For all the talk this summer about the "Summer of Love", Woodstock, etc... I think it has escaped a great many of us that this is also the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing. I mean, it happened 40 years ago last month, but I don't recall it receiving anywhere NEAR the same amount of attention that Woodstock has received over the past week or two. Weird.
4 comments:
I would hazard a guess it is too close to the Bush challenge for us to go to Mars and the recent Obama pronouncement of , 'uh, don't think so.'
The spin-offs for the economy and technology were well worth the money spent going to the moon...something they also tend to forget.
The 20th century: begun with horses carriages and sputtering early autos and by just past mid-century had placed men on the moon!
I just hope the 21st does as well.
Good point. People tend to forget what huge technological, scientific, and social advances were made in the 20th century - even within the first half of it. And it's not like it was THAT long ago. For most, it was the life time of our immediate family: our grandparents, our parents, and ourselves all grew up in the 20th century.
Well, my 104 year old grandmother went to her grave saying it never happened. That was just one bridge too far for a woman born at time before electricity was more than a curiosity and a car wasn't a thought yet.
But, I think part of it is that our Moon landings despite the technological fallout were really accomplished in something of a vacuum. We went, looked around, picked up some rocks, came back and haven't given it much thought since.
The whole Moon episode was driven by Cold War military policy and once the Soviet Union began to decline there wasn't much point in our space program anymore... still isn't. We just come up with these grand schemes like the Mars mission but since there is no national security interest because Al Qaeda ain't going to Mars, we can't justify the money to get their first. The Moon was never about science... it was always about militarization.
Woodstock never happened.
Stanley Kubrick filmed it all on a soundstage with file footage of crowds from other concerts and mass numbers of people were programmed by
The Great LSD Experiment to think that their hallucinations were real....
Et Cetera,
Ad Nauseum,
Ad Absurdum...
Ad Infintum.
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