In ‘69 I was 6 years old I remember one day my father calling me in from playing with my friends. I was rather annoyed, especially when he sat me down on the couch to watch a fuzzy black and white image. That image was Apollo 11. He made me sit there for a hour or so to watch the landing and the first steps on the moon. He said something like, later you will appreciation the fact that I made you watch this. At the time I could have cared less, but my dad was right, I do appreciate the fact that he made me watch it.

Yeah, NASA does great science as long as they don’t have man involved in the equation.

Totally agree. That’s precisely why the Mars rover missions were so amazingly successful. While humans traveling around the solar system seems cool, letting robots do the work is just as beneficial at only a tiny fraction of the cost.

But I still feel that the bureaucratic inertia is holding back the genius of NASA (and many other parts of American ingenuity) from accomplishing truly great fetes that could transform all of our lives and our civilization a thousandfold.

But lately (the past decade?) NASA has devolved into a purely bureaucratic morass where nothing new is accomplished.

Totally disagree. NASA is doing newer and better science now than ever before. The problem is that many of the discoveries made, and feats achieved, are not on the scale needed to captivate a very distracted public.

NASA has its issues for sure, but the work they do is solid, and good, and will improve lives far out into the future.

You are correct - as far as it goes.

No one does basic science better than NASA - no private lab or government in the world. The astonishing discoveries in the last decade using our unmanned robots have revolutionized astronomy, physics, high energy disciplines, optics, exo-biology and other sciences even more than the extraordinary breakthroughs that occurred in the two decades immediately after Sputnik.

But we suck at launching people into space. The shuttle is a dinosaur that was supposed to be replaced already. The Space Station is a joke. And going back to the future in order to go back to the moon by building a slightly bigger Apollo and a new heavy lift booster - both of which are way over budget already and there is a question of safety - is typical of the no-imagination, no innovation agency that NASA has become.

Yeah, NASA does great science as long as they don’t have man involved in the equation.

ed.

Will the eventual Mars mission by us or someone else (or most of us in the developed world, as its perhaps better to share the cost burdens) end up having the same Johnny Appleseed effect WW observes? We can only hope, though it may be much farther off than we once assumed unless there is greater success with the X-Prize-type private-public space partnerships than currently apparent.

Rick, this piece is exquisite. Thank you for sharing these personal reflections and memories in such a fashion.

I have enjoyed your writings in Right Wing Nuthouse for many years and have commented on occasion. One point I would like to make or rather to emphasize.

There are ~100 billion suns in this galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Each of these suns is likely to have one or more planets that may indeed be able to support life of one type or another.

With the number of possible planets in this universe it is so remotely unlikely that we would be the only life-giving planet that for all intents and purposes the probability should be zero. That Earth should be the only life-supporting planet in the universe is just as statistically likely as two identical snowflakes landing side by side upon a microscope slide in your hand in a snowstorm. I take it as a fact that there is life on other planets.

One other point where you and I may disagree is the overall benefit of the space program. I consider the moon landing project a technological “Johnny Appleseed” type of operation. Many, many technological apple seeds were planted by this monstrous, bloated, inefficient government Brute Force and Massive Ignorance project. Much good has come from it as these technological seeds have sprouted into new technologies.

But lately (the past decade?) NASA has devolved into a purely bureaucratic morass where nothing new is accomplished. Even the new Orion spaceship is just a rework of the Apollo project. Sad but not unexpected.

I appreciate your long time readership. I pointed out parenthetically that it was statistically certain that there is life elsewhere. But until we find it, science does not acknowledge it as fact.

As for NASA - the more I read about the agency from people who know and not starry eyed reporters or other space enthusiasts like me, the lower it falls in my estimation. I think the reports on Challenger and Discovery bear out this sad fall from greatness more than anything.

And the question of how much the space program has actually contributed to the development of new technologies is an open one. Clearly, government contracts nurtured some new businesses like Texas Instruments and have probably saved our aerospace industry. But how much would have been done without the space program? These new technologies filled a need in business and industry independent of NASA and would eventually have come into being anyway. The question of how much NASA helped is really impossible to answer.

ed.