Started watching PBS special about the moon landing - over three evenings
It started by observing that back in the 60s many thought that we destroyed earth and it was time to look elsewhere. (Little did they know the disasters that would occur 50 years later).
Thus, I found it interesting a special review from the WSJ:
Next month, the world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of what might be the greatest achievement in human history—the landing of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Yet looking back at Apollo 11 will be bittersweet, because the moon landings that took place between 1969 and 1972 have not turned out to be, as Armstrong promised, a “giant leap for mankind.”
Rather, they were more like humanity dipping a toe in the cosmic ocean, finding it too cold and lifeless to enter, and deciding to stay at home. No human being has traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo missions. And no astronauts have gone to space in an American craft since 2011, when the space shuttle program came to an end.
In recent years, both government agencies and private companies, like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have announced plans to go back to the moon, and beyond. In May, Vice President Mike Pence said that Americans will land on the moon by 2024, and NASA hopes to send astronauts to Mars by 2033. But even if those ambitious goals are met, the fundamental challenges of space travel have not changed since the days of Apollo: Space is simply too big and too harsh for human beings to get very far from Earth. No planet or moon in our solar system seems to be capable of sustaining life, and the nearest star to our sun would take some 19,000 years to reach with the fastest currently available engines.
More.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-quest-for-meaning-in-the-heavens-11561733749 (paid subscription)
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