Re: Moon landing Hoax

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

> At 23:37 21 02 2001 , you wrote:
> > Well, I tend to agree w/ Jim, but in a different way.  I think it was a
> > horrible
> > waste -- "We" spend jillions of $s  while americans starve or remain
> > uneducated,
> > etc. just to satisfy a war criminal's ego.
>
> Oh I quite agree -- I wish they would let us vote on these boondoggles
> before they spend  our money so freely and lavishly.  At least they had the
> sense to close down the SSC.
>
> Jim Green

Well, I guess there are still those who think the world is flat
(figuratively speaking, of course). It is probably true that
everything we did on the manned missions to the moon could have been
done by robots or other unmanned craft, but that seems a craven way
to do it. What romance is there in building a robot to climb Mt.
Everest? Or traverse the Antarctic Continent? I look upon the manned
missions to the moon as the last great adventure we, as a society,
had the will and audacity to undertake. I happened to be in Rio when
Armstrong & Co. made their historic voyage, and I can tell you that
it had captured the imagination of the Brazilians. That's all they
were talking about in the streets. Americans walking around town were
greeted with smiles and congratulations, where only a short time
before it was "Yankee go home!" I am still angry that they cancelled
the program before all the scheduled trips had been made. [BTW, who
was the "war criminal" whose ego these trips were supposed to
satisfy? Nixon? It wasn't even his idea, and by the time he got into
office the Apollo program was pretty much a fait accompli. After all,
he didn't become president until January of '69, and the landing was
in July of that year. Johnson? Well, there's no doubt he had a big
ego, but I think he was a long way from being a war criminal. Viet
Nam may have been more than he could handle, but I suspect he was as
much a victim of that fiasco as anything else.] I look forward to the
first manned missions to Mars. If we hadn't lost our national will in
the face of an onslaught of carping small minds, we would be well on
the way to solving the problems of sustained space travel by humans,
and I might have some hope that we would be in a position to launch
such a mission during my lifetime.

Of course this isn't just an expensive children's game. If our
species (pl.), or our descendent species (pl.) are to survive in this
universe, we are going to need to find a way to get off of earth
before it is either swallowed up or fried by the sun, and the longer
we wait to develop the capability of leaving, now that we are on the
verge of having the technology, the harder it is going to be to do
it, and given the human capacity to ignore impending disaster, by the
time we realize we have to do it, it may be too late.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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