Much like the present new space mob’s collective cognitive deficit at confusing space tourism with human beings actually leaving the Earth’s gravitational field. The last time time that happened was 12:33 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 1972.

From Astronautix.com:
“-the crew of Apollo 17 left the moon with a blast from their service propulsion engine at 8:42 p.m. EST on December 16. A routine transearth coast brought them back to a landing about 300 kilometers (200 miles) east of Pago Pago at 2:25 p.m. EST on December 19, 1972. Apollo’s exploration of the moon, “one of the most ambitious and successful endeavors of man,” was over.”

That was the end of the first space age and everything since fails to meet that definition of leaving Earth. Space tourism is not about space exploration though this “industry” has sucked up several billion dollars by way of political contributions and deceiving the gullible .

As for your latter request, have a look at the product of my last five years of blogging, here and at Air & Space:

http://spudislunarresources.nss.org/blog/slrb.htm

http://spudislunarresources.nss.org/blog/oafm.htm

I hate to say this as a newcomer to your blog, but I think we’re spending entirely too much time “cursing the darkness rather than lighting a candle”.

Of course there are going to be books like Tribbe’s — controversy sells, and not just in respect to the space program: “Jesus was an alien”; “Jesus was a Jewish revolutionary”; “There is no historical Jesus”; and so on.

I would much rather hear about what you and your compatriots at Moon Express are doing to get us back to the moon, and what we will be doing once we get there!

Regards,
G. W. (Glenn) Smith

Would it have been costly? Of course it would. But the US has an annual military budget (in today’s dollars) that’s been over $400 billion a year since the early 1960s and the Soviet Union had a similar budget. Such expenditures dwarf NASA’s current `$8 billion a year human space flight related budget.

Of course, one of the principal reasons that President Eisenhower created the civilian space program (NASA) in the first place was to prevent the US military and the— military industrial complex– from spending astronomical amounts of money militarizing America’s space program.

Marcel

Nuclear missiles based on the Moon did not make much sense then or now for many reasons. The idea was used as a scare tactic. However, spaceships carrying nuclear missiles do make a great deal of sense now since the unavoidable cost of the replacing U.S. nuclear force is going to be “astronomical.” ICBM’s in stationary silos have long been vulnerable to a first strike, the fleet of bombers we kept in the air 24/7 has long since been stood down, leaving missile submarines as the only credible leg of the triad. These boats will have to be replaced soon.

Unfortunately the probability that these vessels will in the near future no longer be able to hide is extremely high. Missile submarines that cannot hide are even more vulnerable than land-based missile silos because the weapons are concentrated on a relatively small number of platforms.

Spaceships in deep space many months or years travel from Earth are effectively immune from being destroyed and also far less likely to launch in a panic as on Earth with only a few minutes available before a possible first strike. The cost? Considering such Spaceships would replace the hundreds of billions of dollars required for new missile sites, bombers, and submarines, we may break even.

Such a nuclear basing strategy would first require a Moon base and would also drag all the nuclear powers kicking and screaming into space. These spaceships would provide planetary protection and effectively remove the human race from the endangered species list in regards to an asteroid or comet impact.

Kennedy’s commitment to the Moon was an almost immediate response to the Soviet Union placing the first human into orbit because no one in the US at the time really understood what the highly secretive Soviet Union’s long term goals were in space. No one knew if the Soviet Union would try to claim the Moon as the the exclusive territory of the Soviet Union once they landed cosmonauts there. And no one knew if the Soviet Union intended to militarize the moon, perhaps placing nuclear missiles on the lunar surface.

It was not until 1967, when the US and the Soviet Union signed the Outer Space Treaty, preventing any nation from placing nuclear weapons in space or on the Moon or claiming the Moon or any territory on the Moon as their own, that things began to change politically in space between the US and the Soviet Union. This greatly reduced the political urgency of the US commitment to put men on the Moon while also allowing some to question why the US was going to the Moon in the first place.

While Kubrick and Clarke’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, made it pretty clear that the Moon would be part of human civilization’s cultural expansion beyond the Earth, the Apollo astronauts at that time seemed rather confused, IMO, as to why they were going to the Moon. Unfortunately, Apollo astronauts became much more articulate about the long term reasons for going to the Moon and establishing a permanent human presence there– only after the Apollo program was over!

Marcel

So have I, for that reason and also because I am amazed that such a scene made it into a big budget action movie.

Now I will have to cut them slack for whatever liberties they may take with the basic principles of physics.