Apollo 8: Gifts from Long Ago
The largest television audience in American history watched the live lunar images from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968. This was one of those shared experiences so common in our nation’s past, but so rare in our modern world of fractured information and culture. Few unifying events as joyous as Apollo 8 would follow and we are worse off from the loss.
Something else extraordinary happened that Christmas Eve. As our nation gathered around Christmas trees and bulky televisions beaming close-up video of the moon, the three astronauts took turns speaking to the world.
William Anders started.
“For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
Jim Lovell continued, reading the first book of Genesis:
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
Then Frank Borman:
“And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
Borman concluded, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”
Never before had man so vividly understood how good and perfectly designed for human life Earth was. Never before had creation been described by men so competent to describe it.
America was beat down and weary by the unraveling throughout 1968. Tet launched. Assassination followed assassination. American cities were torched. Political discourse turned into mob chaos. The unhinged left filled the streets of western European cities while their martial comrades in Soviet tanks rolled into eastern European cities and unleashed death and repression.
“Then, Christmas Eve we got a pleasant change,” Dan McCormick of Williamsburg, Virginia, recalled to me. McCormick was a youngster in suburban Buffalo watching Apollo 8 on television that Christmas Eve. “Something was going right. Something made us proud and the message reminded us that God was always looking down and watching over us.”
The profound achievement of Apollo 8 also validated the brilliance of American economic ingenuity. The space race was more than zesty public relations. Apollo 8 marked the moment we passed the Soviets. It really did demonstrate the greatness of a nation dedicated to free enterprise, where the lunar module was built by Grumman Corporation, the command module by North American Aviation, and the massive Saturn rockets built by Boeing and Douglas. Sure, the Treasury was purchasing the products at great expense, but the supply side of the equation was essentially a free market one, where the best competing ideas won the contracts. Plus, we could afford it while our competitor could not.
A chief reason the Soviet Union lost the race to the moon was because it didn’t have a free market system. Instead, it had a stagnant command bureaucracy that could occasionally produce results like Sputnik, but as we learned in the 1980s, could never overcome inherent flaws that stifled ingenuity in the long run.
Unfortunately, further manned space exploration was effectively killed in the 2011 NASA budget. This is a grave mistake. Not only does space provide unique solutions for problems here on Earth, such as growing perfect tissue cells for transplant research or other medical applications, it also has strategic importance.
The history of man is the history of explorers discovering unanticipated resources, technology, and yes, unashamedly, acquiring strategic might. When courageous humans ventured beyond the known, they defined the future, while the homebound did not.
Unanticipated lesser consequences flow from exploration. Note the dominance today of Spanish language and culture in most of the western hemisphere. Or consider the strategic dominance of Great Britain for nearly two centuries in part because of the first mastery of determining longitude, an invention driven by exploration, allowing her to rule the waves.
I recognize that NASA has many of the problems endemic to any government bureaucracy. But the answer is to reform NASA while pressing forward into space instead of killing off manned exploration. The responsible use of NASA certainly isn’t cultural and scientific outreach to nations of the world that haven’t shown any interest in space for at least 1300 years.
The last space shuttle is scheduled to launch in February 2011. I hope to be there with my young daughter. After that the United States will lack the means to put humans in space for the first time since 1961. I want her to see what this nation at its best can achieve. I want her to know what a generation of Americans have known since Alan Sheppard first touched space — that we are a nation that achieves the extraordinary.
I recently took her to the Kennedy Space Center. She learned about the many female astronauts in the space shuttle program. Later we discussed the 12 men who walked on the moon. She was terribly confused by daddy’s contradiction that no woman had walked on the moon, even though I explained there are women astronauts. Rather than try to explain the evolution of these things, I told her all she needed to know in this circumstance: you could be the first woman to visit the moon someday.
Those undiscovered worlds call the next American generation, if we only have the will to find them.
Nice article.
I find it shameful that Americans associate our Lunar landing with JFK who was dead nearly 6 years before its realization and his only contribution was to “wish upon a star”.
