From "Between the Moon and Woodstock" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.
I'm old enough to remember the moon landing and not only do I remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening, I remember having the same opinion as Norman Mailer.
From a review by Steven Achilles Brown (at Medium):
Throughout ["Of a Fire on the Moon,"] Mailer returns to a recurring question: is the moon landing a good and noble achievement of America, or is it an errand of the Devil?... ... Mailer seems ambivalent until the very end, when he writes
the expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us . . . probably we had to explore into outer space, for technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of that world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness — yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who know that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.This quotation discloses much about Norman Mailer. He had a degree from Harvard in aeronautical engineering, yet as a writer in this technological age, had roots in 19th-century romanticism; he wished that all men, including astronauts, be poets and philosophers. Throughout the book, indeed throughout most of his career, Mailer was preoccupied with one central theme, that God was an embattled vision: good and evil fight each other for possession of the souls of humankind....
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264 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 264 of 264Norman Mailer was never on my radar, and if the writing sample is representative, never will be.
People have mixed motives, and movements are even more mixed. No doubt some of the powers-that-were dreamed of getting the upper hand over the Soviets--and given the alternatives I see no reason to criticize that attitude. But the fact is that millions of us were dreaming of adventure, and getting to see it play out in real life. The plaque saying We came in peace for all mankind spoke for us. The space program was both/and--and the adventure was the biggest part for everyone I knew.
We suffer from a nasty infection of refusal to admire accomplishments of people we despise, and we have a plague of pundits who despise white men with crewcuts.
Yes, I was alive then--almost 14, and glued to the shortwave listening to the landing and the first steps.
To those who say that the Soviet Union was doomed to fail: Of course it was. Totalitarian socialist dictatorships are bound to fail . . . eventually. You could say the same thing about Nazi Germany. Do you really want to go there?
@ Narr at 8:50 pm
I think the Russian was correct. From my very limited work on the space program - a simple water purity detector- i remember the outlandish cost of a simple transformer. Normally the commercial cost would be about a $1, the military cost would be about $10, but the cost for the space program transformer was about $1000 !!. That's because NASA had unbelievable traceability requirements. They wanted to be able to pinpoint to the smallest failure, like what batch of wire was used in the manufacturer of the transformer. This required a tremendous paper trail and that was costly.
I've been watching apolloinrealtime that someone (Darrell?) linked to yesterday. This website is awesome. MUCH better than the original Walter Cronkite. This afternoon was the landing and the EVA is about to start. How anyone can fail to be inpired by this achievement, well, I just feel sorry for them.
"The question is: Do you still have the same opinion?" Whoa. Satellites. GPS.
The moon as a _particular_ destination may have been a false start, but the same people who thought the moon was pointless felt the same way about the whole space program. They could not have been more wrong.
I remember having the same opinion as Norman Mailer.
So you were a hippie chick back then. Sometimes I read a post of yours, Professor, and I think somewhere not all that deep inside you the hippie chick is still there.
Communism failed because Ronald Reagan challenged it.
Reagan administered a stress test, and communism failed spectacularly at the system and human level. Then there's our own semi-regulated market, which has been pumped full of local and international social-lite. For example, Obamacare is either an opportunistic disease or a prescription with a placebo effect to treat the symptoms (e.g. progressive prices, dysfunctional orientations). China seems to have developed a hybrid with a better balance than the first, and with some attractive features of the second. That said, then, and now, there are other active stressors. Time will tell.
An old retired military intelligence guy told me he was in Vietnam from early in Kennedy's administration, a few times during Nixon's first term, and again just before the fall of Saigon. He suggested that it behooves critics of the war to recall that running a defensive war halfway around the world in a shitty third world jungle, with a logistics chain supporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers, for over a decade, without the loss of any territory, against both guerrilla warfare and conventional Soviet equipped armies, was something that no other nation on earth could have done then, or has done since.
The French tried for eight years, with a smaller force and they were broken seriously then they moved to Algeria next door for nearly as long, that's the subtext of the lost command and the battle of algiers
(eaglebeak)
Norman Mailer was pissed off because he wasn't in the WASP establishment, so he had to go out and promote himself.
