Back to Basics

(This article is dedicated to Colonel Woody Spring, Army Colonel, NASA astronaut and decorated war hero whom I had the pleasure of meeting earlier this year..)
The good news is that Atlantis came down safely last week. The very bad news is that has now brought to a close the space shuttle program after thirty wonderful and productive years. The Kennedy “space” legacy has ended where so many of America’s conquests and accomplishments have ended, in the very capably destructive hands of Obama. The irony of all that surrounds this dark moment needs to be discussed at some length..

The shuttle program is the unfortunate end to the Kennedy space program. Kennedy, along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, might have been the LAST of the liberals who actually believed in America’s greatness. Yet another “historic” benchmark for this rudderless administration.. Kennedy’s words about the frontier of “space” demanded excellence and achievement and the nation rallied around the whole concept. Every young boy wanted to be an astronaut. Under Obama and the liberals, these heroes will be relegated to the history books.. Unfortunately, liberals will be the ones writing these history books so the information encased within the pages will be anything but truthful..

How interesting it is to note that literally any time that Obama has been squealing before an assemblage of public school simpletons, he has been praising the laudable ideas of both “science” and “education”. On the surface, these are certainly both goals that the American educational system should be firmly focused upon. However glancing just beneath the surface as you should whenever you deal with the left, one finds a picture that due to liberal meddling into the American educational system has become dystrophic and dysfunctional..

For example, on April 27th, 2009, “Obama redoubles push to improve science education”. (ScienceNews dot org) On November 29, 2009, Obama kicked off his “Educate to Innovate” program which allegedly “highlights science education”.. (Boston dot com) And in what has to be my favorite of the hundreds of Obama nonsense “talks” about “science”, “Obama calls for historic commitment to science” (LiveScience dot com).. One has to wonder, with all of this emphasis upon “science” and Obama’s alleged desire to “save jobs”, why with his shameful inaction has he allowed thousands of “science” jobs to just disappear? Should the nation believe Obama’s words or his actions? It seems silly to ask, doesn’t it?

It is important to note that the “science” that Obama and the liberals are always squawking about is NOT the genuine “science” that has come from such honorable places NASA and the like, it is the politically driven drivel (and with the liberals, the personally ECONOMIC driven) “science” of “globaloney warming” or any of their so-called “green jobs initiatives” that produce about as many actual “jobs” as they do “scientific breakthroughs”.. (NONE..) The liberals enthusiastic embrace of the idiocy of “globaloney warming” is about as senseless as an astronomer being pushed aside so that the “science” of astrology can be endorsed..

Who is the “scientist” who has been at the forefront of the “globaloney warming”/climate change/whatever we want to call it today nonsense? Liberal ballonatic Al Gore.. That fact should actually end any further logical discussion of the matter..

History was made 42 years ago today, as Apollo 11 touched down on the surface of the moon. It’s also my son’s 16th birthday, which means that my car insurance will very soon cost about as much as a moon shot, so I think that’s a fitting tribute.

Out of all of the moon landing video, animations and footage of various news anchors covering the touch-down, one of my favorite pieces of tape is simply the view from a small window in the Eagle.

Here’s about ten minutes worth of video and audio leading up to the landing. To this day I get chills when they still haven’t landed and somebody from Mission Control reminds them that they have “30 seconds” of fuel left before plunging to the surface. They landed with just a few seconds worth of fuel remaining — no pressure:

Last Wednesday marked the fiftieth anniversary of a monumental crossroads in America’s history; a moment in which the nation, in the face of a seemingly invincible enemy, collected its resolve to remain a world leader that would be subservient to no one. The “mainstream” media, so saturated in its anti-American mindset, felt little compulsion to even mention the anniversary of this event. A resolution no less significant to the course of the nation than was the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century, apparently matters little to the liberal mouthpieces who would far prefer to demagogue imagined Republican attacks against Medicare.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, addressing a joint session of Congress, issued this stunning challenge: “I believe that this nation should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long range exploration of space; and none would be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

Amidst the brief and deceptive calm that ensued between American involvement in Korea and Vietnam, it might have seemed reasonable to fixate on the nation’s domestic concerns. But Kennedy was well aware of the burgeoning threat of an aggressive Soviet Union obsessed with world conquest and the forcible conversion of humanity to its Marxist ideology. In the tumultuous month preceding his address to the Congress, America had been subjected to the double humiliation of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the dramatic news that the Soviets had successfully sent a human passenger into space and recovered him safely after a complete orbit of the earth.

America desperately needed this boost of both its technological capability and its world standing. Believing in the greatness of these United States, Kennedy gambled that public commitment to such an undertaking would bring the talents and resources of the entire nation into service of his goal, and having done so, could indeed succeed in making it reality. The effort would ultimately be a defining battle in the Cold War, with no less than the very survival of America at stake.

Eight years and two months later, standing on the moon’s surface and speaking to then President Richard Nixon via Oval Office telephone, Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong talked of the mission’s significance to “men of peace of all nations, and with interest and curiosity, and with a vision for the future.”  Not mentioned by Armstrong was that this event spelled the beginning of the end of Soviet technological dominance on the world stage. And while it took nearly another two decades, and the combined knock out punch of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to bring the Soviets down for the count, that day in July of 1969 proved America had risen to Kennedy’s challenge and would not accept technological conquest.

I turn 73 on October 9th and, to be honest, I feel sorry for anyone who has not lived during much of the last century. In a very real way, America’s Apollo program that put men on the Moon on July 20, 1969 was as an exciting a moment in history as anyone could ask to experience.

On Friday, October 1, a total of 1,100 employees at Cape Canaveral reported to work for the last time. No more space shuttles. No more trips to the Moon. Not even trips to the International Space Station.

In February President Obama called for an end to NASA’s Moon program. In fairness, the U.S. hadn’t put a man there since December 1972, the fifth of the Apollo missions. The spacecraft and Saturn launch vehicles were later used for the Skylab program and the joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz test project.

I can remember John F. Kennedy’s speech to Congress in 1961. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”

In the 1980s I visited Cape Canaveral on assignment for a magazine and had the opportunity to go out to the launch pad. You cannot imagine how big those Saturn launch vehicles were unless you stood there and looked up at the huge structure, realizing that launching a Moon mission or any other is comparable to putting a skyscraper into outer space.

I confess that I always suspected that our space program was actually a cover for our development of ballistic missiles. The idea of going to the Moon was conceived during the Eisenhower administration in 1960 when many of the early decisions about the development of a missile program took shape.

At the time, the Russians had put Sputnik into space in 1957 and had scored a huge propaganda victory. What it said to Eisenhower and others was that the same missiles that lifted it into outer space could be used against any of our cities. By April 1961 Yuri Gargarin, a Russian, became the first person to fly in space. Americans took notice.

Now the only way to get to the space station is aboard a Russian vehicle. How’s that for irony? There’s a lot of talk about developing a new generation of space vehicles and, since we’ve been using technology developed in the 1950s and 60s, that’s probably a good idea.

Or maybe not? Despite all the Star Wars films and Star Trek television shows, I have my doubts about the wisdom of putting humans in space for any reason. Probably the best space project we have undertaken involving humans was the Hubble Telescope, but it has been other unmanned projects, the Mariner, Voyager, and Cassini flights that have told as just as much or more about the planetary system we’re in.