Werner von Braun a German scientist made it happen and put the first man on the Moon. He revitalized the now dead town of Huntsville, Alabama and made it a blooming center of scientific activity and was rewarded with his deportation by witch hunters comparable to today’s anti-Christian warrior Abe Foxman. Now Huntsville is a black center for anti-American sentiment and welfare checks.
“…was rewarded with his deportation by witch hunters….”
Huh? Von Braun wasn’t deported. He died in Virginia, an honored American citizen.
As for the witch hunters, well, they had some real witchery to hunt: his SS membership, his use of slave labor, his development of the V2 rockets that rained down on London. As Tom Lehrer so aptly sang:
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun
Joseph states – “Von Braun wasn’t deported. He died in Virginia”. Joseph is correct. I was mistaken. I apologize for my error.
Braun was clearly no Max Planck, who hated the Nazis so much he refused to join the Party even to save his son, but he did manage get himself arrested by the Gestapo and engender the undying mistrust of Hitler.
Steve, Werner von Braun was considered by many to be a war criminal, and it was only his knowledge that kept him out of the dock.
Von Braun was responsible for production at the Dora-Mittelwerk facility in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen. Concentration camp laborers here were forced to assemble V-2 ballistic missiles under deplorable conditions that resulted in large numbers of deaths. Perhaps as many as 20,000 workers died in V-2 production. Von Braun later acknowledged that he selected workers for Mittelwerk from camp inmates at Buchenwald. He also acknowledged that by 1944 he was aware that many of the slave laborers at Mittelwerk had been executed, that many others had succumbed to malnourishment and dysentery, and that the environment at Mittelwerk was “repulsive.”
Are you nuts? Huntsville is rapidly becoming a defense megacenter with the move of the Army Material Command from Washington. NASA contractors have been laid off, but Redstone Arsenal is booming. Get your facts straight.
BTW, my reference to the hateful Abe Foxman does not imply that I consider von Braun to be a Christian. I have no idea what his religious affiliation was, if any, only that Mr. Foxman is a left wing zealot.
great essay.
you mentioned that american cities were burning. “America was beat down and weary by the unraveling throughout 1968. Tet launched. Assassination followed assassination. American cities were torched. Political discourse turned into mob chaos. The unhinged left….”
hey those people are running the government now.
Apollo 8 was amazing. So was Apollo 13. Lovell certainly made some history.
We can get back to space by supporting people like Burt Rutan who has more vision than all of NASA.
Brilliant! Thank you.
Wow. This is a great piece of history and thank you for reminding me of it. My first recollection of the space program was as a 3 yr old watching TV and seeing a “splashdown” of a capsule returning to Earth in 1973. The billowing parachutes to slow its descent, the Navy SEALs securing the capsule and the astronauts returning to the Navy ship. Those were the things that little boys dreamed of doing–exploring, daring, and winning. Yes, those were the days.
Yeah. It was good. Burt Rutan is “one of them” even though a couple decades “after the fact.” We lived a couple miles down the desert road from him in California for a few years. He’s a good old boy with lots of dreams, abilities and impatience with bureaucratic nonsense. I agree with the statement about him having more vision that (present day) NASA. Unfortunately, present day NASA has become an errand boy, apparently, for the thug.
Anyone aware of how Apollo was constructed? The South Bay area of Los Angeles was home to hundreds of small machine shops. These were each the product of an entrepreneurial engineer or technician. Each might produce one or two specialized components of the Saturn, Apollo, or the Lander. I used to visit these shops on my way home from high school. Some of these gents showed me how to take metal filings from the shop floor, and produce a thermite volcano (but I will not try to convince the untrained about 911). I visited Rockwell in Seal Beach during openhouse, but that was the assembly and engineering center. Much of the work was done in small shops. Many of the engineering challenges of that era were solved on those shop floors.
Now they are all gone, the owners retired. Their work was all offshored, mostly to Communist China. Globalism and corporate crime have destroyed America. I knew people involved in the B-1 bomber project. There was so much corruption by then (under Reagan, the rule of law disappeared), that Korean bolts were being re-stamped milspec. Ever use a Korean nail?
