Just watched “Apollo 13 and “For All mankind” back to back. Forty years on from that historic day in 1969, we’re in the midst of Moon Landing Fever and the nostalgia is flowing freely.
Personally, I can recall as an eight-year-old in Penshurst, New South Wales, being marshalled into a classroom to watch live, grainy television footage of Armstong setting first foot on the Moon’s surface.
I have very little time for the conspiracy theorists: it’s not my place to put you right morons, and there are plenty of people out there willing to take your silly little paranoid scenarios apart, piece by piece.
And I have even less time for the Moaning Minnies who decry the achievement of the Apollo programme and ALL that followed as a “waste of money”. Your spurious claims that all the cash “thrown away” on space exploration could have been better spent on “curing cancer” or “ending poverty” or boosting the economy by “giving tax breaks to the rich” is just naive.
For a start, it’s not how much you spend on “good works”, it’s how you spend it.
And if we lived in a world where every single cent had to be justified on grounds of mitigating one injustice or another, we would never have had art or culture or knowledge or even a simple sense of achievement. That sort of logic puts us on a level with bees and ants.
And for Americans who ponder if the Moon Landings or the International Space Station or the Shuttle or a Manned Mission to Mars are worth your tax dollars, ponder this: Would you have the US remembered fondly for achieving something so full of hope and aspiration such as landing a human on the Moon again — or even Mars — and expanding the bounds of knowledge?
Or would you rather your country be famous for developing a bomb that can cause the most collateral damage for the least cost, or expanding a brand which can squeeze the most out of its suppliers to return the biggest profit margin, or for turning the cultures of the Earth into a cheap knock-off of the parts of Detroit very few of you would be proud to relocate to?
The Moon Landings — and the people behind them — made me proud to be an American, even though I’m not!