40th Anniversary of Moon Landing: First Steps In Long March Towards Socialism?
July 20, 2009 5:07 pm ET by John V. Santore
You can imagine the lede: "Today marks 40 years since the humankind first set foot on the moon, one of the most dramatic examples to date of just how badly the federal government mismanages everything it touches."
Of course, nobody would dream of reporting that story. Instead, the Apollo Project, which culminated in the 1969 moon landing, is universally viewed as having been one of the most significant and successful ventures our nation has ever undertaken. It was also initiated at the behest of President John F. Kennedy, and was the work of a federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). And it was extremely expensive, costing more than $150 billion dollars when adjusted for inflation, and employed "400,000 Americans and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities."
Today, Fox News headlined its moon landing coverage by declaring 1969 to have been "The Year that Changed America." And yet, at the same time, the conservative media is doing whatever it can to destroy the very notion that the federal government should play a role in reforming the American healthcare system – or a role in anything else, for that matter. Our government, we are told, is corrupt, wasteful, and incompetent. Government bureaucrats can't do anything right. And the sums of money they want to spend are unjustifiable, dooming us to suffer under a perpetual mountain of debt.
So, it begs the question: when will Fox News declare the Apollo Project to have been a pork barrel-ridden boondoggle? When will Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon be seen not as a symbol of our country's ability to overcome all odds, but instead as the first steps on our long march towards dreaded socialism?
Here's a better question: when will the right-wing media admit that some of our greatest national achievements have been made possible by dedicated men and women working with and for our government?
The simple answer is.... Never!
It is not in the blood of corporate right-wing idealogs and their paid for media whores to admit that their way of (non)thinking destroys freedom, stifles Democracy, and kills decency!!
Of course, this isn't true in this case (I think in some things, yes, the free market does a better job). Look at the private companies trying to make a viable spacecraft. They're not even up to Mercury program levels yet.
Also NASA was formed under Eisenhower after Sputnik. Project Mercury was started under the Eisenhower admin also. I would add one more thing to your narrative, that this was an incredible time of patriotism and gung-ho attitude and that people wanted to serve their country to help defeat the red menace and win the race to the heavens.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big supporter of NASA, and I was an Apollo geek growing up.
I think going to the Moon was a worthwhile project for the technology and patriotism it inspired.
But it didn't make us any safer.
I disagree that it didn't make us safer. The space race forced the Russians into ever increasing risks and they pushed to hard in their bid to the moon. It set their program back and crowned us king for the next three decades in space. We paved the way to a peaceful use of space until the Russians forced our hand for the SDI. That debate is for another day though. :)
Don't forget that now we have a whole other problem in space:
China's space weapons
Didn't the Clinton admin boost the Chinese space program upwards of twenty years by giving them info in the '90's?
SDI is a pipe dream. We weren't "forced" into it... somebody lobbied Reagan and convinced him that it would work... which it never has.
Actually you have that backwards. Reagan actively searched it out and had an idea of changing the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine to a Win doctrine for the U.S. It started out the of High Frontier program and bloomed from there. OK...maybe we we're not "forced" into it, but we "took" the "initiative" and took the technology fight to the enemy...if you consider the CCCP to be the enemy back then.
You say it hasn't worked but you fail to acknowledge the success of the Sentinel and Safeguard programs along with Soviet programs of the same nature. The next logical move would have been a space based program whose seed was planted way back in the Eisenhower admin. Ike after all was the first president to formulate a policy of integrating defense in space.