Re: Thoughts on 1969

Frogwatch wrote:
I remember frantically mowing lawns and collecting old coke bottles so
I could replace the 2 bad tubes on our old B&W TV set so I could watch
the moon landing. I was 13 and had just been with a scout group to
Titusville, FL to watch Apollo 11 take off and I had models of the
Saturn V and LEM and could quote facts and stats on the Saturn V. It
was reasonable to expect that when I was older I would be exploring
the moons of Jupiter and I really looked forward to the future.

Fast Forward to 2009

Aint it depressing how far we have fallen?

For awhile, I thought NASAs post Apollo ineptitude was something
brought on by the Viet nam defeat and they would get over it and I
told my kids that I expected they would be able to explore lava tubes
on the moon but I would be too old to do so. Now, even that vision
for my kids has faded and on nights on the sailboat when we look up to
the stars and they ask "Dad, Why don't we go to the moon anymore?",
all I can do is get a lump of sadness in my throat and mumble
something about bureaucrats.

But...

Why don't you answer:

We went to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We explored Venus and we have machines turning around Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and
we have sent a craft to Pluto that will arrive in 6 years there.

We sent a machine to the poles of the sun and studied how the surface of
our star looks like.

We discovered the first extraterrestrial ocean, bigger than all of earth
oceans in Europa, we suspect another ocean is waiting for us in Encedalous, around Saturn. We sent a machine to the surface of Titan,
and another sank into Jupiter. We discovered the biggest active Vulcan
in IO, around Jupiter, we have now, as I tell you this, two machines
exploring Mars, and many others orbiting it.

In this forty years we have increased enormously the amount of knowledge we have about the other worlds of the solar system. We sent machines into space to watch what no human eyes could ever watch, to sense what no human will ever be able to sense: the surface of the sun, the depths Jupiter, and above all, we sent an observatory out there, that changed forever how we look at the Universe.

Why don't you tell the REAL story?


The ineptitude of NASA seems to not be just a case of post Viet Nam
caution but has become something much darker and seems to be an effort
to keep anybody from doing space exploration.

After all those achievements, this is just not true. NASA is the best
that American civilization has brought forward.

.

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