We continue to lose the giants of that generation.
We're saddened by the passing of Chris Kraft, our first flight director. He was a space legend who created the concept of Mission Control during the early human spaceflight program and made it an integral part of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. He was 95. pic.twitter.com/HT2T6CArrX
Heh. “Perhaps the New York Times’ obit for Kraft was already written, as it curiously fails to explore the seething hotbed of sexism and white supremacy that was the early NASA, according to the latest reporting by the New York Times.“
An interesting overview, but I am aware of no serious plans for Virgin Galactic to get tourists to orbit any time, let alone in the early 2020s. Only Blue Origin and SpaceX offer that potential right now. https://t.co/Sew1biT1z3
And they repeatedly use the phrase “lunar soil.” In fact we just update Evoloterra this weekend to fix this ourselves.
There is no such thing as lunar "soil." Soil has an ecosystem and fertilizer needed to grow things. At some point, we will make soil out of the regolith, but it's not there naturally.
Finally, we have this comment, which seems gratuitous and almost a non sequitur in the context of this article:
"The planet is in the midst of a climate crisis the likes of which we have never seen…"
Oh, please. Such hyperbole.
Go tell it to the folks who had to live through effing glacial advances with neolithic technology. Or even those who ice skated on the Thames in the LIA. https://t.co/rw8vMJW4ze
“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.”
Not a lot new here for people who read Vance’s book (or the more recent ones), except he thinks he could put Starship on the moon in two years. From now.
He also describes how he was inspired by Apollo, so that is one good thing that came of it (besides winning a battle in the Cold War).
As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.
I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:
I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).
For one thing, it’s more sustainable. And it will accomplish much more. Whenever kids (i.e., people less than 50) tell me they envy me that I saw men walk on the moon, I tell them that I envy them for all the much more exciting things in space they’ll see (assuming that we don’t get life extension).