I remember watching the Moon landing with my whole family and being thrilled. I remember watching Woodstock and thinking the music was great, but who the hell wanted to wallow in mud on an acid trip?
(eaglebeak)
Among fun facts about Mailer: He stabbed one of his (six) wives:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/13/reviews/mailer-stabbing.html
Not sure he got his degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard--according to Wikipedia, doesn't sound like it: "At Harvard, he majored in engineering sciences, but took the majority of his electives as writing courses."
If I sound unenthusiastic about Mailer, it's probably because I read way too much of him in my distant youth.
Most people will never go. It will never be economically mined or settled. It will never be a place people can run to to escape oppression or to start over. Physics, the coldest of sciences, prohibits it.
Physics “prohibits” nothing of the kind.
Human biology might hamper it, in the noirish expanse, shouldn't they have done a new season by now, those raised on the moon or Mars were tortured by exposure to earth's gravity.
It wasn't to satisfy scientific curiosity and it wasn't to invent Tang and Velcro and honeycomb composites. Nor to jack up WASP culture (good god, I can hardly get myself to repeat such nonsense). It was to be able to throw nasty things at the Russkies from way up high. Nothing more, nothing less.
No it wasn't. While the Russian space program benefitted from their building huge rockets during the 40's and 50's for their ICBM program (since it was believed early in the atomic age that nuclear weapons were necessarily large and heavy, requiring such enormous rockets to loft them over the north pole at America), the U.S.'s space program basically did not (since it didn't begin developing ICBM's until people had learned that smaller nuclear bombs were feasible) — and thus much smaller missiles (such as the Minuteman) were developed that were nearly useless for space travel.
"Couldn't get through or far into anything Mailer wrote. I recall he and Buckley shared a Thing. Each found a literate murderer whom they managed to get out of jail. Each killed again."
And knowing what we know now, about such "thought leaders" like Bill Kristol and David French.
The masks have slipped. We are 10 year kids sitting ringside, slowly realizing that if Andre The Giant is faking, maybe - gasp - the Von Erichs are too?
And could Mailer or Buckley compete in today's world? I can click a button and find 100 anonymous scribblers with sharper analysis, for free.
Were they really so tall? As we grew up they began to not look so big.
Because of the early Russian advantage in heavy-lifting boosters, the reason why a mission of the caliber of the Moon race was so important for the space-age competition JFK sought to engender between the U.S. and the USSR was that it would require both sides to develop a super-heavy booster — making it possible for America to win the rivalry.
And they were wrong then, too.
You have to memorize organic chemistry. There is NO over-arching theory modeled by mathematics. I hate memorization.
You'll be glad to know that Nobel Prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi shared your sentiment. As he put it: [quoting]
If I could remember all those names [referring to the growing population of subatomic particles], I would have been a botanist.
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____
Enrico Fermi, early 1950's (quoted in the AAAS's Science 85, June, 1985, p. 9)
A buddy of mine in medical school was an ex-fighter pilot. The Astronaut program tried to recruit him for the program.
Nothing doing. He had enough flying and did not want, like Chuck Yeager, to be “spam in a can.”
Yet the history of the moon landings shows that (extreme!) piloting skills were absolutely required for the success.
" used to enjoy mailer AND hunter Thompson when i was a teenager. They seemed so smart and edgy. Now, i find them both unreadable. What juvenile Bullshit. Just two Con artists, leftists, and male chauvinists posing as "Rebels" and "Wild and Crazy Guys".
Funny. I usually read threads in reverse, from the last comment to the first. So I made my "pro wrestling" analogy before I saw this.
Amazingly, 40 years later when Obama and his diverse crowd of leftists took over America, they could not come even close to sending a man to the moon. Clearly those WASPs were vastly superior to the POCs.
"He did it!” said my little granddaughter.
“No, she did it!” cried my little grandson as he stomped his feet.
Bill Cosby on the difference between having one kid and two.
“"Communism doomed to fail on its own"
As Keynes said, “in the long run, we are all dead....”
Yes, communism is extremely ineffective economically, oppressive and bloody. But it won’t necessarily fall on its own. Look at Africa and Latin America, look at North Korea, look at most moslem countries. Shitholes can remain shitholes for centuries, even millenniums.
