Paul Spudis has an interesting anecdote from the Apollo days, with a current-day context.
10 thoughts on “The Scientists Versus The Astronaut”
Comments are closed.
Paul Spudis has an interesting anecdote from the Apollo days, with a current-day context.
Comments are closed.
My eyes must be bad. Where in the picture is the landing site?
Your eyes must be really bad Bill, as I am seeing an annotated picture with the Antares descent stage clearly labeled!
Its possible that his browser just didn’t finish loading the object. Refresh or clear your temporary cache from the internet options and restart your browser.
Bill, did you click through to Arizona State’s LROC site (where the pics are) from the Smithsonian Air & Space site?
Oops, my bad! Yes there is a copy of the pic at the Smithsonian Air & Space site. Just click that for a larger copy.
You are correct, sir!! It did not fully load the first time I looked. The link I went to was a small image and not annotated. That was a heck of a walk.
Let me get this right. A panting, whiny geezer fails to deliver for Earthside geologists and forty years later his apologists are still trying to spin the story? Shameful! 😉
My view is that the astronauts actually doing the walking in the dangerous environment get to have the final say on whether they can do something or not. You end up with fewer dead astronauts that way.
Wait a moment…the scientists were unanimous in saying that Sheppard and Mitchell didn’t reach their objective. Surely if the AGW controversy proves anything, it proves that when the scientists are unanimous that it is time to stop the debate!
The pictures must be wrong…
The coolest thing of all is that some guy claiming to be named Edgar Mitchell stopped by and claimed he and Shepard were alway sure they had reached the right spot.
There’s an even larger lesson to be learned from this. It’s not just that scientists — even when they agree with each other completely after long discussion — can be wrong. It’s that anyone can be wrong. There are sets of conditions when the Alan Sheppard style of leadership is quite correct. To use one famous example, long, thoughtful discussion of what to do next would have been hilariously inappropriate on Normandy beach on June 6, 1944. Perhaps even under the conditions present on the Moon during the Apollo explorations. After all, if the astronauts had died on the Moon, then those samples would not have come back.