Neil Armstrong: American Human Spaceflight Program is "Embarrassing"

Have read extensively about the 60's space program and what we were able to do in an amazingly short time, this guy's words are especially cutting:

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, told lawmakers Thursday that the end of the space shuttle era has left the American human spaceflight program in an "embarrassing" state.

"We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Armstrong told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

"For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable."

Armstrong was part of a four-member panel of space experts who told lawmakers that NASA needs a stronger vision for the future and should focus on returning humans to the Moon and to the International Space Station.

"A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain," said the US astronaut, now 81, who was commander of Apollo 11 and walked on the Moon in 1969.

President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation program that would have returned humans to the Moon and called on NASA to instead focus on new, deep-space capabilities to carry people to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by 2030.

As a kid, I watched nearly every space launch from Mercury to Apollo, saw the moon landings and the scary moments of Apollo 13, and even built a large model of the Saturn V moon launch vehicle. I was a big fan of the program and remember the feeling that Americans could do anything. I certainly don't feel that way about the anemic space program we have today. We don't even have a way to get our own guys into orbit anymore.

It's sad.

Remembering Apollo 11

July 20, 1969 was a Sunday, and we always went to church on Sunday morning and evening. However, do to the historic nature of the event, we played hooky and stayed home Sunday night to watch the broadcast (along with the Associate Pastor and his wife, I might add). It was a very exciting evening, even for a 13 year old kid like me.

Many years later - probably 30 or so - I was moving a bunch of books around, one of which was an old Good New for Modern Man, a version of the New Testament that was popular in the late 60's. I used to use it as a kid and it was still in my collection of Bibles. If you're as old as I am, this might bring back some memories:


As I was picking up the book to put it up on some new shelves, something dropped out. To my surprise, look what I found:



It was a tithe envelope, dated July 20, 1969, that never made it to church because we stayed home and watched the moon landing. I apparently never used that Bible again - otherwise I would have turned in the tithe. I gave a whole $1.10 (which is still in the envelope - I've never opened it). My handwriting isn't any better today than it was back in 1969.

I keep the Bible and the tithe envelope together on my bookshelf as a reminder of a very important day in our country's history.

Neil Armstrong Talks a Little About the Moon

Very little, but more than he's done in nearly the entire time since the 1969 landing that made him the first man to walk on the surface of the moon:

Every schoolchild knows that the "small step for man" and the "giant leap for mankind" are words uttered by Neil Armstrong during the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. But now the famously reclusive astronaut has made a rare foray into the public arena to give an answer to a puzzling question: having gone all that way at such vast expense, why were the steps and leaps so few?

The subject arose when science blogger Robert Krulwich mused on his National Public Radio page about why Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin had covered an area barely larger than a football pitch. "The trip was a 'leap' to be sure, a fantastic accomplishment," he wrote. "But the first Moon explorers explored an astonishingly small area." There it might have rested.

But much to Krulwich's surprise, he got an answer – and from the commander himself. In an emailed response, Armstrong, who at 80 is still campaigning to have Nasa resume its exploration of the lunar surface, said there were multiple reasons for the small footprint of that first landing, not least among them nervousness about how well their water-cooled suits would work.

There's more at the link. Armstrong has always been a fascinating individual. He could have had the highest profile of just about anyone who ever went to space, but chose to keep to himself and stay out of the limelight. Many other astronauts were unable or unwilling to do that.

Today's Reading List

Your going to sense a theme in this post. With the 41st anniversary of the first moon landing coming up next month I've found myself in a mood to read about the manned space program during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo years.  I recently finished Michael Collins' book Carrying the Fire, and currently have two different books going - Moondust, which is a follow-up on what happened to the men who went to the moon in the years since the Apollo missions, and The Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan's book about his astronaut exploits.  I've got two more books waiting in the wings (no pun intended):  Failure is Not an Option by former Mission Controller Gene Kranz, and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin.  They've all been very interesting, and since most of them have been out for quite some time, you can pick them up pretty cheap on Amazon.  Here are the links in case you're interested.