I don't know how old Freder is but he sure has never grown up.
The cultural reference is a tell. No one under thirty has even heard of Fritz Lang.
Fen, here is how to understand and enjoy poor untalented Mailer and poor excitable but untalented Thompson ...
just imagine that you were born a long long time ago and they are your deeply flawed grandchildren.
There are almost no poets any more, and for God's sake losers like Mailer and poor little Thompson were not poets - whatever they were, God bless their little hearts, they were not poets - there is just God, and those you love, and whether you care or not about words, there are billions of words to describe God and to describe God;s creation and to describe those you love (yes I know there are only millions of words in English but the average poet has NO PROBLEM AT ALL learning billions of words in the course of his or her lifetime, trust me)
why do I bother nobody cares
I have seen and experienced so so much
God loves you
I know that
there are billions of words to describe God and to describe God's creation and to describe those you love
Billions, my friends, billions.
Be kind, follow the commandments.
And if you want, feel free to tell me I am sanctimonious: I am not: I have seen that look on his face that God has when he loves you: and I try to say what needs to be said when one has seen that look.
EVERY SINGLE NUMBER FROM ONE TO THE BILLIONS IS A FRIEND OF YOURS (if a number can be a friend and of course that is true)
just saying
I speak with authority sometimes
not all the time
just sometimes
Feliz Sabado Amigos !!!!
I do regard numbers as my friends; I'd just been thinking about that. Nevertheless, you're taking that friendship only up to “billions”? The fact is that billions are basically no closer to infinity than 1 is.
I've been reading Oriana Fallaci's intriguing book on America's 1960's Moon program Se il sole muore in Italian on Kindle. I don't know the language and there's no English translation on Kindle, so I've been translating it using Kindle's translator — comparing its results with Google Translate to create a synthesis — and it works amazingly well!
I'd like to share a portion of Oriana's book, having to do with interviews she did with science fiction author Ray Bradbury (still leaving out much good stuff, unfortunately!): [quoting]
[Oriana] “All right, Mr. Bradbury, but the task of the writer is not to exalt the little beauty that is there: it is to look for the bad, the ugly — and then denounce it. Man's task is not to be satisfied: it is rebelling. Only through rebellion can we seek truth.”
[Bradbury] “But at a certain point we must also find the truth. There is a moment when the company, society, tells the writer: Okay, kid, all right, absolutely right. However, since you are so good at it and destroy so well, since you have broken everything, our hopes, our illusions, tell us how do you rebuild? So, my dear, either shut up or explain how to rebuild.
“I have been very attached to the company: with a freshman's enthusiasm. But you can't be freshmen forever. The freshmen always have a fever and you cannot have a fever forever. Fever is a disease and disease isn't eternal. When the thermometer rises to forty-one, you die or heal. I've had my forty-one degrees [C], and I ended up learning to appreciate health.
“Grumbling is old, hope is young, and perhaps I am an eternal child but the space age I see with the enthusiasm of our children — an innocent, stubborn enthusiasm, that makes me scream: what do I care if the first rocket was Russian or American — if the first to land on the Moon, on Mars, was named PopoviÄ or Smith? The important thing was to have it, that rocket — the important thing was to send that man!”
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[Oriana] “All right, Mr. Bradbury. But some fear will be legitimate to have: a little fear. Where are we going? What will we do? Will we do well? Will we do badly? Will we plant plastic, glass roses and lawns even on Mars? The enthusiasm I have for those rockets: they like me so much too. But when I'm on, who stops them? They go on alone: because man has built something that has escaped from his hand and lives without him.”
He lit red to the tip of his toes; shivered like tinfoil quaking in the wind; boiled: gurgling the whole passion of the world.
[Bradbury] “Fear?!? But has she never seen a rocket go up?! It sits there, so great, the men around so tiny, gnats, and those men — little tiny gnats — light a spark of nothing, a roar rips the air in tatters, a white cloud blooms, it goes up, goes into the infinite — and you swear: God, we grabbed you by the coat flap, God! And as you swear this polite blasphemy, the rocket does not scare you any more because you remember that man built the rocket, man ignited the spark of the rocket, mankind tore the tattered air: the rocket without Man is a glove without a hand.
