8 thoughts on “The Fiftieth Anniversary”

    1. Yes, and USS Indianapolis left the west coast that morning with components of Little Boy. She and most of her crew, my cousin included, never returned.

  2. From Loren Grush’s article:

    Until the commercial space industry starts to repeatedly fly giant rockets more often than NASA does, the agency will probably continue to build its own vehicles.

    So she’s got the joke all teed up. Anyone want to whack that ball?

    1. Yeah. Falcon Heavy has flown twice in 2019 alone, which of course two times more than SLS flies per year.

      And of course by the time of SLS’s first flight (EM-1/Artemis 1) in 2021, there will be two MORE commercial heavy lift rockets in operation, too! (Vulcan and New Glenn)

  4. NASA set NASA back decades. After 50 years NASA can only delay launch of giant rockets, not launch them.

    1. I disagree. NASA has carefully been following its mission goals as it has been allowed to follow by Congressional appropriation since its inception. Everything is going according to plan according to the PAO. You postulate some kind of parallel universe NASA that is somehow decades ahead that I am totally unfamiliar with.

      The root of the problem is the last ‘A’ in the acronym. And will remain so until it is obvious to all to be the anachronism that it is.

  5. One quote from your New Atlantis essay that caught my eye:

    There is one more component of Apolloism worth mentioning. Those in the grip of the ideology believe that if we are to reach Mars we will need a “national commitment.” They do not understand the difficulty — if not impossibility — of getting such a thing in a democratic republic, in which policy directions change with the political winds.

    The only word I would strike is “impossibility.” *If* you have a national crisis – which Soviet space achievement “firsts” in 1957-61 at the height of the Cold War arguably qualified as – you can get a “national commitment.” But the only thing that seems to qualify in any future prospect now is either an Extinction Level Event asteroid/comet detected en route, or (more exotically) a bonafide alien artifact unambiguously detected somewhere in the Solar System. Anything short of that simply will not do the trick now.

    But that only underlines your argument. There are no national commitment level crises in view (thank God). So, instead, we have to find a way to explore – and exploit – deep space with what gets spent presently. Which means we must do it in a very different way from Apolloism.

    Your essay deserves to be read by every single space policy maker in DC.

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