I hadn’t realized that Jorge Frank had teamed up with Dennis Jenkins to put out a new book on Apollo
By the way, thanks to whichever of my readers bought a Kindle at my Amazon store. I can always use the extra income.
Category Archives: Space History
More Apollo-At-Forty Thoughts
Michael Laprarie has an essay related to mine over at Wizbang.
[Via email from Paul Spudis, who must be thrilled that “Moon” was capitalized throughout my essay]
A Space Program For The Rest Of Us
I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.
As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.
[Late Friday update]
I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.
But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.
And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.
[Bumped]
The Untold Story
…of Apollo XI. Along with an oral history.
More Anniversary Stuff
Unsurprisingly on this decadal anniversary, there are a lot of Apollo pieces over at The Space Review today.
Note particularly Michael Potter’s piece on the real moon hoax. This will be a main theme of my upcoming (Real Soon Now, though it’s not looking very good for making the anniversary) piece in The New Atlantis.
A Briton Remembers Apollo
Thoughts from Andrew Stuttaford.
At The Conference
I’ve got connectivity now (the wireless here isn’t public, so I had to finagle an account at Ames). Jim Muncy led off the morning session. Clark Lindsey has a report. The morning session focuses on what’s happening at NASA Ames, which is hosting the conference. I should point out that it’s kind of amazing that a NASA Center is hosting a Space Frontier Foundation conference, but it any center would do it, it would be this one. As Muncy said this morning, he doesn’t expect an invitation from Marshall any time soon.
An Apollo Restrospective
Over at Forbes. I haven’t had time to read them, but at least some of the pieces look interesting.
[Update a few minutes later]
Paul Spudis: Space program, or space commerce? Only the latter will get us off the planet permanently. And on a related note, the Chair Force Engineer says from the earth to the moolah.
It
[Note: This post is on top all day for the anniversary. Keep scrolling for new posts]
The aliens did not come across vast expanses of space to eat us. Or take our resources. Or another reasons. Frankly, they’d rather be on their way; they have places to go, things to do. Their spaceship broke down, and it needs repairing. For some reason they have to assume human form to fix it, though, and this means duplicating the bodies of ordinary Arizona townsfolk. As the hero asks them: Why? You built the thing, surely you can fix it without turning into us.
“Yes,” says the creature in an echoey monotone, “but this would require a budget that allows for several creatures, which we do not have. Also, grad students in film school decades from now would not be able to cite the movie as an example of subconscious dread of Communist infiltration.”
And forty years ago, while It didn’t come from outer space, we went to outer space. Apollo XI lifted off on July 16th, 1969, to deliver Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon. And WeChooseTheMoon.org went live about an hour ago, where you can follow the mission in real time, from now until they return next week. The Saturn is sitting on the pad, and they’re launching in less than half an hour.
[Update a little later]
Alan Boyle has a lot more Apollo-related links, and a story about the restoration of the original video of the landing.
I’ll be keeping this post at the top all day.
[Late morning update]
An alternate history, from Henry Spencer: Welcome to Lunarville.
[Update in the afternoon]
There’s some stupid discussion over at James Nicoll’s place:
Let’s be magnanimous, and as a thought experiment keep NASA’s budget at its peak as a share of the American economy for the next forty-three years.
Do we get five thousand people on the moon? *really*? Those are some interesting economies of scale. Remember, NASA’s budget would only be six times bigger than its current.
A straight linear extrapolation gives ca. eighty-four American associated space deaths.
It’s entirely idiotic to do a “straight linear extrapolation.”
Could NASA have had that many on the moon by now with a steady budget? Who knows? But I know I could have. In fact, it would easily be an order of magnitude more. But task one would have been a serious effort to reduce launch costs.
[Update about 2 PM EDT]
More thoughts from Derb:
As I’ve made plain in several columns, I am a space buff from far back, and I find the exploration of space, including the manned exploration, thrilling beyond measure. That’s my taste in vicarious thrills. Other people have different tastes therein: They are thrilled by sporting achievements, or medical advances, or cultural accomplishments. If the federal government is going to pay for my thrills, why shouldn’t it pay for everyone else’s? If putting men on the moon is a proper national goal requiring billions of federal dollars, why isn’t winning the soccer World Cup, or curing the common cold, or resolving the Riemann Hypothesis?
As a minimal-government conservative, I’d prefer the federal authorities do none of those things. I’d prefer they stick to their proper duties: defending our coasts and borders, maintaining a stable currency, organizing national disaster relief, etc. Leave manned space travel to the entrepreneurs.
That’s pretty much my attitude as well, but I don’t think that we’re going to shut down NASA, so I will continue to work hard to get it to spend the money less crazily.
[Update at 3 PM]
Who would have predicted that in 2009 we would have to go back 40 years to find the most futuristic thing humans have ever done? Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan has said that it is as if John Kennedy reached into the 21st century, grabbed a decade of time, and spliced it neatly into the 1960s and 70s. Ever since then, I’ve been waiting to see us get back to where we were in 1972.
Now, in the midst of the real 21st century, none of us can say when humans will go back to the moon – or what language they will speak when they get there. If Chinese taikonauts become the next lunar explorers, will we be spurred to action, or shrug it off? Or will we have somehow risen above our differences and found a way to go back to the moon together?
Call me naïve, call me just another aging Baby Boomer who can’t let go of the past. But I firmly believe that Apollo was just the first chapter in a story of exploration that has no end, and will continue as long as humans are alive. And I still want to believe that when humans do return to the moon to follow in the Apollo astronauts’ lunar footsteps, it will have more of an impact than many people now realize.
It will, but only if we abandon the failed Apollo model. If it was a first chapter, the rest of the book is going to have to look very different for it to lead to exploration without end. It did indeed happen too soon, so it cost too much, and it established a terrible precedent for human space exploration that we have not recovered from to this day, as demonstrated by the current Constellation disaster. This will be the theme of my piece at The New Atlantis (which I hope will be on line in time for the anniversary on Monday, but I can’t promise it, particularly since I’ll probably be doing final editing at the conference this weekend).
Men On The Moon
The next three weeks or so leading up to the anniversary are going to be full of pieces like this, from a British journalist who covered the event. It’s a good piece, and I don’t want to diss it–it’s obviously a key part of his own personal history and inspired him, but I disagree with this notion, which will also be a common one among the upcoming commemorations:
A new era was to begin: there would one day be huge satellite cities in space, colonies on the moon, an outpost on Mars, and all before 2001.
This is just not true, much as we’d like it to be. Apollo, for all of the wonder of the achievement, was in fact a detour from the road to those goals. I’ll be explaining that more in my essay a little later this summer in The New Atlantis. I would also note that Eagle didn’t separate from “Apollo.” It did so from the spacecraft Columbia. But that’s just a nit compared to the other point, and I encourage people to enjoy the piece anyway–it’s generally a good historical description of the event.