“Fear?!? But this is the most beautiful time that mankind has had the good fortune to live, the most daring, the most privileged, the most wonderfully profane, this is the greatest era in history! When they say: look, isn't that rocket wonderful? I answer: no, the man who built it is wonderful, our age is wonderful, our ideas are wonderful — our ideas that are no longer abstract, frozen, immobile, but ideas that move, they burn, they fly!
“Yes, first we thought of Beauty and we carved statues, drew paintings, constructed palaces — we thought of God and we raised churches, bell towers, [places of] prayer. Now we think of Beauty, of God, and we create something that moves, that burns, that goes up: the engines, the machines!
“Fear?!? But until today we slept, frozen turtles from winter! We slept but here we wake up and, fresh, rested, and intelligent, invent our rockets, jump off the Earth, break the chains that kept us tied to the Earth, we leave behind our prison.”
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[Oriana] “Yes, but my dad replies that we are made to live here. We need air to breathe, water to drink, we suffocate sans air and water: so why go, why?”
[Bradbury] “For the same reason that makes us give birth to our children. Because we are afraid of death, of darkness, and we want to see our image repeated and immortal. We do not want to die: but death exists and, because it exists, we ‘calve’ children who will give birth to more children who will give birth to more children, ad infinitum, and this gives us eternity.
“Lest we forget: the Earth can die, it can explode, the Sun can go out, it will switch off. And if the Sun dies, if the Earth dies, if our race dies with the Earth and with the Sun, then what we've done until that moment dies. And Homer dies, and Michelangelo dies, and Galileo dies, and Leonardo dies, and Shakespeare dies, and Einstein dies, and all those who are not dead because we live, because we think of them, because we carry them in and on us — die. And then every thing, every memory, rushes into the darkness with us.
“Let's save them, therefore let's save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, escape to continue life on other planets, to rebuild our cities on other planets: we won't be ‘terrestrials’ for long!
“And if we really fear the darkness, if we really fight it, then, for the good of all, take our rockets, get used to the cold, the heat, the water that isn't there, the oxygen that isn't there — we become Martians on Mars, Venusians on Venus — and when even Mars dies, when Venus dies too, we go to other solar systems, on to Alpha Centauri, wherever we can go, and forget the Earth. Forget our Solar System, forget our body, the shape it had, these arms, these legs, these eyes — we become, no matter how, we become lichens, insects, fireballs, no matter what — it just matters that somehow life goes on, and with life continued awareness of what we were and did and learned: consciousness of Homer, consciousness of Michelangelo, consciousness of Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein! And the gift of life will continue forever.”
[Oriana] Here it was. This is the response to your answer, dad. And it seemed to me a beautiful prayer. Even now I try to repeat it with similar words to those he used and I do not get it the same, unfortunately. It seems to me a beautiful prayer: infinitely more sacred than those that my mother taught me when I was a child, with the sign of the cross. Perhaps because he spoke in a low voice, with half-closed eyes: this man who rides a bicycle and does not own a TV. Perhaps because his head was bent and it no longer seemed him, he seemed like a priest of those Pater Noster saying believers. Maybe because I felt stung by many regrets, remorse toward you, and I was looking for a big justification, a pardon: accepting the ideas of the man was already betraying you, dad. Later I would have accepted it much less: like a clock pendulum that is never in equilibrium and continuously oscillates from right to left, from left to right, from doubt to another doubt, I would have already refused them by returning several times to you.
But the taste of that prayer always remained inside me. And I still have it inside.
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Chapter three
[Oriana] I couldn't sleep. That demon with innocent eyes had played with my nerves like a rubber band to make slingshots: pulling them, sensing their softness, flaying them. And now they lay in a tangle of unmade twine, too tired to face the trouble of rest, unable to tell the brain enough, stop thinking and leave it alone. In the manner of a train launched down a slope, the thought continued the race… […]
[Bradbury] “We said it, eh, Miss Fallaci?”
[Oriana] “Yes, Mr. Bradbury. And I feel a bit beaten up.”
[Bradbury] “But why? These are things that should give joy, make us feel stronger and bolder.”
