You know those random useless facts that you wish you had never learned because they just really piss you off for no good reason.
This is one of them.
Thanks.
Getting decimal points wrong is always expensive when NASA is involved.
Though not as expensive as mixing up avoirdupois and metric units…
I’ll take “what is lithobraking?” for a thousand Alex.
Wow, google “Apollo 20”. There’s a conspiracy about everything.
At least cosmetics serve a useful function! I would ask those who begrudge NASA its billions what they think of resources diverted to professional wrestling, political campaigns, war on drugs, etc.
The huge cost of the Moon landing means it might not have happened at all without the ambition and charisma of John F. Kennedy. This is why JFK is one of only two U.S. Presidents that Michael Hart includes in his well-reasoned list of history’s 100 most influential persons.
The entire moon program was a fraud in one respect.
It was never exclusively about science or even heavily science oriented. It was another branch in the cold war tree.
The Russians got into space first and even sent automated lunar rovers and probes.
We, to one up the game, sent humans. It wasn’t until very late in the program when we finally got around to sending a geologist to walk on the moon and hence, know which rocks are noteworthy enough to collect and bring back to Earth.
That said, I was cheering the astronauts on in my youth, watching it all live on TV.
One does ponder what we could have accomplished with a full science team sent to the moon repeatedly…
Nobody at the time said it was this and nobody thought it.
To call something as obvious as the Space Race a fraud stretches my imagination.
Everyone knew it was about beating the Russians. And for science.
Apollo 11 did not go to the Moon, but Apollo 20 did?
What could make somebody believe that?
“Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” - Samuel Johnson
Its funny, I don’t take the song/poem to be a criticism of Apollo so much as a commentary on how some people live in abject poverty and society would rather spend on almost ANYTHING than to help them.
Same old same old. “We should never spend any money on X until we solve unrelated issue Y.” Fucking nonsense.
It’s really a common story. The best guy is sometimes at the end of the list because he’s disliked. Sometimes he’s at the end of the list because he’s not the best guy and he’s disliked. But after everyone else fails the guy at the end of the list has the benefit of seeing the others’ mistakes. When he succeeds he’s a hero, for fifteen minutes. The underlying dislike never goes away. But even without any of those circumstances, you always want to be the last guy who tackles the problem.
Not to dispute aNewLeaf, but this isn’t true. Exclusively, perhaps not, but it was heavily science oriented. For the vast majority of Americans, the science was simply unbelievable, and that was what it was about.
In the mid to late 1960’s, the majority of Americans viewed air travel as exotic, and that would be in a prop-driven airplane. Jet powered aircraft, while certainly popular and even in the majority in the late 60s, it was very new. In the early 60s, most air travel was on prop planes. Most people who watched the moon landing grew up when steam-powered trains were how long-distance travel was done, and local travel was on a horse. Live pictures from the moon was really a scientific achievement for people who were used to waiting for weeks to see newsreels of WWII, which only had to travel halfway around the world.
Technology advances so quickly now that people forget how slowly things took to happen. For someone who was 40 in 1969, when Neil made the first step, that person didn’t have a TV growing up, only a radio, and likely only one in the house. When he was 30, he probably didn’t have a TV, but perhaps a couple of radios, maybe even one in the car. No, the space program wasn’t exclusively about science, but it did represent the epitome of scientific achievement, which was advancing so rapidly that changes in a decade were greater than even today.
You go back to 2003 and tell people that in 10 years everyone would have a cell phone, a music player that held 1000s of songs, and HD TV would be the norm, and people wouldn’t doubt you. Go back to 1959 and tell people that in 10 years most Americans would watch man walk on the moon live, in their own living room, on a color TV, and they would not believe you.
<nevermind>
excavating (for a mind), I will dispute one thing that you say. Someone who was 40 in 1969 (and hence was born in 1929) very likely did have a TV when he was 30 (in 1959). TV was adopted very swiftly in the U.S. It went from being somewhat rare to have a TV in your home in 1950 to being fairly standard to have one in 1955.
