Still holds true today.

(And of course spaceflight doesn’t feel as groundbreaking as it did forty years ago; that’s because we haven’t been breaking any goddamn ground.)

I am very conscious of the need for research, investigation and achievement of that which appears to have no immediate or conceivable payoff, because we just don’t know. That’s incredibly important.

But at the same time we can also question whether something is necessary or worthwhile now. I don’t think that spaceflight and the like is going to have such a ‘glorious’ feel as it’s had – but it’ll all be back. Sometime.

At the moment everyone is trying to justify everything financially. Shoe-horning in some reason why in the next 3 years it’ll change things and make things better. That’s not great, but the ambition to do something beyond our reach is still pretty much what drives any pioneer anywhere. Maybe you can’t see it because it’s not in space, but like I say, that’s a very obvious thing, give everything else a chance.

Also saying that “the current realities curb it all a fair bit” is kind of missing the point in the post. The point is that accepting that we can’t do manned spaceflight because it’s too hard or too expensive is accepting a lie. It is neither hard (as in, technologically hard) nor expensive, just risky and with no immediate payoff. That’s no reason not to do it if astronauts like Armstrong can be found who are willing to shoulder the risk (and let’s be honest, they’d be queueing up at the fucking *door*), and Apollo directly proves that.

I mean, you ask like the entire population of the planet the question “Should we have bothered with Apollo?” and I suspect you’ll get back somewhere in the region of six billion resounding YESes. That is what matters here, not economics or propaganda or politics.

I think the ambition is there, but the current realities curb it all a fair bit.

I dunno, I think growing up in the very tail end of the Soviet Union and whatnot, the whole space thing had long stopped being portrayed as something grand and groundbreaking – less Soviet Propaganda style and more ‘a thing that happens and is normal’. That attitude doesn’t preclude ambition and reaching for the extremes of what we can achieve – it just becomes re-focused elsewhere. Spaceflight and the like is a grand thing easy to latch onto, but perhaps it’s also too obvious?

Good point about the investment banking though…

Pictures like your third one here always make me miss a breath. You don’t realise quite how far away the moon is until you stand on it and turn round and see just how small Earth looks. Seems like a very small target to aim for on the return journey.