[Oriana] “What? To think that we, just us, touch the privilege of continuing the miracle of existence? If it is a privilege, it is a very tragic privilege. A very dramatic responsibility.”
[Bradbury] “Glorious, not dramatic.”
[Oriana] “Dramatic, Mr. Bradbury. The most dramatic that the human race can imagine. God! Give up the body, the form we have, to take on a body and a form that we do not even imagine….”
[Bradbury] “Look, it's not a great shape: looking at it right. Have you ever wondered how you would judge an egg if you could judge? Or a bird?”
[Oriana] “I inquired about it. And I have concluded that we do not offer a fascinating spectacle: in all probability they find this vertical octopus, full of tentacles and holes, very disgusting. A bird is much prettier than us, and also an egg. But we got used to it, to being like this, right? And I do not feel prepared to become a bird, an egg, a lichen.”
[Bradbury] “None of us is prepared. Nor will we ever be. But this is also our destiny: to change. We are already changing: physically, psychologically, religiously, whether we like it or not, whether you like it or not. You change slowly, the same slowness that changes from spring to summer, summer from autumn, autumn into winter. One never notices at what moment spring becomes summer: one morning we get up and it's hot, summer came when we slept.”
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[…]
So I didn't sleep. I was chasing after lichens and can't sleep. I was chasing after that sentence and I wasn't sleeping. “And if the Sun dies, and if the Earth dies, and if our race dies with the Earth and the Sun….” Strange, but the death of the Earth, of the Sun, I had never thought about it, dad. I had thought to my, to the people I love, not to that of the Earth and the Sun. Them I had always considered immortal, the Sun and the Earth, why they had been there billions of years before me and would be billions of years after me. Instead of being immortal, they too would die.
Soon, very soon, seeing that the billions of years for the Sun and the Earth are nothing, the same relationship between me and a butterfly: to me twenty-four hours seem few but, for a butterfly that lives from dawn to another sunrise, twenty-four hours is a lifetime. Soon, real soon… altogether to the mountains and the seas, the valleys and the deserts, the noise and the colors, the days and the nights, and what you call the list of the world — and myself to the idea that the Sun died, that the Earth died, along with the list of the world — I felt empty, mad with rage, dad, how when I think that you're going to die, that mom will die, that I will die.
I have never understood death. I never understand people who say death is normal, death is logical, everything ends so I'll finish. I have always thought that death is unjust, death is illogical, and that we should not die from moment that we are born. I have never understood those who say: you don't really die, you become something different, you become a tuft of grass, a sip of air, a puddle of water — and grass, air, water, feed a fish, a bird, another man — then you live through them.
I have never understood why being alive, for me, means moving inside this body — inside this thought: What do I care about becoming Martians on Mars, Venusians on Venus, Andromedans on Andromeda? These tentacles they call arms, legs, fingers, are ugly? And what do I care if they're ugly? They're the only ones that I know, the only ones that I have, and I don't want any other. I want these arms, these legs, these fingers, I want this Earth! This Earth is a prison? All right. I'm comfortable in this prison, it's warm and safe like a mother's womb, it is my mother's womb, and.…
And you had reason, dad. Reason? But the mother's womb cannot hold you forever. If we stay there forever we die, and she dies as well. The womb holds you until you're done, and when you're done you spit, you vomit to strength in a world that you couldn't even imagine. Maybe you did not want to see that world: you were well curled up in the belly, at that heat. No effort to eat, no struggle to sleep, your mother did everything for you. Her skin, her tissues, protected you more than an armor, more than the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and repels meteorites, other pitfalls.
Yet you were forced to leave it, that belly, you were forced to take the form of a body that you did not even imagine, to eat differently, to sleep with so much effort, to protect you with such pain. And that change was not an abuse, not even a cruelty: it was the only way to continue life. And the only way that the Earth has to live is to spit you away, vomit yourself into the sky, beyond the atmosphere, to those worlds that you cannot imagine and which in turn will spit you away into other worlds…. But that was what Ray Bradbury said. So Ray Bradbury had reason: not you, dad.
And in this conclusion I found peace. I finally fell asleep, to awaken in the morning swollen with curiosity, then found myself in a taxi that ran to him: as a pin runs towards a magnet.
