[MD] An Inconvenient Truth

[ian glendinning]

Purely coincidentally Case,

My "home" these days is Huntsville, AL living right alongside the
Redstone / Marshall Space centre. I drive past two Saturn 5's one
upright, one lying down (plus a whole bunch of Saturn 1's, Redstones,
Titans, etc, plus one complete shuttle) at least twice every day.

Puts other daily things into proportion.
Shows what can be done, with a little vision. It's only engineering after all.
Ian

On 7/2/06, Case <Case at ispots.com> wrote:
> [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?
>
>
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