Comments | brianblackberry: 40 years ago, a new era was about to begin

brianblackberry

40 years ago, a new era was about to begin

Jul 16, 2009 08:07

I hardly heard anything on the news about this, really mentioned as an afterthought to the shuttle Endeavour finally being able to launch today. Anyway, today the 16th of July is the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission. Hopefully everyone actually already knows what the Apollo 11 mission is but just in case, it was the NASA ( Read more... )

nasa, astronomy, international, history, america, science

Comments 6

direwolf23 July 16 2009, 14:41:34 UTC

I say we stop piddling around with Mars and jump straight to wormhole technology! Now where is John Crichton? I have some questions for him.

quasiskunk July 16 2009, 15:05:55 UTC

I was always mad at NASA for not waiting one more day, so they would launch it on my birthday :)

But yeah, 40 years ago, we found that we could travel off of Earth. Its just amazing that they did, with very basic computer technology, and no cad designing programs. Plus, the amount of tech and supplies they had to invent....in only 6 years! Just astonishing what they got accomplished in that short amount of time.

Biggest human accomplishment....I rank this as #1.

eric_hinkle July 16 2009, 16:31:09 UTC

NASA's accomplishment is even more amazing when you consider that they did all of that ahead of schedule and under budget. Yes, a government agency did that.

Enough farking around; let's return to the heavens.

mauser July 17 2009, 02:44:59 UTC

We're never leaving this rock again, once they shut down NASA to pay for more Health care or research into endangered wombat mating habits.

spots_da_hyena July 17 2009, 04:25:10 UTC

I have a vivid memory of that night as that was the time in Mississippi when they landed of the moon. As a 9 year old kid I did understand it was history and a great thing. Star Trek had just had it's run and sparked the interest in me that we were really going to be that. But then came Nixon and the faith people had in our strong nation failed. Followed by Ford who...who.. what did he do? Carter who taught us to wear sweaters and drive 55. Hardly a step forward more like backwards. A gleam of hope in Regan who got rocket and space technology up and running, but he pointed it at the Russians instead. Bush 41 saw a thousand points of light but they were not stars. The closest Clinton got to space was the competition between him and Captain Kirk on the number of ... well. And last but not yet the end is Bush 43 who thought we were already in space or at least he is.

To the moon, Alice akktri July 22 2009, 05:16:29 UTC

The sad part is that Bush made his announcement only two quarters of the way into the war in Iraq. Our budget was stretched out to the limit with military spending, the economy was showing the first signs of decline, and he wanted to send us to Mars. I stared at the TV and wondered what planet he was living on.
Furthermore, the moon is nothing but rock. There really isn't any point to going back up there unless we're planning to terraform it or mine it for its nonexistent resources. We learned that the moon is just a big ball of rock with craters on it. Handy for knocking asteroids away from the earth and controlling tides, but hardly something that needs revisiting.