It takes guts. It takes dedication and first and foremost, it takes sacrifice.
Something that I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m not old enough to remember the manned landings. For me the ‘dreams’ of my generation was the Voyager probe. Amazing to be sure, but depressing to think that the best manned flight memories are of Challenger and Columbia. Low earth orbit is the farthest that man has gone in my life, and that’s, frankly pathetic.
Sure is.
I OTOH remember watching that first landing mission. I saw the first step off the lander's ladder at my wife's grandparents' farm.
I also remember watching the lift off from the moon during the Apollo 15 mission. That was in the "day room" at AF ROTC field training at Vandenberg AFB, CA.
Then there was Apollo 9, with the reading from Genesis from Lunar Orbit on Christmas Eve. Watched that one from my basement, during a lull in our Christmas Eve festivities. The only holiday we celebrated with my Dad's family. I remember my Uncle Jim, (Dad's brother in law) being as fascinated as I was. He was of the pre-WWII generation. Too Old for WWII, too young for WWI.
So, with those memories, my take on the situation, and the current space program is that it makes me sick to my stomach.
You make a good point there, but as a follow-up to my last post I would suggest that human activity in space in recent decades has been limited to low-earth orbit because that’s the type of “space exploration” that represents the best opportunities for useful investment of resources. Just think of how much we’ve come to rely on things that wouldn’t work without having an extensive array of satellites in that region.