Category Archives: History

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Apollo And The Treasure Fleets

1 Comment

Gary Oleson has a good op-ed over at Space News. A lot of space enthusiasts misinterpret the lesson of the Ming Dynasty. I wrote a similar piece seventeen years ago. As with most of my old space commentary, I’m always surprised at how well it holds up.

Speaking of old space commentary, I just read this for the first time, written by my former editor at The New Atlantis, in 2003. This was about the time that we first met, probably as a result of a comment I had at my blog about a post of his at National Review. I wrote my first essay for him about a year later.

[Update a few minutes later]

In searching for that blog post, I discovered something funny; it was based on that piece, so it wasn’t the first time I’d read it — I’d just forgotten, it was so long ago. I think what happened is that someone at The Corner commented about my blog post, which caused Adam to engage, and later call me to talk. The rest is history.

The original post, with comments, is here.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Chappaquiddick

4 Comments

Half a century later, still covering for the Kennedy’s.

The media cover up was aided by the fact that it happened during the moon landing.

[Update mid-afternoon]

Fifty years later, the media continues to whitewash Chappaqiddick.

“[The Lion of the Senate] was Kennedy’s nickname. He was like a lion, in the sense that he mated without limit and killed without remorse.”

Heh.

I disagree though, on one of his movie recommendations. There are many better documentaries of how we got to the moon than First Man, which was about Neil Armstrong, not Apollo per se. The best I’ve seen (and I saw it in IMAX at the NASM a few weeks ago) is Apollo 11. The most surprising thing about it, considering how good it is, is that it was produced by CNN. I recorded it a few days ago to watch tomorrow with friends.

Business, Education, History, Mathematics, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Back To Basics

3 Comments

The military is being trained (for the first time in decades) how to manage without computers.

This is good, not just as a defense against cyber attacks, but because it will give them a lot more insight. Even when I started my career in aerospace, I worried that young people were being too confident in computer output, without understanding the fundamentals sufficiently to know whether or not it made sense.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Gray Lady

19 Comments

Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related: Apollo Shrugs.

[Late-afternoon update]

Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.

[Friday-morning update]

More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):

Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?

“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.

It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

History, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Mike Collins

8 Comments

It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.

“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”

“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”

“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”

I always thought it was baloney.