[Tupelo]

The money sentence: “America put a man on the moon in less than a decade; yet we can't put a man on the moon today. We're more than 12 years out from 9/11 and we STILL haven't completed 1 World Trade Center”

In just one sentence, John Hawkins covers just how far this nation has fallen. Then he follows with the complete paragraph that makes me want to cry like a baby.

[Kaslin]

Exactly

[chimera]

It's worse than that. The Empire State Building started site excavation in January of 1930, and had it's ribbon-cutting in May of 1931. The Great Depression was underway, yet the entire thing took about 18 months to build.

Not only can't we do a lunar landing today, we have no capability for doing a manned suborbital flight. Alan Shepard did that over 50 years ago. Today we have lost that capability.

[roadcat]

We're more than 12 years out from 9/11 and we STILL haven't completed 1 World Trade Center

After the 1989 earthquake that damaged a small section of the SF/Oakland bridge, the replacement was finally opened, more than 23 years after the quake. The entire original bridge was built in 3-1/2 years in the 1930s. And the replacement bridge is still not completed, although it just opened to traffic (undergoing workarounds for sloppy welds etc.).