About a month back,
I wrote a blog lamenting that America no longer did Big Things. In the 60s, as the Cold War ramped up, JFK exhorted us to go to the moon. It was meant to be a symbolic show of the superiority of Capitalism and Democracy over Communism and Authoritarianism. Ultimately, it was an exercise that gave us a lot of jobs and scientific innovation. The space program was a series of steps - from the one man capsules of Mercury, to the two man capsules of Gemini, to the 3 men capsules of Apollo.
After going to the moon seemed to become almost quaint, the Apollo program quietly died, and was replaced by the Space Shuttle. That was meant to be a reusable workhouse, transporting astronauts and cargo to build and maintain a laboratory in permanent earth orbit. It succeeded in its task. However, it too became the victim of its own stagnation, and an increasingly tight-fisted economic mindset that no longer saw the program as a necessity, but simply a costly line item for our nation's budget.
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