4:17 pm Eastern Daylight Time marks the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing (Neil Armstrong didn’t step out onto the lunar surface for another several hours). It was the first human landing on the lunar surface. It concluded the ambitious goal laid out by John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth within the decade. It also began the end of the “Space Race” between the Soviets and Americans. Until shortly before this moment, the Soviets had been notching their belts with a number of firsts: first man-made satellite, first animal in space, first man in space, first man to orbit the Earth, etc. But the United States persisted and continued to pursue the challenge. The effort has generated a number of side benefits and increase human knowledge.

In an interview with a number of British scientists, one was quoted as saying,

“It was carried out in a technically brilliant way with risks taken … that would be inconceivable in the risk-averse world of today…The Apollo programme is arguably the greatest technical achievement of mankind to date…nothing since Apollo has come close [to] the excitement that was generated by those astronauts – Armstrong, Aldrin and the 10 others who followed them.”

They’ve captured my sentiment – we have become such a risk-averse world where we risk the ability to innovate and expand. Instead, we cling to the little we know and are increasing deferring critical and risky decisions to others, to government or to later in life.

Maybe NASA’s time is ending and private industry will eclipse it. Tom Wolfe, author of “The Right Stuff” (great movie and book about the Mercury program), captures some of this in an OpEd piece in the NY Times. So now, as we mark this anniversary, what has been accomplished in the 40 years since. Plenty of scientific advancement and monitoring in space, but very little in the way of expeditionary efforts. It will be interesting to see if the Orion program continues or falters as we move forward.

I look forward with the hope that I or my kids have the chance to witness that next “giant leap [of] mankind.”

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.