Andre: Not all those old machine shops are gone. My friend (who helped to design the Apollo ECS at AirResearch) took over http://www.millipart.com/ from his father. They’re out in Glendora.
Thanks for the info, John. I followed the link, and found it quite encouraging. These are the sort of people who made America great. If our government supported more like them, rather than funding the training of IT workers in Sri Lanka, we might do it again. Salute your friend for me.
Unfortunately, further manned space exploration was effectively killed in the 2011 NASA budget.
With all due respect (and I have the greatest respect for you as someone trying to reform a corrupt Justice Department), this is simply untrue, regardless of how many times it is repeated by people who don’t understand the new policy. The 2011 budget offered much greater and nearer-term prospects for future human exploration than Constellation did.
With no heavy lift? I’ve read you stuff and I have the utmost respect for you, but I’ve never understood your logic. Heavy lift is what we need to get the apparatus to the moon to get the helium 3. When we have that then we have real clean fusion power–and real space propulsion for going outside of our own earth/moon neighborhood.
But that will not happen without heavy lift, period.
I also believe in Burt Rutan, and everything he has done, and the way he has done it, but… NASA needs to do the heavy lifting. Don’t ask me for libertarian political purity on this, because I can’t supply it–but just for the sake of argument, what if Barry had really cared about this country and it’s future and had laid out $50 billion for the immediate building of a real moon program.
Not that we need it, but the 2011 budget had heavy lift.
So the 2011 budget did not cut funding for the Ares V? Did Obama try to cut funding for the Ares V?
So the 2011 budget did not cut funding for the Ares V? Did Obama try to cut funding for the Ares V?
There was never any funding for Ares V in any near-term budget to cut. Funding was cut for Ares I, because Constellation as a whole was cancelled, because as the Augustine panel pointed out, it was unaffordable with any realistic NASA budget. And Ares V is not necessary for space exploration. If we really need heavy lift (we don’t at least for now), there are many more cost-effective ways of getting it. NASA’s new plan called for some sort of heavy-lift development to start no later than 2015. And by then it will be quite clear that it is unnecessary for exploration.
When I thing about Apollo 8, I do not think about altitude records or the free market.
I was a little kid when I heard the recording of the three astronauts reading the Genesis story from their spacecraft. It inspired me (a) to see the Bible as a noble text worthy of honor and (b) to comprehend the scientific wonder in the Creation that God has made. That is, if the astronauts could read it that way, then so could I. If the universe had that nobility shot through it, then it made my study of science an occasion of joy.
To this day I still feel that way. Good.
I remember my pride as a young man in the Apollo program;
I remember, as an older and wiser man, my shame and disgust
at the loss of Challenger, and Columbia.
JFK was given three options for what became the Apollo program;
He chose the cheapest, which was intended to give him the political
propaganda victory of winning the ‘Moon Race’ against the USSR,
and then stop dead, with no follow-on, leaving NASA as a roadblock
to ensure that there would be no private enterprise exploitation
of space for profit.
The US has one last chance, _now_ , to reverse that policy, and
gain the financial, political, and _military_ advantages, or
wait for the Chinese to take over, permanently.
I remember, as an older and wiser man, my shame and disgust at the loss of Challenger, and Columbia.
Frankly, that’s a mistake, and one that has a lot to do with some of the space program’s issues. I’m an aviation and space nut and descend from an aviation and space nut whose memory went back to the Spirit of St Louis. One of the biggest lessons that can be drawn from that history is that when you’re trying to do something new and dangerous, sometimes people die. Wiley Post and Will Rogers, Saint-Exupéry, several of the people who tried New York to Paris before Lindbergh, Glen Edwards, Grisson, White and Chaffee — people have died before, and they’ll die in the future.
I am not mistaken; you are in denial, particularly in
the case of Challenger.
NASA yielded to political pressure for an on-time launch,
violated its own safety rules, lost seven astronauts and
a billion dollar STS, and got away with a crime that would
have put the responsible managers of a private company
behind bars, because it is a government agency.
Uh huh. And no one else ever died in an air accident that could have been avoided if only….
