Landing on Luna

I guess I should break down and say something about the moon landing anniversary.

I was a fan of the Apollo project. I even drove with friends to Cape Canaveral to see one of the Apollo missions lift off.

I grew up thinking this would be an ongoing project of lunar exploration. Oops. Nope. The economics wasn't there. The military benefits weren't there. And a lot of intellectuals just didn't like the program.

Here's a passage from a 1972 article, in the NY Times, quoted in an article by Ayn Rand:

The critics of Apollo, and there have been many, believe it was an evasion of earthly responsibility. They usually share the sentiments of the late Max Born, the Nobel laureate who said, 'Space travel is a triumph of intellect, but a tragic failure of reason.' They view Apollo as America's pyramids, a folly of national vanity, or as technology's Chartres, a symbol of the machine's new dominion over man and reason.

Fie upon such critics.

The good news is that the march of machine power has continued in unimagined ways. And the machine has proven not to dominate us, but to empower us. And our actual use of space for satellites of various kinds has expanded amazingly.

But those lonely footprints on the moon
won't have company anytime soon.