Goodnight Moon

Say goodnight to the manned space program and especially any thoughts about returning to the moon:

Nasa has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon — effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight programme despite a congressional ban on its doing so.

Legislators have accused President Obama’s Administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill.

Constellation aimed to build upon what was arguably America’s greatest technological achievement, the first lunar landing of 1969, by launching new expeditions to the Moon and to Mars and worlds beyond. Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was “over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation”, but he has met opposition in Congress, which has yet to approve his plan.The head of Nasa, Major-General Charlie Bolden — an Obama appointee — has now written to aerospace contractors telling them to cut back immediately on Constellation-related projects costing almost $1 billion (£690 million), to comply with regulations requiring them to budget for possible contract termination costs.

The move has been branded a “disingenuous legal manoeuvre” and referred to Nasa’s inspector-general for investigation. “It’s bordering on arrogance by the Administration to boldly and brazenly go forward with this approach. It shows a blatant disregard for Congress,” said the Republican Congressman Rob Bishop, of Utah, whose constituency stands to lose thousands of jobs. Two weeks ago the Senate passed legislation that compels Nasa to continue work on Constellation unless Congress directs otherwise. That legislation is due to be signed into law by Mr Obama this month while Congress continues its deliberations over his proposal to cancel the current space space progamme.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican and member of the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said: “The timing of Nasa’s decision to push forward with these actions now, before this becomes law, is highly questionable.” Nasa is “willfully subverting the repeatedly expressed will of Congress”, she added.

Scott Pace, a former Nasa executive and now the Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: “The effect will be to stop work on Constellation and lay off or transfer people to other jobs. If Congress then says it wants to continue going ahead with Constellation, those people will be difficult to re-hire. It’s already a difficult situation, but this will introduce more instability.”

Constellation was born in 2004 from President George W. Bush’s vision for returning Americans to the Moon by 2020 and using it as a base to build the knowledge and technologies for a manned mission to Mars by 2030. Since then, more than $9 billion has been spent on designing and building the necessary space vehicles.

An independent review panel appointed by Mr Obama last year concluded, however, that without an extra $3 billion a year Constellation was on an “unsustainable trajectory”. In his proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, unveiled in February, Mr Obama made it clear that there would be no extra money for its continuation. The proposal has yet to clear Congress.

Distinguished space veterans, including the first and last men to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, have complained that the abandonment of Constellation will set America’s space capabilities on a “downhill slide to mediocrity”. They say that, while Mr Obama has outlined a vision for Nasa that includes sending people to Mars at some point, it lacks a concise plan for developing the rockets and spacecraft to get them there.

Right now I'm reading Michael Collins' book about his days in the Gemini and Apollo programs. Collins flew on Gemini 10 and was the Command Module Pilot on the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11. It's a fascinating insight to what life was like in the 1960's space program, and I highly recommend the book for anyone with an interest in the space program. You can order yours at the link above.

It's hard to believe that the things we could do in the 60's, with technology that has a fraction of the capability we have today, can't be done today.  The difference, I think, is the will to do it.  In the 60's we had it.  Today we don't.

In honor of Flag Day, I leave you with a sight we probably will never see again:

And That's Not Quite the Way It Is

How many things can the NY Times get wrong about Walter Cronkite? Weekly Standard notices this in their corrections column:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International [New York Times, July 22, 2009].

Other than that, it was perfect.

Apollo 11, The Untold Story

For space buffs like me this Popular Mechanics series is interesting reading: Apollo 11, The Untold Story.

Another good read is Tom Wolfe's piece in the NY Times in which he proclaims that American space program effectively died the moment Neil Armstrong's boot touched the surface of the moon. I've read Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff", about the Original Seven Mercury astronauts, several times. He knows his stuff.

