October 20, 2014

"The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get e-mail or use Google to settle arguments."

"The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch Season Four of 'Breaking Bad.' We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna.... Steve Wong had cued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna’s Jambox and was nearly late for his cue. MDash yelled, 'Hit Play, hit Play!' just as a blue-and-white patch of life — a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been — pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph Haydn or George Harrison, but 'The Circle of Life,' from 'The Lion King,' scored our home planet’s rise over the plaster-of-Paris moon. Really? A Disney show tune? But, you know, that rhythm and that chorus and the double meaning of the lyrics caught me right in the throat, and I choked up. Tears popped off my face and joined the others’ tears, which were floating around the Alan Bean. Anna gave me a hug like I was still her boyfriend. We cried. We all cried. You’d have done the same."

From a New Yorker story by Tom Hanks (which you can read or listen to Tom Hanks read at the link).

19 comments:

Big Mike said...

As it happens I've been to the Space Center in Huntsville, AL. The Saturn 1C and Saturn V are on display there, and my thoughts were that the administrations of Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Dick Nixon could get those rockets designed and built and launched, but the administration of Barack Obama would not have a prayer.

pm317 said...

And Hanks' idol Obama killed the NASA programs, and Hanks did nothing about it. Sorry to sound the sour note. I never liked Tom Hanks -- he is the most boring actor (not even an interesting face)I have ever seen and became even more intensely dislikeable for his stupid devotion to Obama.

And George Harrison is classical?

pm317 said...

"The Americans who went to the moon before us .."

--
What! "before us"? when did these bozos go to the moon?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

And so are the waiting periods in between takes.

Digital cameras have made those a thing of the past.

Wince said...

I'm detecting a hammer theme today.

Larry J said...

pm317 said...
And Hanks' idol Obama killed the NASA programs, and Hanks did nothing about it.


I can count on one hand the number of times I've agreed with Obama and have several fingers left over. His killing of Constellation was one of those times that I agreed with him. The program was poorly defined, the schedule was slipping a year for every year that passed, and the cost was growing out of control. It deserved to die.

Unfortunately, Constellation replaced it with the SLS (Senate Launch System) and maintained the Orion capsule boondoggle. This was largely due to Republicans in the Senate who wanted to steer pork to their districts in Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Utah. The SLS has no defined mission and between it and the Orion, there's no budget left to develop any useful payloads. It's what we called in the military a "self-licking ice cream cone."

When NASA needs to send employees on a trip, they don't operate their own airline using custom designed planes. They buy tickets on existing airlines. That's how they should approach space.

DanTheMan said...

With slide rules, we went from "never been in orbit" to "landing on the moon" in 8 years.
With all of our brillant new technology, Constellation was a 13 year plan to get back to the moon.

Progress?

pm317 said...

The Manhattan project, Landing on the Moon, .. we don't do things like that anymore. There is no joy in killing programs. The problem is something else.

Larry J said...

The Manhattan Project was a national emergency. There was fear that the Nazis would get the bomb first (and they were working on it) and win the war. That justified the $2 billion (over $26 billion adjusted for inflation) spent developing nuclear weapons. There was waste and inefficiency but it was a national crisis.

Project Apollo cost perhaps $100 billion in today's money. There was no national crisis. The artificial deadline to land on the moon before 1970 caused the attitude expressed in NASA's unofficial motto, "Waste anything but time." The result was a program that was too expensive to sustain and was killed just as it was finally returning some good science (Apollos 15, 16, and 17).

Large, massive government programs like the Manhattan Project are by their very nature wasteful. They should only be justified in the event of a true national (not political) crisis.

DanTheMan said...

Larry J,
Are you saying the 'space race' with the Russians was political, and not a national imperative?

It was about who would be able to exploit the high ground of orbit, and create the technologies required to do that.

Was it "wasteful"? You tally the total cost, but not the total benefit.

JSD said...

Antoni Gaudi vs Frank Gehry
Shakespeare vs Edward Albee
Milton vs Common
Mozart vs Kanye West
Maynard Keynes / Friedrich Hayek vs Paul Krugman
Everything is smaller dumber and more trivial, but at least we can look it up on our smart phone. Unfortunately my niece couldn’t find Jake’s Steak House in NYC. Apparently she was googling for a “stake” to kill a vampire or something. Yes, she does possess highly credentialed degrees from a well-known institution.

DanTheMan said...

JSD,
I bet she has a an app to calculate 15% of the bill, too.

Gahrie said...

When NASA needs to send employees on a trip, they don't operate their own airline using custom designed planes. They buy tickets on existing airlines. That's how they should approach space.

To be fair, that does seem to be the current plan. Buy rides on private rockets to low Earth orbit, and save NASA's resources for journeys further out.

Anonymous said...

Our computers are more powerful, their brains were more useful.

Crimso said...

Hey Big Mike, you referring to the actual Saturn V, horizontal and separated into stages in its own display hall? An awesome sight, isn't it? To see those engines up close...

Worth a trip over from I-65 if anybody finds themselves on it in northern Alabama. Hell, worth a trip over from I-24. Or I-75.

Larry J said...

"Blogger Gahrie said...

To be fair, that does seem to be the current plan. Buy rides on private rockets to low Earth orbit, and save NASA's resources for journeys further out."

Except that the massively expensive, wasteful way they're going about developing the SLS and Orion is inevitably dooming them to failure. Want to go to the moon or Mars? You're going to need additional hardware like transfer stages, landers, habitat modules, long duration life support systems, and EVA spacesuits. Unfortunately, there's no money for any of these things. The SLS is so expensive that they'll likely only be able to fly one every two years or so.

Larry J said...

"Blogger DanTheMan said...
Larry J,
Are you saying the 'space race' with the Russians was political, and not a national imperative?

It was about who would be able to exploit the high ground of orbit, and create the technologies required to do that.

Was it "wasteful"? You tally the total cost, but not the total benefit."

The artificial time constraints drove NASA to adapt a very expensive, unsustainable approach to landing on the moon. The Saturn V, as big and impressive as it was, was not only very expensive, it was pretty much a deadend.

Ambrose said...

Know what else they had? - English measurements, inches, feet, yards, pounds and ounces

The Godfather said...

In my senior year of high school (1960-61) I wrote an article for the school magazine that argued for the privatization of the space program. I didn't say "privatization", which I don't think was even a word then, but that's what I meant. My reason was that I was convinced that when the government space program experienced its first fatalities, the government would back off and, ultimately, kill the program.

I was wrong about that. The government kept going after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. But I was right in the sense that government priorities are not always the same as the priorities that the space program ought to have. At least by now it should be clear that privatizing space is the best policy.