Re: John, the landings and 11/9 are two different orders of probability - Archived Message
Posted by Shyaku on July 31, 2019, 10:30 am, in reply to "Re: John, the landings and 11/9 are two different orders of probability -"
I suspect there may be a significant ideological element here of private vs public ownership of resources. The private side have enjoyed great success over the past 30+ years in stripping public assets, with the ideological assertion that government is unable to succeed in anything. They likely got rather tired of people pointing out the Apollo program. They would probably be happy to see doubt sowed about this program. I would speculate that people like Branson and Bezos would probably be happy for the first privately funded mission to the moon to be perceived as the first, that is, after they have ripped off all the public assets eg. Launch facilities, and hired away NASA know.how. In addition, i think perhaps unlike Apollo, the shuttle program really was a boondoggle, and effected a pretty sizeable transfer of public wealth into private hands while providing very little in return in the way of advances and breakthroughs though space toilets are much, much better now. This is the next thing for manned space flight from NASA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System It seems they have survived the shuttle rip off by the skin of their teeth and are inching back into the human space flight game with something pretty similar to the Apollo vehicle. Note also all the ID politics that surrounded the shuttle program, first teacher in space, first mother in space, all kinds of ethnicities etc. Nice homely looking astronauts, with little motivational PR videos before, during and after their missions. None of the awkward robotic military test pilots who represented the pure functionality of the Apollo program, and who could perform under the unbelievable pressure of the whole world watching while they walked a multiple tightropes for the very first time. Apollo flights were called missions for good reason - they were performing and reacting like concert pianists 100% of the time, being experts in a huge variety of things like the spacecraft (the command module was the most complex machine ever developed at the time), navigation, observation, life support, etc. No wonder they were geeky. People say that the best personality type for a trip to mars is a couch potato.
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