History Photo of the Day

From my 2005 quartet trip to Virginia and Washington D.C.

That's the Apollo 11 capsule on display at the National Air and Space Museum in The Smithsonian.

40 Years of Studying Nausea During Weightlessness

That's pretty much how Charles Krauthammer describes the state of the space program since the end of Apollo:

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you had told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest ... the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009, and the moon recedes ever farther.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the anti-matter to George Bush. Moreover, for all Barack Obama's Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of John Kennedy's enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive.

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon, but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

There's more here.

I can still remember the excitement of watching countdowns as of kid during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Every flight was a new discovery and fraught with all sorts of perils real and imagined.

I watched the Shuttle launch the other afternoon and there was none of that excitement about what was going on. Oh, they're just running some more stuff up to the space station. High tech delivery boys. Nice pictures and all, but if there's any excitement left in these missions it's in wondering if the thing will come back safely.

America needs a challenge like we had in the 60's, but I doubt that as a society we're up to it anymore. Too much need for immediate gratification and too much risk aversion. And with a president hell bent on socializing the country, innovation and entrepreneurship are no longer welcome. Until we "solve health care" and "stop global warming" there won't be room in the budget for fantastic voyages outside our own low earth orbit.

And with the retirement of the Shuttle, we won't even be able to do that.

NASA Photographs Apollo 11 Lander on the Moon

NASA has released a photo from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the Apollo 11 landing site:

You can almost see the flag flapping in the breeze (that's for the moon landing conspiracy nuts).

Walter Cronkite Dies At 92

Breaking: Walter Cronkite has died at 92. Almost 40 years to the day after one of his more memorable broadcast

UPDATE: I posted the above from my cellphone while waiting at Macy's for my wife. Let me add some thoughts.

When Cronkite signed off for the last time on March 6, 1981, the age of objective news reporting pretty much retired with him. With the exception of his famous anti-Vietnam War rant, Walter played it pretty much straight down the middle. Just the facts, ma'am.

Uncle Walter anchored some of the key moments of my youth, including his famous broadcasts of the news that Kennedy had died and the Apollo 11 landing. During those two moments you saw the emotions come to the top - the raw grief over the loss of Kennedy and the nearly giddy joy and relief when Apollo 11 safely touched down on the moon.

Once Cronkite left the scene the news media seemed to turn more and more left. They hated Reagan, didn't respect Bush 41, swooned over Clinton, despised Bush 43, and are sloppy drunk with love over Obama, and it shows in their broadcasts. Network news and most of their cable compatriots has become an embarrassment.

Walter always closed with "and that's the way it is" and you believed him. As one commenter on Facebook said, the current anchors should close with "and that's the way I think it should be". Well said.

Apollo 11, You Are Go For Launch!

Forty years ago today:

Wizbang has a nice rundown on the anniversary of Apollo 11.

Follow The Apollo 11 Mission on Your Computer

Of course it was 40 years ago when there were no home computers, web sites, or Twitter, but the folks at the John F. Kennedy Library have made it possible to follow the Apollo 11 mission in real time:

Families crowded around black-and-white television sets in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong take man's first steps on the moon.

Now, they'll be able to watch the Apollo 11 mission recreated in real time on the Web, follow Twitter feeds of transmissions between Mission Control and the spacecraft, and even get an e-mail alert when the lunar module touches down. Those features are part of a new Web site from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum commemorating the moon mission and Kennedy's push to land Americans there first.

"Putting a man on the moon really did unite the globe," said Thomas Putnam, director of the JFK Library. "We hope to use the Internet to do the same thing."

The Web site — WeChooseTheMoon.org — goes live at 8:02 a.m. Thursday, 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will track the capsule's route from the Earth to the Moon, ending with the moon landing and Armstrong's walk — in real time, but 40 years later.

Internet visitors can see animated recreations of key events from the four-day mission, including when Apollo 11 first orbits the moon and when the lunar module separates from the command module, as well as browse video clips and photos and hear the radio transmission between the astronauts and NASA flight controllers.

