Forty years ago, someone walked on the moon. A select few followed in subsequent moon landings then it all went quiet. Plenty of satellites and other person-free objects have been launched into space, especially on behalf of the military/industrial complex. They don’t seem to need permission from an earth-tied population to spend copious amounts of money. They just commit grand theft of our taxes and spend it on boy’s toys to float around spying on everyone or various other competitive willy waving exploits to the benefit of no one, except the aforementioned military/industrial complex (and their immoral shareholders).
The few useful scientific experiments carried out in space are fine, but where would we have been had space exploration kept up the early progress that put these brave souls up there 40 years ago. Just compare the rapid development of mobile phones since the 1980’s and the way those have been transformed from plastic bricks to the weird and wonderful variety, we have now. So, I firmly believe humankind could have taken an incredible journey in these 40 years had equivalent money been spent on getting us out of this gravity well and into the solar system, that was squandered in killing various populations across this planet.
Where were you when those historic pictures were beamed back to sitting rooms on Sol Three? I have clear memories of being allowed to stay up to watch this. I was optimistic of witnessing helmeted humans lumbering around on the moon and being gobbled up by moon monsters. I was beyond upset that nothing alien ate them. I’ve gotten over that disappointment and can see that meeting characters like the delightfully tusked demoiselle above, might not have encouraged space exploration. I do not believe we are ever going to be visited by an advanced species who will save us from ourselves. This is a common theme of much science fiction, but in reality, we have to become adults who can make their own decisions and not look to space (or other) gods to save us.
My other assumption on seeing the moon landing is that I would grow up and go into space. This was not a career aspiration to be an astronaut merely that we’d all be living and working in space or on other planets. I realise that this was optimistic and that a few decades was not going to produce anything Star Fleet would recognise, but I was hopeful as a child that science could do anything.
I remain disappointed that none of these expectations was ever met. In the way that I had grown up and accepted in young adulthood that I had run out of time to become a child prodigy, I approached middle age only occasionally railing against the fact that going into space was never to be my reality. However, I have a longer-term plan. It is now fairly easy to have a gram or two of one’s ashes sent into space, and the cost is reducing all the time as it becomes more popular. Try an online search for this and see how many organisations are offering this.
I remain disappointed that none of these expectations was ever met. In the way that I had grown up and accepted in young adulthood that I had run out of time to become a child prodigy, I approached middle age only occasionally railing against the fact that going into space was never to be my reality. However, I have a longer-term plan. It is now fairly easy to have a gram or two of one’s ashes sent into space, and the cost is reducing all the time as it becomes more popular. Try an online search for this and see how many organisations are offering this.
All three images were culled from this really fun site ...
Taken by the Terrain Mapping camera (TMC) on board the Chandrayaan-1, the first Indian unpersoned space mission to the moon. Chandrayaan-1 means ‘moon craft’ and is orbiting the moon at a distance of 110km.