with an eye on a permanent lunar base.
Think about it, we (the US) had men wandering about on the Moon forty years ago, and we don't yet have a station on the Moon? To me this is one of the most graphic illustrations of the collapse of our supposedly US human intellectual society.
Whether it is through private enterprise or government sponsored, it is a graphic comment. Just in the excitement and curiosity and enterprise and imagination that just that endeavor would incite, in our youth and even in our elderly, is a tragic fall.
But NOOOO, we have lawyers for Congressmen, women as the only politicians who have a modicum of courage, truly corrupt power greedy egomaniacs in the WhiteHouse, and Barbara Boxer as a Senator. Sick!
How obvious is it?
Johnny Suntrade
One of the Apollo astronauts said in interview that maybe the lunar landings were fifty years too early. They are a startling accomplishment when viewed through the subsequent stagnation of the space program. Having a moon base would be nice, but ultimately it would now be excoriated as a dead-end waste of 40 years of effort, just as the Shuttle is excoriated for being merely an orbital vehicle.
But the STS is an amazing piece of machinery, and very likely will remain the recordholder for reused orbital vehicles until such time as some future brainiacs devise propulsion systems that aren’t based on chemical propellants. It’s not likely that reusability will reach that level in subsequent conventional rocket-powered vehicles. Ever.
The scene in “Apollo 13” where someone asks Hanks (playing Jim Lovell) why the Apollo program continued to be funded after the US had beaten the Russians to the Moon is out of the whole cloth of the time. And LBJ’s both-feet-blindfolded jump into Vietnam led to outright hostility (particularly among the beneficiaries of the so-called Great Society programs) toward not just Vietnam, but also programs like Apollo. Probably a web search would turn up Ralph Abernathy’s anti-US remarks made right after he’d witnessed one of the Apollo launches.
There was just one reason that the US beat everyone to the Moon — Werner von Braun. The F-1 engine that powered the Saturn V was his baby, and developed for the Defense Dep’t, which believed it needed a million+ lb thrust engine in order to deliver the H-bomb. But Teller’s boxcar-sized H-bomb design (while it did work) wasn’t the only one, and the much smaller design(s?) were used instead. Teller’s bomb test also resulted in the B-52, which was proposed and designed to carry just one of Teller’s huge H-bombs.
Under Eisenhower, the DoD dropped the F-1 as superfluous, but von Braun was developing it for a future moonshot, and took it with him to NACA, which became NASA. Big booster designs using one, two, three, four, and five F-1 engines were drafted by and/or for von Braun to pitch, and when JFK got pissed off about the seeming superiority of the Soviet space program, von Braun took his F-1 right to the head of the class.
Korolev, head of the (or rather, one of the) Russian space program (s) kept abreast of von Braun’s ideas by reading stuff in our free press. He scorned von Braun’s suggestion that the upper stages of a lunar vehicle would be 100% cryo-fueled, saying that the problems were too great to be solved. A little over a year later, von Braun had his 100% cryo-fueled engine on the test stand, and Korolev realized the race was lost. He died as a consequence of heart surgery in 1966. His ridiculous 30+ engine N1 booster wasn’t delivered to the launch site until after his death. The only actual flight (the first try exploded and burned on the pad) of an N1 ended in a low-altitude massive explosion.