America's achievement through British eyes.
Not for the first time, we had sweetened our failure with fantasy. NASA’s Mission Control may have been the acme of American industrial cool, a collection of (Alfred) Sloan Rangers, calm, crew-cut men in white shirts methodically guiding tiny vessels over immense distances, but we had Doctor Who, an almost-perfect embodiment of the chaotic, improvisational genius that Brits like to believe is one of their better national characteristics. The doctor generally appeared to have little control and less interest over where or when his spacecraft might land — but wherever and whenever it was, and whatever the perils he encountered there, he invariably managed to emerge victorious at the end. To be sure, he was an alien from another world, but he was a very British alien, amateurish, surprisingly effective, and clad in vaguely Edwardian clothing, a wistful nod to a lost empire’s last good time.
Go read the rest of the piece, it's rather well done. A personal recollection of a magical moment - if that's the word - in human history. To keen spacenuts like yours truly, the moonshot was a brilliant climax. That was the problem, it was THE climax. Nothing since has some close in daring or accomplishment. The moon, the wisemen told us, was only the first step. Mars was next, by 1990 surely. 1990 came and went. Whatever the scientific merits of sending men rather than machines to the planets, the spacenuts wanted Captain Kirk to follow logically from Neil Armstrong. It was the future. It was progress. It was inevitable.
We didn't notice, until rather late, the problem with Apollo. The clever crew cut men, hard cold and objective, gazing at their computer screens - ancient to modern eyes, but so beautiful - using mind boggling math to do the amazing. Beneath the math, the engineering and the hard science was the dismal science. Apollo was a government boondoggle, a creature of politicians it died when its political masters saw that it was no longer a vote getter.
The spectacle of space flight having become routine, the public began to ignore it. When a biopic of Werner von Braun was released in 1960, I Aim at the Stars, the legendary comedian Mort Sahl quipped: "But sometime I hit London." Arguably the greatest rocket scientist in history, von Braun's career path, from hobbyist to Hitler's space obsessed henchman to the designer of the Saturn V, tracks the unfortunate indifference many scientists and engineers have to politics. The funds keep flowing, and the rockets keep getting launched, the rest is accountancy. The future of space exploration lies with the private sector, with investors and visionaries little concerned with the sundry business of vote chasing, or world domination. Our next "magical moment" will happen when the separation of state and space has finally been established.
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