... it's just a question of which.

And then, foolishly, we laid off the engineers....

Viking 1 landed on Mars. (See here for what else happened on that day, and my thoughts on the subject.)

40 years ago today, (it was also late in the evening, was it not?), I was watching the Apollo 11 astronauts walk out, with my parents and siblings, on our black & white TV. (Greg Laden has a great post about that - and yes, I also heard pretty much what he heard.) We were glued to the set. Unbelievable moment.

I remember a national "can-do" spirit that seems to have evaporated.

I remember kids getting excited about science and wanting to be astronauts (for years before that, really, ever since Mercury).

I remember my boyfriend didn't watch it. (He was even more of a lefty radical than I was, and didn't look too kindly on the space program. I didn't see a conflict between funding social needs and funding the space program. That's an argument one heard a lot on the left at that time.) He more than made up for it by going to Woodstock, nearly a month later. (Without me, the cad! ;P)

He died a few years ago, still a lefty radical - in fact, still even more of a lefty radical than I am, and very successful at it. I refound him only about a year before he died. Bittersweet. But it confirmed my faith that (some) people really do have some kind of solid core of integrity that does not change.

This is turning into a long walk down memory lane...

Thanks for a great post, Sarah.

despise nowadays, by the way, lambert.

They don't make enough money for the shareholders, and their salaries are too high.

I don't know how that became "the right decision," but it impoverishes us more daily.

Of course.

(and I should have mentioned, my Dad was, at the time, literally a rocket scientist, an engineer who made rocket fuel for NASA in his first out-of-doctorate job)...

There was an interesting comment in a thread about the Ares booster over at Slashdot: (Sorry, I can't figure out how to link the comment itself, and that page takes a long time to load.)

It's amazing that after the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo successes we can't seem to figure out how to make heavy lift rockets. This is nearly 40 years after Apollo was canceled

(Emphasis mine.) You have your own answer. Apollo came after Gemini, which came after Mercury, all in a single decade. And several years of NASA unmanned (though occasionally monkeyed) flights before that. A decade of various missile work before that. And a decade of prior smaller scale work each by Goddard & co and the Naz^H^H^HGermans before that. Every guy working on Apollo had years of prior experience blowing up rockets, senior guys decades.

Since Apollo, you had skylab. A one-off bit of throw away kit. Then a ten year wait after Apollo for the shuttle. Then "Freedom", a 20+ year long program downgraded to the ISS around a Russian core. 20 years, to deliver a single station.

Then, over 20 years since the newest shuttle was built, we have Constellation - Ares & Orion. No incremental development, no learning their "craft", just one design, refusing all criticism, and fuck you if it's wrong.

(And Ares I isn't a first step, it's the first half of a single program. It isn't a training run, it isn't allowed to go wrong.)

NASA's problems aren't lack of either funding or some mythical "Vision" or Kennedyesque "Challenge", nor is it political interference; it's lack of experience. Noone who has been working at NASA&co less than 20 years has been involved with the development of a manned launcher. Not one. Not the designers, the managers who chose that design, not the engineers working on it.

I don't care how high their IQ's, how many PhD's per square mile they have, you cannot expect them to succeed without giving them a chance to build real hardware for ten years, real rockets, real capsules, before they design your final project.

Somewhere, I can't find the place now, Update: here it is! Except that I'm sure I did not read it in USA Today. I was reading recently of a critique by an authoritative source Michael Griffin, head of NASA (why couldn't I remember that much?) that cancelling the Apollo program was about the biggest mistake NASA made. The implication was that they lost a few steps in their game, as this commenter is describing. (Man, I wish I could recall where I read that. Grrr.)

I talked to mom about this, today, and I'm even more amazed at the feat than she was, and as a youngin', I've seen quite a few astounding technological feats, myself, but nothing I'd compare to the moon landing as far as the instant and visual impact it can have on a society.

