Today is the fifth anniversary since President Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration (has it really been that long?).

I have some thoughts on how it’s been going over at PJM. Bottom line: not so well.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Apollo VIII. Paul Spudis has some thoughts. As he notes, though we didn’t necessarily realize it at the time, that was probably when we won the moon race, in that it resulted in the Soviets dropping out and pretending they had never been racing. Of course, Johnson had already canceled the program even before the flight, though we hadn’t yet achieved Kennedy’s goal. That would happen seven months later, in July of 1969.

Clark has a round up of links.

It was a little strange, and sad, descending into the LA basin yesterday. I had a left window seat, and I looked down at the old Rockwell/North American (and back during the war, Vultee) plant in Downey, which had been abandoned back in the nineties, and saw that Building 6 appeared to be no longer there. A lot of history in manned spaceflight took place there, but now there’s almost no manned space activities left in southern California at all. Not in Downey, not in Huntington Beach, not in Seal Beach. It’s all been moved to Houston, and Huntsville.

Except, except. A minute or two later, on final descent into LAX, I saw Hawthorne Airport just off the left wing, and quite prominent was the new SpaceX facility, which had previously been used to build jumbo jet wings.

So perhaps, despite the indifference of local and state politicians, the era of manned spaceflight in LA isn’t quite yet over. And of course, Mojave remains ascendant.