Get a grip. Every accident, ever, can eventually be tracked back to someone making a decision that turned out, on later examination, to have been unwise. And no one will ever make being strapped to a million pounds of LOX and LH2, not to mention perchlorate and rubber, completely safe. And only damn fools and children can believe otherwise.
Damn fools, children, and those in denial, such as yourself,
cannot, or in your case refuse to, acknowledge that deliberately
ignoring safety regulations is a criminally reckless act, not an
accident.
Nothing short of a visitation from the ghosts of Judith Resnik and
Dr. Richard Feynmann will change your mind; My intention is simpler:
To point out to others here that your soothing, reasonable apology
for NASA is false to fact, as they can determine for themselves by
Googling the Web, starting with the Feynman appendix to the official
NASA Whitewash of the Challenger loss.
Yep, NASA is making the cuts this year. Who knows what the future holds. ‘Goonies never say die’.
Don’t fret. Astronomer turned Mother Gaia fledgling/Director James Hansen is LOVING the extra bucks to.. uhm – reword his damning emails and ‘smooth the climate data’.
Barry will not be satisfied until every symbol of American Greatness is destroyed. The Ares V may have been this county’s last shot for the a real space program. Barry knew that. He destroyed it.
Currently the Atlas and the Delta are launching billion-dollar telecom satellites. SpaceX is testing the Falcon 9 and already has one successful launch. All three rockets have enough capacity to launch people to orbit. A fourth rocket, the Taurus II being built by Orbital Sciences, will also have that capability fairly soon.
Craft which are refueled and refit in orbit, but never return to earth, could take astronauts from low earth orbit to say L1 (and later, back to LEO), where they would transfer to a vehicle that only makes the L1-moon-L1 journey, refueling in orbit at L1.
Each vehicle, and propellant for depots in low earth orbit and L1, can be launched using existing rockets. For the propellant for depots we can use any sized launcher at all. We don’t need heavier lift than we have right now to do a mission to asteroids or the moon.
Why waste $50 Billion to develop an unneeded heavy lift capacity? Other than diverting pork to a few key congressional districts in Utah, Florida, Texas, California and Louisiana?
I couldn’t sleep tonight. Got up, read your article. It brought back memories of me, a teenager, watching with delight and excitement the news from Apollo 8. I can remember them reciting those verses and telling us Merry Christmas from outer space! It was so good to be reminded of this part of our history. Thanks and good night.
In the same spirit, the Hubble 3D Imax movie is a must see. Awe-inspiring and made me so proud of our country and our unique, brilliant people.
“The last space shuttle is scheduled to launch in February 2011. . . . After that the United States will lack the means to put humans in space for the first time since 1961.”
This claim is incorrect. The final launch using Apollo hardware took place in July 1975 (the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project). After that, the United States did not have a manned launch capability for almost six years (until the first Space Shuttle launch in April 1981).
Not to mention the two periods after 1986 and 2003 when the Shuttle was down for almost three years each time, demonstrating the problem with a NASA monopoly.
Lets clarify a couple of things. While the last Apollo-Soyuz mission ended before the Young-Crippen launch in 1982, the Space Shuttle was in full development. The United States was fast developing the next means to put man in space. It was a dead letter like Ares is now. And it is pretty shoddy to claim the post-challenger post-columbia periods we “lacked the ability to put man in space.” If there was some crisis abord the Space Station, you can be darn sure those Shuttles would have launched (assuming there was not an operational Soyuz escape capsule). Fixing the O-ring issues and ice/tile issues did not equate to a lack of capacity to put people in space, which begining in March 2011, the United States will lack for the first time in more than a half century.
While the last Apollo-Soyuz mission ended before the Young-Crippen launch in 1982, the Space Shuttle was in full development. The United States was fast developing the next means to put man in space.
That doesn’t change the fact that for those six years, the US had no means of putting people into space, so your piece is mistaken. And Shuttle wasn’t being developed that “fast.” It was over two years behind schedule. If you’re going to equate “under fast development, but late” with having the ability to get into space, SpaceX (which will be flying a fully-functional Dragon capsule in a few weeks) has a crewed launcher right now.