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Nice trolling there by the Hostess.
THEOLDMAN
Unless we get out into space, actually colonize it, humanity's end is assured.
We're overdue for a major asteroid strike. A large enough one could wipe out most or all life on earth. And a large enough one WILL happen, eventually. And we probably won't even see it coming... I believe we're only capable of watching around 5% of the night sky.
If we don't get at least SOME eggs out of our single solitary basket...
It amazes me that this isn't immediately obvious to everyone.
Getting stoned and sleeping in the mud was the counter-culture's greatest achievement?
DocMike said," The next generation has done very well."
You're not kidding. You can't go to a strip mall in the OC without tripping over a nail salon.
Oh. And ,'metric system'
Anyone old enough to remember the Moon landing can ask themselves this - do they like American society better here in 2019? Or were they better off in 1969? I see the moon landing as the crowning achievement of American culture. No matter how much money a society spends, half of its people will fall below median intelligence and have worse life outcomes on account of it. The bottom 10% in intelligence will suffer most of all. Shoveling money, big screen televisions and smart phones at them will not change their possibilities, those are palliative measures alone. The poor WILL be with us always, and the sly have turned poverty into an industry in this country. Relative to the Soviets, their system is long gone, but I think it may be fairly said they won the ideological war. Š“ŠµŠ·ŠøŠ½ŃŠ¾ŃŠ¼Š°ŃŠøŃ provided the memes that control much of the thinking of our ruling class and cultural institutions. It is the poisonous tree that bore the fruit of AOC and her ilk. The Vietnam War was folly. Not because the Domino Theory was wrong - it was quite correct. Not because our opponents were not evil ideologues - they were. But it was beyond the grasp of our reach and it contributed to the breaking of our culture. I fear that one day we will look back on Afghanistan the same way.
Freder Frederson continues to argue 400,000 people (lowball estimate) murdered and a half million dying at sea plus the ones who were starved is... no big deal.
First of all, 400,000 were sent to reeducation camps, they were not murdered. The reeducation camps were not death camps. The only source for the half million dying at sea are the monkeys flying out of Michael K's butt. He has a history of just pulling numbers that sound good to him, but are without any basis in fact, out of his butt. He can not be trusted.
I hate it when I am forced into a position of defending oppressive regimes. But at some point I have to counter the outright lies that some people on this blog regularly promulgate.
It would never occur to me to wonder - or care - what an ungracious arrogant tool like Norman Mailer thinks about one of the greatest human achievements in history.
Some people take great risks to achieve great things at great personal risk. Other people sit in comfortable chairs and dare to judge the first group.
We call that last group “ankle-biters”. Don’t be an ankle-biter.
8 parts bullshit if you grade on a curve.
"Chilling in its self-evident futility"? That is some powerful projection right there, Mister Miller.
The successful mission to the moon is one of the rare exceptions to the futility of big government spending. If we had chosen to continue space exploration instead of all the spending on the worse than futile war on poverty we might have actually made steps forward for mankind instead weakening our society with sloth, entitlement, aimlessness, and trivia. We chose to spend all those billions so that millions of able-bodied people could sit on couches or hang on street corners getting wasted and forgetting how to be productive while they taught successful generations the same. It would have been better to have failed at space than to have succeeded at the coddling destruction of millions of lives.
'But the moon landing itself did little (and is doing little) for people.'
Other than the extraordinary technological spin-offs.
Agreed that the Apollo program speeded up a number of technological developments. But it is silly to assume that e.g., we wouldn't have computers today if Apollo had never happened. Who hasn't heard the statement that there is more computing capacity in a smart phone than there was in entire Mission Control?
Anybody who knows anything at all about Mailer could have written his opinion of the space program without ever asking him. Predictable, lazy and uninspired has good reason to resent the Apollo missions.
What a surprise that a 60's era student and a "counterculture" author would navel-gaze rather than marvel at the achievement. Only the things in their heads matter, nothing anyone else thinks or does can have any value.
Few people realize that Eisenhower actually wanted to put up satellites. As a military man, he thought they had great potential for finding out just what the Soviets were doing, where their armies were, etc. But he also knew that it was a keystone of international relations that a government had sovereignty over its land and the "airspace" above it. Today everyone agrees that you have to get permission from a government to fly a plane above its territory.
