Today is the 44th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin rode the lander to the surface, and Michael Collins manned the spacecraft in lunar orbit.
This event had the same historical significance as Columbus's landing in the Caribbean half a millennium earlier. Unlike then, we have not capitalized on the moon landing. Not in all the intervening 44 years has a human set foot on another world, not even a return to the moon.
I suggest we make a holiday out of this date, to celebrate the first moon landing the same way we celebrate Columbus Day. It would be a fitting memorial to Armstrong and the rest, if we did this.
It might also help raise public awareness of the excitement and adventure of manned exploratory spaceflight. The moon, Mars, the asteroids, and uncountable places beyond, all beckon.
I really like that idea! The Moon landing anniversary could also be a celebration of space and the opening up of the New Frontier.
ReplyDeleteWhy shouldn't America celebrate one of its ultimate engineering and scientific achievements!
Like that idea too. Here's a great A.C. Clarke quote:
ReplyDeleteSpace Travel: The Path to Human Immortality?
Space exploration might just be the key to human beings surviving mass genocide, ecocide or omnicide.
July 24, 2009
On December 31st, 1999, National Public Radio interviewed the futurist and science fiction
genius Arthur C. Clarke. Since the author had forecast so many of the 20th Century's most
fundamental developments, the NPR correspondent asked Clarke if anything had happened
in the preceding 100 years that he never could have anticipated. 'Yes, absolutely,' Clarke
replied, without a moment's hesitation. 'The one thing I never would have expected is that,
after centuries of wonder and imagination and aspiration, we would have gone to the moon ...
and then stopped.'
http://www.alternet.org/news/141518/space_travel:_the_path_to_human_immortality/
What's preventing a return to the Moon is conviction at NASA such a return has to be hugely expensive. It doesn't just go small.
Bob Clark