A friend sent me this...
... on 30 years after Apollo 17 -- in The Guardian, of all places! http://www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,860813,00.html __________________________________________________
Cute. Laurie is a San Diegan. I met him recently.
As for sadness over abandoning the moon -- Jerry Pournelle said "I always expected to see the 1st man land on the moon... I never expected to see the last."
But articles like this one miss the point. Apollo was like the Video-Casette Recorder... a weird/cludged/insane attempt to do something that the underlying science/technology was nowhere near ready for!
NOW we at last have the tech to do accurate, nimble recording of entertainment/TV at whim, digitally. No such thing 30 years ago. And yet - (here's the point) AMericans have a way of getting what they want, when they want it. We WANTED to record programs, so a weird electromechanical Rube Goldberg contraption called the VCR was made... then sold in such vast numbers that it never even made sense to repair one when it went bad!
The same is true of Apollo. We wanted to visit the moon. We weren't ready by more than a generation. Did that stop us? Hell no. We did it in a way that will cause future generations to call us utter maniacs.
Even NOW I doubt we're really ready to go back. Not sensibly. Not soberly and seriously.
This glass is not half empty. Not even a drop empty. The gloomy headshakes miss the whole point. We have all been privileged to live to see something that was scheduled to happen in 2050!!
Anyway. I like my way of looking at things a whole lot better than all the gloomy sourpusses out there.
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