“America was beat down and weary by the unraveling throughout 1968. Tet launched. Assassination followed assassination. American cities were torched. Political discourse turned into mob chaos. The unhinged left filled the streets of western European cities while their martial comrades in Soviet tanks rolled into eastern European cities and unleashed death and repression.”
I remember 1968 very well. I was in graduate school. The silent majority and their families were inspired by Apollo 11. The left— on and off campus — ignored Apollo 11 and did their best to undermine universities and society. Read applicable chapters of Robert Bork’s “Slouching Towards Gomorrah.”
Apoolo 8 as a great achievement and 11-17 were all histoic, but the rudder fell off NASA after Apollo. They had done the main job of ‘winning’ the space race. Everything since has had little focus or broad support. NASA is waning and the private sector space is waxing. Maybe that is what we really need.
BTW, Von Braun and Generl Dornberger had two options, do what the Nazis said or get stood up against a wll and shot. You may recall they were both arested at one point. Von Braun had to use his SS rank to help his scientists escape the Nazis who wre ordered to shoot tehm if the Russians got close. Read about operation Paperclip. Better than a movie.
I rather disagree – to put up 130 plus successful STS launches from 1981-2011 is hardly the rudder falling off. No nation on earth could match the success of the STS program. Space travel became almost routine by 1960′s standards.
If access to low earth orbit is routine, then it is hardly edge-of-the-envelope and not something NASA should be doing. Routine stuff like that should be left to the private sector.
Ever since Lyndon Johnson, the Feds have fostered and promoted and legislated dependence and apathy, not development and independent thought. The feds deem it more important to teach a 6 yr old how to put a condom on a banana, than how to master spaceflight and solve deep mathematical problems. This is done of course, to control and enslave the population.
I was a six years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I remember getting an Apollo 11 lunch box for second grade. My imagination was on aerospace ever since.
However, when I got out of college, I looked around and saw that most people with those kinds of jobs were being sent to the unemployment lines. Aerospace jobs were very few and far between. I sighed and chose another line of work. While I haven’t regretted that decision, I often wonder what our lives might have been like had I chosen that path.
This essay on Apollo 8 reminded me of those days. I am a bit wistful and sad that I couldn’t have pursued my first fascination and love of aerospace…
Innate, American supremacy is on the wane and will remain so as long as the Obama administration remains in control of America’s future.
Obama’s actions and words indicate that he is ashamed of America’s dominance, sees it from the perspective of his peers, the intellectual elites of academia, as unwarranted, acquired by selfish, profit driven, inherently evil American Corporations and their military puppets by unfairly exploiting the human weakness and innocence of the ignorant masses, mired in poverty, in America and throughout the world. They intend to stop it by weakening America, economically, scientifically, politically and militarily; turning America into a second or third rate country befitting what they perceive would be our true status among the nations of the world if we had not been the imperialistic war machine murdering, raping and pillaging innocents everywhere America has or had a presence.
Then and only then can they stand together with all who hate America, hand in hand in the solidarity and respect they deserve for bringing America to it’s knees. They will be loved, adored and respected by all but most will probably be decapitated or thrown in some dungeon for their “noble” efforts, sacrificed for the good of the dominant driving political movement which, if the world doesn’t wake up, will be Islam and it’s ultimate goal, implementation of Sharia under a worldwide caliphate.
Obama is positioning himself no doubt expecting to play a role, just in case or perhaps by design. In a June 2009 Muslim outreach speech given in Egypt President Obama said he was devoted to pursuing “a new beginning of the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world.” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a recent interview on Al Jazeera said reaching out to Muslim nations was his top priority. He is to assure Muslims that America’s success in space exploration had much to do with earlier Muslim achievements in science and math. In other words walking on the moon had as much or more to do with Islam than American ingenuity and creativity.
This of course is horse droppings but since when is truth more important than the convoluted intellectual thought process, the significance of which is measured by how far the conclusion reached is off the track of conventional wisdom. After all, how can one demonstrate intellectual superiority other than by proving that “conventional” wisdom by definition cannot even be close to correct. Conventional: conforming to socially accepted customs of behavior or style, especially in a way that lacks imagination (Encarta ® World English Dictionary).
