It’s less than three weeks until the fortieth anniversary of the first human lunar landing. Alan Boyle has a roundup of links. It’s also a good time to start planning a commemoration ceremony with friends and family. HappilyUnfortunately, it’s on a SaturMonday this year, a good eveningnot such a good evening to have a party.
Link is fixed, too thanks to commenter “Jim.”
John Derbyshire says that government human spaceflight was largely pointless, and likely to end soon.
I don’t actually find much in there with which to disagree (I’ve pointed out the Zheng He analogy myself) — we have gotten horrible value for the money spent over the past forty years, and I do think that the hope is for private space. Though if the Augustine Commission could recognize and articulate the value to the nation and planet of becoming truly space faring, for things like planetary defense, and put forth a realistic plan to do it, I suppose that it’s possible it will survive somehow, but it will have to have sufficient pork content, which will defeat the purpose. But it’s hard to see Constellation continuing to exist in its current form.
I’m actually working on (or at least supposed to be working on) a longish piece for the summer issue of The New Atlantis on this subject.
[Tuesday afternoon update]
I will say that I think that “pointless” is too strong a word — as I said, we have gotten quite a bit of value, but not enough to justify the expenditure. And in many ways, Apollo has actually set us back from progress in space, by establishing a failed government-development model that lives on to this day in the form of Constellation. I hope that the Augustine Commission can finally fix this, but I fear that it won’t.
…but he didn’t quite say it:
Riley and Olsson…concluded that Commander Armstrong and his family members do pronounce the word “a” in a discernible way.
And based on broadcasts from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the surface of the Moon, it is clear that the word “a” was easily transmitted to Earth without being obliterated.
But their analysis of the intonation of the phrase strongly suggests Commander Armstrong had intended to say “a man”. There is a rising pitch in the word “man” and a falling pitch when he says “mankind”.
According to Mr Olsson: “This indicates that he’s doing what we all do in our speech, he was contrasting using speech – indicating that he knows the difference between man and mankind and that he meant man as in ‘a man’ not ‘humanity’.”
I think it’s safe to say that this has been analyzed to death at this point. It’s only been forty years.
The hundredth Carnival of Space is up.
This week’s edition is being hosted by Fraser Cain himself.
On this April 12th, Doug Messier has some thoughts on Gagarin, Shuttle, and Dora.
It’s being hosted at Cheap Astronomy this week.
Orbital Hub has the latest Carnival of Space.
Why don’t I host one, you ask? I’ve noticed that most of them are mostly focused on space science, and (assuming that’s what the audience wants), I’m just not that into that to do a good job with it.
It’s hard to believe, but the Columbia disintegrated, with seven crew, over the skies of Texas six years ago today. And our space policy remains as screwed up as ever.
[Update in the evening]
Clark Lindsey has links to some musical tributes to the disasters. Also, for those who missed the link on the earlier anniversaries this week, here are my thoughts a year ago on the cluster of space disasters at the end of January and early February.
[Bumped]
Today is the forty-second anniversary of the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew, on the pad. I wrote about that, and the other deadly space anniversaries of this time of year (tomorrow is the twenty-third of the Challenger loss, and Sunday is the sixth of the Columbia loss), a year ago.