I'd give just everything, she's got me so mesmerized

[sovay]

I have nothing to say about the moon landing from memory; I wasn't born. I watched shuttle launches on television as a child. I had a subscription to Odyssey. (I never won any of their contests, but I did once have a question answered by the robot mascot: I wanted to know why a hypothetical tenth planet of our solar system was always referred to as "Planet X.") I counted down inside the model of the Apollo command module at the science museum. I had clipped out of a newspaper and taped to the wall beside my bed a list of qualifications for the American space program of the 1980's. I built a radio telescope in high school, but I did not go into space.

I don't know if the future I took for granted in my childhood would ever have worked: space stations, moon habitats, Mars colonies. Certainly I hate the way it's framed nowadays by private spaceflight tech bros who seem to feel that there's no need to take care of Earth if a tiny, restricted, super-wealthy we can just jet-set to Mars and trash it similarly. Increasingly it seems to be difficult to separate our species healthily from the biosphere within which it evolved. Manifest destiny in space is as harmful and stupid as manifest destiny anywhere else.

I still think it's wonderful that there were humans on the moon. I hope it will be possible, not under the auspices of the present administration and its narrow definition of humanity, to have humans there again. Even if I'm not one of them; what does that matter? My niece who likes glitter and car parts might also like the stars.

Comments

[sartorias]

Your niece is exactly the sort of person we need for this kind of program.

[batdina]

It definitely sounds like your niece would be a perfect candidate in my world.

I did watch the moon landing. I remember walking home (my parents had friends with colour tvs even if we didn't have one) and looking up at the moon and imagining the lunar module sitting up there. For a few hours there really was a man in the moon.

[thanate]

Increasingly it seems to be difficult to separate our species healthily from the biosphere within which it evolved.

I once started trying to write a short story comparing failure of extraterrestrial colonies to the thing where it took people ages to get maple trees to grow in Alaska b/c everyone shipped them bare root and they couldn't survive without their soil microbes. I still think it's a reasonable parallel, even if that's more someone else's sort of story to write.

[dramaticirony]

Silent Movie GIFs posted a little comparison between shots from Frau im Mond and footage of the Apollo 11 mission. Seems within your area of interest:

https://twitter.com/silentmoviegifs/status/1152605933996052480

[imagine_that]

My almost 9-yr-old daughter intends to be one of the first people on Mars. A couple years back we were at a talk by an astronaut who had been on ISS who told her that it is her generation that will likely be the right age to do it. She took it very much to heart. She also idolizes Mae Jemison - not just for being astronaut, but also for following all her creative dreams too. She wants to do all her music and stuff and still be one of the first people on Mars!

[csecooney.com]

I remember the Biosphere experiments from grade school. I remember it as an exercise in my imagination; if we could create a habitat artificially, and if people could inhabit such a space peaceably, what might be accomplished with this technology off-world. I don't remember how it failed, or why it failed. I do remember learning that it failed, and grieving it. Now there is the internet, and I am an adult... I should research that.

How times change, and our minds--occasionally--with them.

[starlady]

When I was growing up (and I was dead set on being an astronomer until I was about 16) 2020 sounded so far away, and though it was already looking chancy for Mars, I never thought we'd be where we are today, which is nowhere except low Earth orbit. I never thought I'd agree with so many of the critiques of the space program and societal priorities, either.

I agree that it is good that we went. And I would love to see us go back within my lifetime, particularly if it meant a return to the top tax rate of 91% that existed in 1962.

[asakiyume]

I was alive when the moon landing happened, but too young to be aware of it.

I was always highly uneasy about the notion of colonies on the moon or Mars; they always seemed hugely vulnerable and the actual places so clearly deadly--I never wanted to go. That hasn't stopped me from enjoying stories about moon and Mars colonies, however!

[labingi]

I don't know if the future I took for granted in my childhood would ever have worked: space stations, moon habitats, Mars colonies. Certainly I hate the way it's framed nowadays by private spaceflight tech bros who seem to feel that there's no need to take care of Earth if a tiny, restricted, super-wealthy we can just jet-set to Mars and trash it similarly. Increasingly it seems to be difficult to separate our species healthily from the biosphere within which it evolved. Manifest destiny in space is as harmful and stupid as manifest destiny anywhere else.

Well said. Based on the rec of a friend (who well-meaningly trashed my own writing for having classic M-class planet-like terraforming), I've recently read Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, and its discussion of space colonization was revelatory for me. My own SF universe still has bazillions of (well about 400) terraformed planets/moons, but I'm really trying to reframe how I write about them to be more explicit about how tenuous Earth-based life will be on them and how they were multi-thousand-year project.

[kore]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/shipwreck-archeology-shipwreck.html?

OT but this seemed like a Sonya type story....