So Obama and any and all of his clones have to go back to academia where they can “imaginatively” conjure up their convoluted intellectual solutions to all the world’s problems, deride world ignorance and incompetence and leave the real world to solve real world problems in the common sense, free market environment in which America will benevolently dominate as the example for the rest of the world to follow, prosper and peacefully coexist; someday, if we remain true to our founding principles.
Nobody has ever gone to the moon. This was one huge hoax for the world to watch on TV. Why haven’t we been back? where is all that lost 1960′s technology? The foldable lunar car? Where are the photos of the stars?
What anniversary of “The moon landings” will people finally realize that we have never walked on the moon….one hundreth anniversary? 200th anniversary of the moon landings and no humans ever going back to walk? At some point maybe people will realize that all we can do is orbit the Earth.
Apollo 8 was a hoax. They had not even had a successful Saturn 5 launch and suddenly they orbited the moon? Why didn’t they land on the moon then?
When will they return? Maybe they should hire the American Pickers to go forth and find some of that awesome 60″s technology and send them back to the moon??
I do so enjoy our comments sometimes.
Apollo 8 was a hoax? I think you need to watch MythBusters. They took on every effect and proved that they would happen just like that in a vacuum comparable to the moon “air.” And not in a simulated warehouse on Earth.
Mythbusters? You are not serious are you?
Read “wagging the Moon Doggie”. It is interesting.
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/index.html
Richard: Go back to Infowars.
Doesn’t it seem odd that no other country in the past 40 years or so has never put a man on the moon let alone a manned orbit of the moon like those right-stuff American boys of the 60′s?
Is it not strange that not one country has sent a human higher than a low earth orbit except those right-stuff boys of the 1960′s?
Why is it that after 4 decades all humans can do is low earth orbit?
Lunar module worked the first time and every time X 7 and was NEVER modified. None of what NASA claims about the moon landings really makes much since.
Where is the kodak film that can withstand 250 degrees above and below zero that the moon photos were taken with?
lingering questions. Sorry to ruffle feathers here.
GAZE
Richard,
Your ignorance infuriates me. There is incontrovertible evidence that the Apollo landings did in fact take place.
The astronauts gathered nearly a thousand pounds of authentic lunar geological samples (the Russian probes only managed a few grams).
Also, the astronauts set up laser reflectors that have been used for decades to provide accurate ranging data. If we’ve never landed on the moon, how did the devices magically get there?
Amateur astronomers (as well as radar tracking stations from foreign nations) actually tracked the Apollo craft as they left Low Earth Orbit.
Additionally, modern probes such as the NASA LRO and the Japanese SELENE have actually given us photos of the landing sites showing the descent stage of the LM, scientific instruments, and even the astronauts’ footprints:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/17jul_lroc/
http://www.universetoday.com/15579/japanese-selene-kaguya-lunar-mission-spots-apollo-15-landing-site-images/
The Apollo hardware is still there, sitting on the lunar surface. That is fact. To dispute this is to say that the 400,000 Apollo personnel, every planetary geologist in the world, every Russian space tracking tech,all those amateur astronomers across the country, every scientist from every nation who’s ever performed a lunar ranging experiment, all of the current NASA unmanned spaceflight personnel, and the entire Japanese space agency are all party to a colossal half-century long hoax. Is this really what you believe, Richard?
Typical slide reaction.
I totally understand because it was not that long ago that I thought that anybody who thought that the moon landings were a hoax must be a raving lunatic and or some sort of kook. I would bet my life that no human has ever walked on the moon or even orbited the moon. It’s ok to believe everything you watch on TV if that is what is comfortable.
Richard: not that long ago, you were entirely correct.
Please stay away from firearms and sharp objects.
I remember being so excited about the moon race. We held our breath as we waited for the the broadcast . My father died 5 months before we landed on the moon. He would have been so elated about it. We decorated our house with a huge American flag and posters celebrating the moon walk.The future looked bright and promising.Unlike now…………..
Latest news from private space exploration:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1912711/danish_rocket_grounded_after_failed_launch/