Her passiveness irks me, though, but she's always been rather earthy, pun fully intended, and not as curious about things as I feel people should be, which has always created some friction between us.

I'm still waiting for my generation's "moon landing", but I'm increasingly pessimistic when all I hear are words and see leaders half-assing actions to get to that point, and even worse, many of things we are arguing about should simply be givens. It's as if we've completely lost any semblence of an attention span that'd allow us to do anything as percise and instantly impactful as the moon landing.

I look back at the 60's, and where our president (and many others) looks back on it as time where we changed too quickly, too much, or was too bold (and he did say this and fewer words during the campaign, despite always positively harkening back to our moon moment), I look back it as a time when even an organization as conservative and straight-laced as NASA couldn't resist true change.

Again, I question whether we have an attention span long enough today that would even allow us to have something as impactful as the moon landing. If only were we so lucky to have that positive confidence and the "sense of urgency", today, that the president is always rambling on about, but never gives it anything more than words. If only.

beancounters vs. guys like Chuck Yeager, Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra -- and yeah, Walter Cronkite, too.

Under Nixon we became a nation of "can't afford."

Not because we couldn't afford it; NASA, even when it cost a nickel of every tax dollar at its zenith, didn't cost as much as the war in Vietnam. The nation's gains from the race to the moon reach from velcro (hospital gowns, tennis shoes, kids' parka hoods that don't have strings to catch in schoolbus doors or carousel frames and choke the kids to death) to your cell phone (an Iphone has something like 1,000 times as much computer memory and capacity as the Apollo spacecraft and the Mission Control center combined. Can you imagine?)

Corporations didn't want to lose the potential profits from space to the government.

Truth is, all those media, pundit and politicians' pulings about the Jimmy Carter Malaise to the contrary, it was Richard Milhous Nixon who yanked the guts out of our nation -- and it is in his image and through his legacy (remember, Cheney and Rumsfeld were stars in the Nixon and Reagan admins before they were Bush cronies, for either pere or fils) as amplified and set-dressed in the Reagan and Bush years that we have become "not a crook."

Not a crook, but a nation refusing to recognize that the "detainees" picked up on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are Prisoners of War, lack of a 'uniform' notwithstanding; a nation refusing to recognize that "enhanced interrogation" is a polite description of torture. Not a crook, but a predator in finance nonetheless; not a crook, but a confidence artist extraordinaire in all matters public, political, international.

I want to live in the America that elected JFK and LBJ, not the America Nixon crafted en route to a stolen second term. I want to live in the America that held the hearings on Watergate, not the America that stuffed Iran-Contra under the rug; I want to live in the America we can be, not the America we're stuck with.

Since you're the guy in the White House now, President Obama, do you hear me?
You're the President. How dare you say the country can't afford to prosecute the torturers? How dare you say the country can't afford real affordable health care (NOT insurance, dammit, that's another profit-suck bleeding working people: you know, the ones you persuaded to vote for your shiny smile last year?)? How dare you say we cannot take care of our citizens, our residents, our grandparents and godparents, our children, our disabled, our elderly, our impoverished?

Because, you know, we gave up peace.
We gave up prosperity.
We gave up jobs.
We gave up workers' rights.
We gave up women's control over their own bodies.
We gave up affordable education.
We gave up freedom of -- including from -- religion.
We gave up habeas corpus.
We gave up the right to be secure in our persons, papers and possessions.
We gave up the right not to be spied on over the phone and the Internet.
We gave up space.
We gave up the moon and the stars beyond it.

We gave all those things up, Mr. President, to try to please the opposition you're reaching out to still -- the opposition gloating over stalling health care, the opposition believing this to be your Waterloo.

You could write an executive order opening Medicare enrollment to every American in about thirty-five seconds, Mr. President.

Contrary to what the GOP tells you, it wouldn't destroy your popularity. It wouldn't make the nation ungovernable.

Yes, you could. Why didn't you choose to?