I remember this like it was yesterday. My parents and grandparents, glued to the TV, listening to WALTer CronKITE.
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I definitely remember them talking about the weight of a man, and how hard it would be to drop a bomb, weighing just the weight of a man about 175 lbs or so, accurately from that height.
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108 mins that stunned the world
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His 108-minute flight into space 50 years ago set new a horizon for humanity and overnight turned a farmworker's son named Yuri Gagarin into one of the century's heroes.
But half a century after his exploit captured the world's imagination and fueled a space race with the United States, Russia has found it necessary to release top secret archives to counter persistent rumors that Gagarin was later murdered on the orders of jealous or paranoid Soviet rulers.
"Gagarin once said: 'To me my whole life seems to be one perfect moment,'" recalled veteran Soviet space journalist Vladimir Gubarev earlier this month.
The 27-year-old's single Earth orbit on April 12, 1961 was one of the Soviet Union's most enduring Cold War victories and is proudly remembered today, especially in the cosmonaut town that is the heart of the nation's space program.
Star City, the world's oldest space-flight training center, resembles in many ways a shrine to the first man in space, whose premature death in a mysterious plane crash seven years after his flight cemented a poster-boy status.
Visitors on a rare open day were greeted by a lone statue of Gagarin dominating the snowy paths between worn buildings scattered behind a perimeter fence in a pine forest outside Moscow like some isolated university campus
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When I think of what a waste of time NASA has become, I'm sick to my stomach. We let the Moon slip away, IMHO, because people were too busy with the beginnings of the self-importance craze we now live in. The question then became, and remains,
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"...but what does it mean for ME, ME, ME?"
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or the ever popular,
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"...but what about all that money WASTED for a few pounds of moon rocks?
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Shouldn't we spend it on some...Poor, blind, black, Amer-Asian Teaching Center, WHEAT AND OAT SUBSIDY, Native American, wolf breeding, Bee Pollen Research, Fart Fly Eradication, Purple Peckered Yellow Bellied Newt, blah, blah, blah, MY PET idea that should RIGHTFULLY be a FEDERALLY FUNDED PROJECT!?!"
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Well, plenty of everyday stuff is NASA Spin-Off Technology. That site is just a few of the things.
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But here's my question. How many of the "wasted money / moon rocks" types has a kid that got a medical diagnosis from an MRI or CAT Scan? How many people used their cell phone to call an ambulance that saved someone's life?
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Like your laptop? The battery and many of the guts had NASA or military uses first, meaning the R&D was done with federal money. Oh well, on days like this, I am CERTAIN that I was born 100 years too LATE.
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Schteveo
3 comments:
You're right Steve. Most of the gadgets we use today had their beginnings in the military and/or NASA. It's just a good thing we don't sit down and figure out exactly how much we've spent flying around in space because most people would really freak out, especially now.
There's also the argument that says, could the military have discovered those things anyway, and at a fraction of the cost. But it's too late for that now since the space money is gone. And unfortunately, i really don't think we'll be taking trips to Mars anytime in the near furture. That fact alone makes people raise serious questions about the entire venture.
What the feds NEED to do, is get the hell outta the way, and LET the privateers do this stuff. There isn't an engineer ALIVE who thinks the government is BETTER at anything than a private company can be.
Beam me up
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