I heard on NPR this morning that http://wechoosethemoon.org/ will have ‘real time’ coverage of the Apollo XI mission to the Moon.
Looks interesting. I’m working from home Thursday, so I’ll probably have it playing in the background (or else have a space show playing on the TV). Fortunately I now have audio on my computer at the office, so I can play it here as well.
I just downloaded the widget. So…what does it do exactly? Does it just show the “real time status” of the spacecraft? (+40 years?)
This makes me sick.
We did this forty years ago. With laughably ancient computer technology, we put a man on the moon. I watched it live then, as a kid. A kid who was already reading science fiction, and there wasn’t a shred of doubt in my mind that this was our first step to the solar system and the stars.
Some of the reason that I’m a Republican is that fucking asshole William Proxmire was a Democrat.
We could still do it. Proxmire is dead, after all. OK, the middle of an economic crisis is not the right time to pitch it, but still… dammit.
You’re more angry than I am, Bricker. I’m just disappointed. Space: 1999 came on TV only a few years after the last Moon mission and the same year as Apollo-Soyuz. I was certain we’d have a Moon Base when I was a kid, and the science fiction and the last gasp of Apollo and the coming of the Space Shuttle made it look like it would be a reality.
Anyway, I was pretty young when Apollo XI flew. I’m going to try to watch as much as I can.
Some appropriate music for the site 
What a cool idea. My brother and I were at my grandmother’s in Mexico City when the first moon landing happened. We’ll be there (but at my Mom’s) on the anniversary.
Count me as another who fully expected to see a lunar colony by now. It seemed like such a natural progression when we were kids. How sad.
Why Proxmire? Wasn’t it Nixon that killed the Apollo program? And Nixon that decided that Americans wouldn’t leave low earth orbit anymore? Seems that if space is your priority, you’re more likely to vote Democratic.
From Wiki:
Any idea what TV channel this will be on?
The NASA channel I hope?
Sadly, I don’t have The NASA Channel. 
Ahh, but if you aren’t unable to watch video for some reason (I can’t at work) you can watch NASA TV on their website. I’ve watched a couple of launches that way.
I wasn’t born until 1976, so I don’t remember the landing. But I wish I did.
For some of us, a launch countdown will forever only sound right in a booming, echoing, distorted loudspeaker sound, and at some point after “eight” we will quietly expect to hear “ignition sequence start”…
At those words I’m eight again and, with Bricker, looking around and asking who the hell ran off with THAT future? Alas, now we know that by then it was already doomed. With Apollo we had proved that the USA… um… had greater virile endowment than the USSR, and now that we had so very expensively proven that point, let’s get back to the prosaic but necessary business at hand. Can’t say I blame them, how would I quantify the ROI on such an enterprise?
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To be fair, not only Proxmire, but quite a number of other Dems broke with JFK/LBJ relatively early, and many would be likely to join in with the “why spend billion$ in space when there are needs at home” line of thought (e.g. Mondale). Repubs would reject the sort of “Grand Space-for-its-own-sake Project at Government Cost” like the Moonshot, but at least they had a faction that was into maintaining spaceflight for the sake of defense and commercial applications – which was what made the STS sale to the Nixon-era management. Same deal as Reagan who had the SDI (“Star Wars”) but also the notion of “Space Station Freedom” (that eventually collapsed into having to settle for putting together the leftovers of the US, Russian and ESA space station programs into the current ISS). So I can understand how Bricker** may feel that hey, at least they WILL want to send someone up in a rocket once in a while…
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I was fourteen when we landed on the moon. My sisters and I watched, along with my grandparents. Grandpa was 69 being just barely born in the 19th century, and in his lifetime he saw spaceflight.
I was so keyed up that when Armstrong left the LEM and came down the ladder I could not “see” what was happening. My eyes and brain had a disconnect, and all I could percieve was blobs of black, gray, and white. It was night here in North America, and I went outside and looked up into the clear sky, at the moon, and thought “there’s people up there!”
You’re absolutely right about Proxmire - but remember that Nixon killed the Apollo missions after XVII, partly because they were Kennedy’s baby. On the other hand the Rev. Abernathy protested the mission because the money should go to the poor - as if the money were being dumped on the moon. So there is plenty of blame to go around to both parties.
Are they assembling their own coverage? For the 25th anniversary, I think, PBS rebroadcast the ABC coverage real time. I had just graduated high school, and had a party in my basement to watch the landing and the moon walk. I watched the CBS coverage. Uncle Walter was the best, and he had Arthur C. Clarke on too!
We’re not only past 2001 but we’re almost at 2010, and we still don’t have a real space station, or a moon base, and we’re nowhere near going to Jupiter. That monolith is waiting for us.
I think the whole problem is that we are stuck in between achievements. We have already been to the moon, so a return trip there, while it would gather scientific data, probably wouldn’t be worth the cost.
Our next achievement would probably be a manned mission to Mars, but every plan that NASA comes up with is either terribly, horribly expensive, or only enormously expensive and very unsafe.
So, there really isn’t something that we can do right now. That, and any big plan requires a 10 to 15 year committment that spans across presidential administrations. One president may support space exploration and the next kills the idea, or has a different one.
I would like to see us go to Mars, but I can’t see it happening in my lifetime.
I’m totally with **Bricker **on this. I’m also disappointed with the shameful lack of progress after Apollo. But the sad, pragmatic fact of human exploration from Columbus, Drake, Magellan, Cortez, Franklin, right up to Apollo, is that it is only starts for 2 reasons: 1) to make huge amounts of money, 2) to gain power / military advantage over rival nations. Exploration, advancing the noble quest of human knowledge, is just retro-active window-dressing applied after the fact to pretty it up. Apollo was just another front in the cold war.
The best thing that could happen to Nasa is for the Chinese to start building moon bases so they could prove that they should be allowed to play with the big kids, and for the Pentagon to believe that they could start chucking boulders from the top of the gravity well.
Until they then, there will never be the money for manned space flight beyond low earth orbit. There will always be politicians who will covet the money for their own priorities, be it the GWOT, or the poor.
Let’s face it, between them, greed and the desire to win pissing contests are responsible for a huge portion of humanity’s advancement, if you can call it that. .
Thanks for the link, Johnny.
A couple weeks ago I took the family to the Aerospace Museum of California to see the “Space: A Journey to Our Future” exhibit. The entry into the exhibit had footage of one of the later missions rolling and a spare tire/wheel from the lunar rovers. Looking up I saw I was underneath part of a Saturn V booster, staring into a rocket nozzle. While the rest of the family walked on into the exhibit, I must have stood in the entry for five full minutes, totally amazed. My wife finally came back for me and had to ask if I was okay - I get all choked up and teary-eyed about the early space missions, especially the Apollos.
The last Apollo mission flew two and a half years before I was born. I grew up with the shuttle flying into LEO almost routinely, and am among those who are disappointed and saddened that we stopped venturing farther into our system. Science-fiction has led me to be a little idealistic about the promise of science and space exploration as a way to solve the problems of mankind. So I keep telling myself that we haven’t given up, we’re just progressing slowly.
I’m hoping Neil Armstrong gets the first words right this time…
fingers crossed