I've always been a bit of a space buff, especially the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions that took place when I was a kid. I have a special post coming up on Monday celebrating the moon landing, and I'm also planning to watch a History Channel presentation called "Moonshot" that will be broadcast Monday night.

Lots of memories.

Original Apollo 11 Tapes Found

Those of us who watched the moon landing on live TV did not see a very clear image. The astronauts almost looked like ghostly figures moving around the monochrome moon. There's a reason for why those images looked as they did, and just in time for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing we might get a whole new view:

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, NASA may have found the long-lost original Apollo 11 videotapes.

If true, as Britain's Sunday Express reports, the high-quality tapes may give us a whole new view of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's lunar strolls.

Back on July 20, 1969, the raw video feed from the moon was beamed to the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in southeastern Australia, and then compressed and sent to Mission Control in Houston.

Because of technical issues, NASA's images couldn't be fed directly to the TV networks.

Instead, the grayish, blotchy images Americans saw on their TV sets were the result of a regular TV camera pointed at the huge wall monitor in Houston — a copy of a copy, in effect. (Australians saw slightly different footage.)

Those images survive, and anyone can see them on YouTube. But the original, sharp, black-and-white tapes that were recorded at Parkes vanished.

NASA had thought they'd been shipped to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., But a search there a couple of years ago turned up nothing.

Around the same time, though, a cache of tapes containing data from moon-surface experiments from the entire Apollo program was discovered in a university basement in Perth, Western Australia, on the other side of the country from Parkes.

According to the Sunday Express, NASA has combed through those tapes and found the original Apollo 11 video footage.

"We're talking about the same tapes," an unnamed NASA spokesman told the newspaper, though he added that "at this point, I'm not prepared to discuss what has or has not been found."

I hope they've got the tapes. It will be fun to relive that experience.

I don't know what Neil Armstrong has been up to lately. He's lived pretty much out of the spotlight since retiring from NASA, but his moon landing buddy Buzz Aldrin has kept himself busy, including his latest projet - a rap video with Snoop Dog:

Buzz Aldrin's Rocket Experience from Buzz Aldrin

I think part of Buzz is still out there.

Moonwalker Says Global Warming Not Man Made

Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt is not a fan of the global warming scare crowd:

SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

"I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

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"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.

Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."

Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.

"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."

Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.

Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.

Current NASA employee James Hansen is on another one of his rants trying to scare everybody into ruining their economies to "save the planet". Sounds like they need to dump Hansen and start listening to Schmitt.

Landing on the Moon and Landing in the Drink

Mark Daniels reminded me of two events which took place on this day in 1969: The landing on the moon by Apollo 11, and the landing in the drink by Teddy Kennedy. We've done Teddy to death around here, so we'll let that event pass, but I did want to mention a personal anecdote regarding the moon landing.

July 20, 1969 was a Sunday, and we always went to church on Sunday morning and evening. However, do to the historic nature of the event, we played hooky and stayed home Sunday night to watch the broadcast (along with the Associate Pastor and his wife, I might add). It was a very exciting evening, even for a 13 year old kid like me.

Many years later - probably 30 or so - I was moving a bunch of books around, one of which was an old Good New for Modern Man, a version of the New Testament that was popular in the late 60's. I used to use it as a kid and it was still in my collection of Bibles. If you're as old as I am, this might bring back some memories:

As I was picking up the book to put it up on some new shelves, something dropped out. To my surprise, look what I found:

It was a tithe envelope, dated July 20, 1969, that never made it to church because we stayed home and watched the moon landing. I apparently never used that Bible again - otherwise I would have turned in the tithe. I gave a whole $1.10 (which is still in the envelope - I've never opened it). My handwriting isn't any better today than it was back in 1969.

I keep the Bible and the tithe envelope together on my bookshelf as a reminder of a very important day in our country's history.