The stars are still out there

[anghara]

I direct you to John Scalzi's journal this morning - remember what date it is, remember what date it was 38 years ago today, look up at the moon and weep.

As someone put in the comments to the above post,

"I always knew that I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never dreamed that I'd live to see the last."
Jerry Pournelle

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the reminder - I just sat through that whole fucking video with tears dripping. Because even though Deck can spot me a couple of decades, I'm still not convinced I'll get to take this photo for myself someday - not anywhere near as sure as I'd have been if you'd asked me at age 11 or so.

I place a lot of hope in Bert Rutan and his competitors, so I'm also not as despairing as I'd have been 10 or so years ago.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

That means that 38 years ago plus or minus a few moments Roger Zelazny called me and said "Steve, we did it!" ... I'd been in the kitchen watching the little TV and listening to the "weird" radio station that my step-father despised while they (the family)sat watching the big TV and talking over-top all the science talk that the radio station was featuring... so I was right there next to the phone when the call came. My step-father was annoyed that anyone would make a phone call in the midst of history... and Roger and I just about broke each other's backs over the phone, knowing that *we* were part of making it all happen...

And so the Chinese *will* go to the moon, and we may "beat them" by going back to the moon before they do. The important thing is not to go for political reasons alone, though I can understand going for tactical reasons. But the moon is not prize. The solar system is the prize. Hope is the prize.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

But the moon is not prize. The solar system is the prize. Hope is the prize.

Amen to that. In spades.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think we lost it somewhere between Saigon and Baghdad...

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I think the first commenter over there might be right -- it was just too early then to keep it going. I hope he's right about the rest, that we're entering a new space age with all the private companies getting involved.

I have to admit, I'm torn. I love the idea of people in space -- the space station, the moon, Mars -- but the unmanned programs do so well and are more economical.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

Yes, they do well. Yes, they're economical in terms of filthy lucre AND human lives.

But oh, GOD, the difference between seeing a grainy photograph of a Martian sky, and BEING there... the difference between seeing a moonlet by Saturnshine in a photograph sent back by a probe that hurtles past it and onwards and is never seen again, and BEING there... the difference between saying "there MAY be liquid oceans on at least one world or moon in the Solar System" and KNOWING it...


I don't know that I am up to that, that I have ever been up to that, I may be too fragile and too Earthbound for it in body - but in mind, in spirit, I've been living out there amongst the stars all my life and I have never lost the awe and the wonder of it...