If the US had sent a satellite up, the Soviet government would have raised hell. But once they had sent one up that flew over every country of the world, they could no longer complain. The principle had been established that space was like International Waters, not requiring any government's permission to pass through.
And, of course, after Sputnik, he proposed the creation of NASA, which Congress quickly agreed on.
This the first time I had ever heard of anyone with an engineering degree from Harvard.
It is getting to the point where, if a white man cures cancer*, I'm worried there will be people who ask: "Is it worth curing cancer like this?"
* And yes, I know "cancer" is a super broad term that one cannot actually "cure."
Most people will never go. It will never be economically mined or settled. It will never be a place people can run to to escape oppression or to start over. Physics, the coldest of sciences, prohibits it.
Physics “prohibits” nothing of the kind.
But it does. A tremendous amount of energy is required to escape the earth's gravity. (Some times physicists will say the earth is at the bottom of a deep "gravity well".) Getting and using that energy is not cheap or easy. Have you every done the Kennedy Space Center tour? At one point, you can stand under a Saturn V rocket. It is incredibly impressive--and gigantic. For 3 people. The Space Shuttle was supposed to be cheap, reliable, and safe. It turned out to be zero for three.
And, of course, the moon and Mars are even less habitable than the bottom of the Ocean or the middle of Antarctica. They will never be for ordinary people.
Q: What do you call 5,000 lawyers on the moon?
A: A good start!
"A tremendous amount of energy is required to escape the earth's gravity. (Some times physicists will say the earth is at the bottom of a deep "gravity well".) Getting and using that energy is not cheap or easy... For 3 people. The Space Shuttle was supposed to be cheap, reliable, and safe. It turned out to be zero for three."
This isn't the least bit convincing. The "tremendous amount of energy" you are referring to is the same amount of energy required for a plane trip to Australia. There are some serious engineering issues that have made it hard, but SpaceX has solved some of them and is working on other ones. The price is coming way down.
Once you get a factory set up out there, you can make your own components and don't need to ship everything up from here. You need to get past a hump, but it isn't the least bit impossible.
Hard is not the same thing as impossible.
"Who hasn't heard the statement that there is more computing capacity in a smart phone than there was in entire Mission Control?"
And there are millions of those phones running 24/7 in accomplishment of what?
Imagine what mankind could do with all that computing power if we had half the courage, ambition and vision of Mission Control. We can't finish the safety manuals, government mandated reports, sensitivity training and hard work of wokeness. The very nature of the Apollo mission and it's possibilities have been made illegal and replaced with a preoccupation with safety, identity politics, and a paralyzing fear of failure.
How do we excuse the lack of progress in space exploration in the 50 years since Apollo 11. With all our advancements over the last half century do you think we could do what those Americans did in the 60's and 70's today with as few failures?.
Here is a real eye opener: What would be an equivalent challenge today to our current technology as landing on the moon was to that of 1960?
What is the real impediment to a similar accomplishment today, becuase it sure isn't technology, manpower, or money, becuase there is many times more of all those available today than ever in history. What could be missing or present today that stops us?
Imagine having a similar discussion in 1900, and claiming that in your lifetime you would see us fly 300 people across the globe in a giant metal bird at 500 miles per hour in complete comfort watching news live on video from the other side of the world. You would be considered a fool.
"the Wasp triumph of the moon landing, answered, almost exactly a month later, by the counterculture triumph of Woodstock...." "
Because in the annals of the greatest achievements of mankind Moonlanding=Woodstock.
Die hippies. Die.
Come on Oso Negro--it's too early in the morning for Cyrillic.
Baudrillard wrote something after the fall of the Red Empire to the effect that their failure presaged a general system failure of modernity, and the West would be infected too, over time. (Burgess foresaw a lot of the present, even, ironically and in a sketchy way, the cultural influence Russia would have even as a failure. Just realized that.)
But I digress. By the time I graduated from ESU in 1976 (History major--Ancient, Byzantine, Medieval, some British and Modern Europe, one course shy of a major in PoliSci--Soviet Studies, Third World, International Relations) it was clear to me that the standard narrative in academe re the USSR was laughably absurd, grotesquely oblivious to material reality.
