Good Morning, Starshine.

[poliphilo]

Captains Kirk and Picard were never unduly worried by stray bits of foam detaching themselves from the Enterprise.

But then, as some NASA person was saying on the radio yesterday, sci-fi has left us with the mistaken impression that space flight is easy.

But it was easy once. The Apollo missions were easy. And why were they easy? Because the will was there.

We've lost the will. We got to the Moon and...and...

...we'd put one over on the Russkies and that was that. But it wasn't just about defeating the Russkies. Or was it?

Neil Armstong sounded as if he believed in his famous first words.

I'm sure he did.

I want that spirit back.

Comments

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

Apollo was also "easier" because, in a way, the costs of a mission loss were lower. While it is always a disaster to lose a crew, in the case of Apollo there were still active production facilities to replace the equipment that they had lost. They could always build another rocket. But the Space Shuttle is so tremendously expensive and antiquated that replacing one is essentially impossible, and there are no replacement designs ready to go into production. Each loss of a shuttle is therefore a nail in NASA's coffin, and that encourages the extreme caution we're seeing.