[MD] An Inconvenient Truth

[Case]

[Ian}

Case, you said ....

"At some point during Apollo 13 I realized that at one point in my life time
we as a people had had the will, the skill, and the confidence to live an
impossible dream. When things went sour we used slide rules, duct tape and
team work to make thing work."

Me too. I use that "duct-tape" clip from Apollo 13 frequently in
business presentations.

"We gotta make this, fit into that, using only these."

Pragmatism. Just do it. Real life's like that.

There's more to read in your post, and it's still a Platt-free zone.

[Case]
I gotta say I am seriously not an emotional guy and I can supply witness to
that effect. But several years ago we have a French foreign exchange student
in our home for about a month. We took her to the Kennedy Space Center for a
tour. They have the Apollo mission control room sitting right there as it
was. I believe it was renovated in part to be used in the filming of Ron
Howard's movie. But after the presentation you leave the control room and
just around the corner is one of the last of the Saturn 5 rockets laying on
its side. I choked up.

But the emotion that overwhelms me is actually fury and regret. We should
have a permanent presence on the Moon by now and tourism to space resorts.
The exploration and exploitation of the cosmos is a dream and a goal shared
by people of every culture on this planet. It unites citizens of every
nation in a shared vision of what we can be and what we can do as a species.


Well before the fall of the Berlin wall US and Russian astronauts cooperated
in the Apollo-Soyuz mission. And by the way there should be no
misunderstanding; the Russian communists kicked our asses in space. At every
milestone and by nearly every measure they did more things first, better and
longer than we did. We "won" the race to the moon but it is like winning a
race off a traffic light when the other guy doesn't know or care that there
even is a race. 

Why then do we insist on focusing on piddly stuff that keeps us at each
other's throats?