It wasn't so much that it was pro-USSR (though much of it was and is) but that it was smug in the assumption that Communism had achieved both material benefits for and a large measure of legitimacy from its subjects. This was so entrenched that even later in grad school (lots of Russian and more Modern Europe) a common reaction to criticism of the USSR was a snide reference to the John Birch Society. This was funny because my take was not theirs but Aslund's and Reagan's (and other's)--the USSR was a Paper Bear that could be outwitted and outspent while it flailed around and spent the last of the "WE BEAT NAZISM!"
credit it ran on.
As the miserable place imploded, I got a kick from the Sovietologists on TV who had had no clue that anything like this could happen, and some were downright frustrated that Gorby wasn't paying attention to their wisdom on how to salvage the good parts and keep bad actors at bay.
Narr
Question Authority (I question the authority of bumper stickers)
A tremendous amount of energy is required to escape the earth's gravity.
As MikeR commented up-thread up-thread, this is dramatically and drastically wrong. To get more specific, it's been calculated that the theoretical energy burden for accelerating a human being from the earth's surface to a velocity that would deliver them to the moon is about $10 worth of electricity.The reason why we build gigantic and expensive Saturn V's and Falcon Heavies to do the job is because our present space-access technology is so low, not because it's “high technology.” Time, research and development will obviate much of that burden and expense. For instance: ever hear of a “space elevator”?
No, Eisenhower was against putting up a satellite because he was afraid of "militarizing" space (or being perceived as doing so). The ABMA was capable of putting up a satellite two years before Sputnik went up.
The Navy's Vanguard was being prepped for an eventual satellite launch -- over von Braun's more reliable Redstone rocket (later renamed the Jupiter C) -- and von Braun and Bruce Medaris were told to stand down. Once Sputnik went up, Eisenhower dismissed its importance, until public sentiment made him change his mind. Vanguard failed miserably, von Braun and Medaris were finally given the green light, and Explorer went up on a Jupiter-C four months later.
Von Braun is the unsung hero and space visionary here, sadly being gradually written out of NASA history. You can watch him explaining how we could get to the moon in 1955: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIDFx74aSY
This was still largely dismissed as fantasy/Buck Rogers stuff in the 50s, but just 14 years later, his Saturn V made it reality.
When JFK was searching for some way to compete with the Soviets peacefully, he toured the Marshall Center and asked von Braun what it would take to get to the moon. Von Braun didn't answer in terms of time or money or manpower. He said simply, "The will to do it."
That's what it takes, and that's what we haven't had for a long, long time.
When the space inside your mind is so interesting you spend your time exploring the expanse between your thoughts and your feelings, going to the moon seems an unnecessary hassle.
Those who can, do; those who can't, bitch.
But at some point I have to counter the outright lies that some people on this blog regularly promulgate.
No, you could do your homework. Oh, that's right. It's summer vacation.
Forget it,.
Mailer has not aged well. Pyrotechnics for the sake of attention, with no ethical appetite beyond his one true fetish, that of hanging with his fantasy version of black men. Nothing much mattered to him beyond the sick expression of sexual jealousy and leftist-so-acceptable degradation of minorities in his "White Negro" essay.
"We went there because we could go there, with the strong implication that this was also, to borrow the title of another Mailer book, why we were in Vietnam ...."
One of these is not like the other.
Apollo cost: Three lives, and $20. to $25 billion (depending on what's included).
Vietnam war cost: ~58,000 dead in U.S. military forces, and over a million Vietnamese dead; $111 billion.
Apollo results: NASA did just what it said it would do, when it said it would do it.
Vietnam War: Much of the country we were saving was destroyed; when the political cost became too high, the USA left its ally to defend itself.
Apollo iconic images: "Earthrise" photo, footprints on the moon, moon buggy, focused creativity saves the day after Apollo 13 explosion.
Vietnam War iconic images: "Napalm girl," pistol-to-the-head execution of Nguyen Van Lem; mad scramble at U.S. embassy in Saigon to get out while it was still possible.
How could anyone think these things were similar?
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