RIP Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.
The moon landings where the first historical event I can remember. It’s just the sort of thing that captures the imagination of an eight-year old.
I have no time for those who dismiss the entire Apollo programme as a grand folly. Shouldn’t the ingenuity and resources have been directed to solving practical problems on Earth, they say. But they surely miss the point. It’s grand projects like the space program that inspire people to pursue careers in science or engineering, who then grow up to help solve the world’s practical problems. Otherwise children will want to become financiers or marketeers, and the mess we’re in today is the consequence of that.
Quite often when I look up into the night sky and see the full moon, I stop and think. Neil Armstrong went there. And he came back. His footsteps are still there, undisturbed.
So rest in peace, Neil. You are one of the names people will remember in a thousand years time.
I agree totally about the drift of attention away from big, ambitious projects to mingy, selfish ones being a major problem. I know too many people who have brilliant minds, but who work in wholly unproductive careers — finance, advertising, what have you — because they get paid tons of money to do so, and because the people recruiting for those jobs are far nimbler and more persuasive than in other sectors.
I don’t resent money in the abstract — I challenge anyone to create a society on the scale of our current one that doesn’t use money — but I do resent the way we pretend the making of it justifies its corrupting influence.
You are older than I thought you were.
Have you seen Google’s “Solve for X”? http://www.wesolveforx.com/
In an era where “being famous” seems to have become a career choice this is a reminder of what the real thing is all about.
It is staggering sometimes to think that humanity went from the Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong in less than a single lifetime.
People are inclined to complain about the monetary costs while taking the results of technical improvements for granted. We may have found that satellites can be launched and used without people up there in orbit. But, without Apollo, would the launch technology have been perfected for satellite communications to be commonplace?
It is incredible to believe that this achievement, arguably the greatest in our species’ existence, has not been reproduced in nearly four decades. The hopes and inspiration that the Apollo missions created were never really followed through.
I have read many complaints about the cost of the current Mars mission, Curiosity, that was in the news recently; I have even heard it said that this is a waste of money! Is $4.5 billion dollars really that much? Compare that to how much will be spent on this year’s US presidential election. Compare that to the cost of hosting the Olympics. Compare that to the cost of the Gulf Wars and the War on Terror. In the overall scheme of things a few billion dollars is not that much to spend on space exploration. Such expenditure yields new technologies that benefit our everyday lives. I read somewhere that for every dollar spent on the Apollo program, eighteen found its way into the American economy. I find this rather easy to believe.
I do wonder if the astronauts of Apollo 17 will live to see another human being set foot on our humble satellite. I hope they do. I have no memory of the Moon landings when they happened. I hope I live long enough for a human being to set foot on another object in our Solar System.