were three men, crammed into something smaller than the family car, seeing things that I could only imagine, filled me with a sense of awe and wonder that I’ve never had since. We were touching the sky. It was amazing, it was what religion was supposed to be, but never was. And just like so many of the relationships I’ve been in, it all turned to shit before it ever got started. Damn, it pisses me off!
Damn. If you’re willing to move to Oklahoma for me, it must be love. Or something.
Sadly, I do not even have the tape anymore and can’t find the place I bought it from in the first place, else I would send you the whole tape. It’s all along those lines.
Oh, and this:
Made me all misty eyed because my brother and I did the exact same thing.
Tucker,
It is even worse for us who were on the inside. My father worked for NASA. In a small wonderous branch called Advanced Mission and Design. They thought up wonderful shit to do in the future and did preliminary designs, feasability, and cost estimates for said missions. There were only eight to twelve people in this branch at any one time. When NASA was formed they thought that planning for future exploration was so important that they made this group its’ own branch. (Each branch reported to the head of NASA.) These were the dreamers. They did early work on the moon missions, ion engines for interplanetary travel, the shuttle (I could go off on a seperate rant here, Dept. Of Defense screwed this one up.), Mars missions, space stations, and of course moon colonies. The moon colony was one of the prized and hoped for missions that they worked on during the late 70’s. They expected to be sending men back to the moon by the early 90’s, set up manufacturing facilities, and build moon bases. The projected timetable was for a PERMANENT manned presence on the moon by 2003. This base would, because of the lower gravity well, provide materials etc. for planetary missions, space stations, etc. It was a noble dream. It would have continued man’s expansion and exploration of the universe. It would have been less that .5% of the Govenments budget. (It would have been cheaper than the money that was spent on SDI.) It was possible with the technology that was already available.
Short sighted politicians like Sen. Proxmire, who looked at programs and stated that if it didn’t have a result that you could hold in your hand it was a waste of tiem and money, were the ones who killed our exploration into space.
It was thinking like this that caused my father to retire early. I was lucky to have lived at a time when it still meant something to be a “Rocket Scientist” and a dreamer.
FYI. They even looked at the possibility of interstellar probes. They put the ideas on the back burner because they figured in ten to twenty years the technology would improve so much that later probes would overtake and pass the original. They were over optimistic that we, as a people, would still treasure scientific research and exploration.
How sad.
Sorry, man… I guess I just got too comfortable here, sunken down into my couch, watching the tube…
They just won’t let us fly, man, except for vicariously!
Unless… unlesss…
And in following Arden Ranger, I would like to add:
Standing on the moon
I got no cobweb on my shoe
Standing on the moon
I’m feeling so alone and blue
I see the Gulf of Mexico
As tiny as a tear
The coast of California
Must be somewhere over here - over here
Standing on the moon
I see the battle rage below
Standing on the moon
I see the soldiers come and go
There’s a metal flag beside me
Someone planted long ago
Old Glory standing stiffly
Crimson, white and indigo - indigo
I see all of Southeast Asia
I can see El Salvador
I hear the cries of children
And the other songs of war
It’s like a mighty melody
That rings down from the sky
Standing here upon the moon
I watch it all roll by - all roll by
Standing on the moon
With nothing else to do
A lovely view of heaven
But I’d rather be with you
Standing on the moon
I see a shadow on the sun
Standing on the moon
The stars go fading one by one
I hear a cry of victory
And another of defeat
a scrap of age-old lullaby
Down some forgotten street
Standing on the moon
Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky
Standing on the moon
With nothing left to do
A lovely view of heaven
But I’d rather be with you - be with you
Standing on the Moon, Hunter and Garcia
I’m having a very good day.
Take heart Tuckerfan, the recent moon probe (Prospector?) successfully detected water in the lunar crust. They are also working on formulas for an extruded barrier material made with water and moon surface materials.
Couple up a large surface photovoltaic array to an electrolysis supplied hydrogen fuel cell and oxygen regeneration system, budda boom budda bing, moonbase!
They’re working on things like this (check out Nasa Tech Briefs), but the vast underappreciation America has for applied engineering plays a big part in the footdragging. Wall Street’s “What have you done for me in the last fifteen minutes?” mentality has combined with government vision so bad it’s blurring the separation of church and state so as to forever mire us in mediocrity.
We will travel to the stars one day, it is only a matter of when.
This is awesome… here we have a great discussion - and you can cuss! - because it’s in the pit! Great rant! Fuckin 'A!
Incidentally, speaking as a person born in the mid 70’s, I am curious about how people who actually saw the TV broadcasts of the Apollo missions feel. Do they feel that we have nothing to show for such hard work or what? I imagine that the current situation is a real letdown to those who took part in the occasion.
Revedge, I am really curious to hear the story behind the space shuttle that you allude to here. Care to share it?
Arden I had a witty flirt reply that I had planned to post, but then the events of this morning kind of made it all seem pointless.
Let me say that thanks to the space program the emergency workers and military personnel have the tools to take care of the horrific business they have before them. Thanks to the space program, the air traffic controllers were able to get all the planes safely down. Thanks to the space program, many of those people who are suffering from wounds far greater than any I have had to bear, will be able to live. Let us hope that this is the last time that something like this happens.