A similar thing happened here in GB too. The coronation in 1963 was the trigger - many people before that had never seen a TV, but the televising of the great event sent then to the TV rental (most were rented then) shops in droves.
Before that yes - one, maybe two radios. If you had a car, and had paid the extra for a radio, then you had to wait while it warmed up before you could listen.
bob++ writes:
> . . . The coronation in 1963 . . .
You mean 1953, of course.
We’re in agreement- science oriented, heavily.
But also an exercise in national boasting. And a jobs program.
Apollo wasn’t exclusively about science and nobody thought it was.
I agree, but some of the nuances are worth looking at.
Starting around 1950, there was a concerted effort by the space community to sell space as science and adventure. Destination Moon, a fictionalized documentary co-written by Robert Heinlein, was a major success. Willy Ley was churning out editions of his Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel and other books regularly. The Hayden Planetarium held its First Annual Symposium on Space Travel, organized by Ley, in 1951. Von Braun wasn’t invited, but that would be the last space event without him. Collier’s magazine ran a gigantic seven-part series about space travel, with articles by von Braun, Ley, and others, from 1951 to 1953, which were collected into major books. The climax of the first season of the *Disneyland *tv program, the hit of the year, was “Man in Space,” featuring all the usual subjects. It ran on May 9, 1955 and was the first Disney show to promote Tomorrowland in the newly opened Disneyland theme park. Another *Disneyland *show, “Man on the Moon,” ran in December. There are lots of other examples of books, movies, tv shows, radio shows, magazine articles, comic books, and cartoons using the space theme.
From my reading I’d say that kids loved the idea of space and space adventurers and adults loved it too, until the minute they closed the book or turned off the tv. It was fun to think about and nobody took it seriously or cared to put any pressure on the government to achieve.
The fit of national hysteria after the Soviets launched Sputnik is equally well documented. We were seen as losing the “space race” in exactly those words, which appeared independently in many newspaper headlines. Rocketry was pulled from the back burner where Eisenhower had deliberately left it. He was concerned that if he gave Russia an opportunity to complain that rockets were flying over their territory, they would make public the balloon and U-2 spy plane flights that he was conducting illegally. (They hadn’t because they were embarrassed by their inability to stop them.) He knew that a launch was coming, because both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. announced their intentions on successive days earlier in the year as part of the International Geophysical Year. He just couldn’t believe they could do it, let alone do it first. The failures of U.S. rockets for the next few months were humiliating because they were so public, unlike the Soviet failures.
Once the U.S. had “caught up” the pressure was off. You’ll notice that nobody of note was ever punished for the failure to be first. The administration decided that making it an explicit race was too risky. Come in second in a race - and the U.S. did for the next several years - and you’re a Loser. But there’s no race to Science. Everything you do is good. Putting the emphasis on science allowed the U.S. to claim that it was proceeding at its own pace and the final reward was all that mattered.
This was a lie and everybody understood that. But WWII and the Cold War gave the government license to lie about national security. It’s not much of an exaggeration to claim that everything the Eisenhower administration said about the U.S.S.R. was a lie. Everything said about most foreign policy issues were lies, especially in Iran, Vietnam, and Latin America. Kennedy inherited these lies and kept on lying because no other course was viable. (We’re seeing exactly the same thing again with Bush and Obama.) Johnson inherited Kennedy’s lies and being Johnson magnified them. The first moon landing took place under Nixon and he was born to lie. The only question facing historians is “can you call it a lie if everybody knows it’s a lie and insists on being lied to?”
The moon program was about science. Every piece in every medium said so. The moon program was about beating the Russkies. Everybody in America wanted it so. If you could slip the question of whether the moon program was valuable for any other reason past them - near treason - they would say no. But they wouldn’t protest it happening. Until after it happened and we won. Then they stopped caring altogether every moment it wasn’t on television.