Quote:
Originally Posted by norm
The whole Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era is inspiring. I was too young to remember the 1st landing, but as a kid and seeing footages of the latter Apollo missions always fascinated me.
I've lost count how many times I've seen From Earth to the Moon.
The thing that I find amazing is the relatively short time span it took man to get to the moon, the technology that had to be invented, the materials, new methodologies - unbelieveable stuff. I sometimes wonder how much time could have been reduced if they were given a couple of dual core notebooks...... 
and just think we can't even get a 2nd airport built in Sydney  |
The early space program (Mercury, Gemini and especially, Apollo) was probably our greatest achievement, and also our greatest failure. The problem was, its primary raison detre was purely political and militaristic....beat the Russians to the Moon and everywhere else. Manned exploration of space was a secondary concern. The moment it was politically expedient to can it, Nixon did. In doing so, we lost all that vast momentum that we'd built up. All that expertise....lost. All the hardware, lost. The chance to have firmly established ourselves in space and to push forward with what we had...lost. Who knows where we'd be now if things had've gone on from there. I know, for sure, we'd have been on Mars at least 20-25 years ago. There'd be permanent bases there now. We'd probably have sent manned missions to Jupiter and Saturn by now too. Our space technology would be way ahead of where it is, now. Instead, it'll probably be another 20 or so years before we even consider going to Mars and it's a good 10 years before anything permanent ends up on the Moon, even!!!!!. Geez, given how magnanimous and generous politicians are these days, and how much intelligence and forethought they possess, it'll probably be, oh...2040-50, by the time we finally get to Mars!!!! (sarcasm intended).
As interesting and exciting the early space program was, I just can't share the same enthusiasm for the present program. Regardless of what they're doing now with the Ares and Orion programs, it holds about as much interest to me as a wet sponge. They may have given NASA $1 billion in extra funds, but that's not even a drop in a bucket. NASA has had to pull funding from other programs in order to get the present "adventure" up and running. The entire Apollo program cost $25 billion dollars over its lifetime. NASA's nominal yearly budget is around $16 billion, in a normal year. Compared to the $1.7 trillion they just threw at the feet of "Corporate America" in order to prop up a few greedy executives and their lifestyles, what they spend on the space program doesn't even register. You hear some say they should be spending the money they give NASA to help the poor and all that. They already spend $900 billion yearly, in the US alone, for social welfare programs. Take a look at their "world class, wonderful" social system!!!. It's a joke.
No, in reality, there's still no real political will to forge ahead with anything to do with space exploration. They mouth platitudes to being "proactive" (I hate that word) in funding space exploration and research...you get the political bosses trot out every now and then and make what they think passes for a "grand" pronouncement on the future of space exploration, but it's all just smoke and mirrors. If it wasn't for the fact that there's something in it for the military and the politicians (spying on other countries, etc), they'd have canned the whole lot years ago.
Come to think of it, does "Joe Public" even give a rat's about the space program at all, these days??. Probably not.