Our president bizarrely reached back to Sputnik today as an example of the sort of fresh thinking and innovation we need to recapture.
The strangeness of the example notwithstanding, it did get me thinking about space exploration in general, and I considered again how much I’d like to have not just missed Apollo 11. I wrote of that before.
I spent some time with the excellent Apollo 11 article at Wikipedia as I ate my lunch today, and just loved this photo. Surely I’ve seen it before, but it never struck me like it did today. It’s at the base of the lunar module, so Armstrong or Aldrin took it.
What an incredible moment! Get in a lunar astronaut’s head as he took in this view. Think of everything you’ve experienced—all the things you’ve done, all the people you’ve known, all the places you’ve been, and so forth—and consider that it all happened on that little blue sphere in the sky. Now think of the everythings of everyone who ever lived. They were all right there, too. Consider that you’ve just taken a vehicle barely large enough to contain you and your shipmates 240,000 miles into the sky—almost exactly an order of magnitude farther than anyone else has ever traveled on a single point-to-point trip—and you’re going home in it too.
Wow.
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Our president has no substance. He doesn’t even know our own history. All he does is try to parrot ex-presidents. Kennedy said something important and compelling at the time of Sputnik. That’s all Obama seems to know about it.
‘seester, after seeing his performance today talking about the tax bill, I’m beginning to entertain more severe versions of exactly that narrative.