Godspeed John Glenn

[Pana]

They have the same awe and reverence as the early explorers of the new World, Africa, the Arctic and Antartica.

[Dr Exile]

Too bad we did not take half the cash from the "Gene Pool Pollution Program" and the military and put it towards exploring space.

I'd have a beach house on the moon.

Hear's a song about a boy's imagination, in my opinion the best song Jimmy ever wrote,

Beach House on the Moon.

[lkwalker]

The meaning and love of those men requires a little context. The long shadow of the War had finally given way to a morning sun. The Irish and Italians had finally eclipsed the Yankee straight jacket in Massachusetts and had birthed a handsome Irishman, an idealist, a Catholic dreamer who now lived in the New Camelot of Washington. The 'small step for a man' was in fact not 7 years in the future- it was that day. And that man was John Glenn. Truly America's moment of greatness had arrived. It didn't last long. In 9 months the dreamer and the dream were dead...

[Pigeon]

Didn't the russian sputnik launch place the idea of space superiority in the american mind. Had they not, what would we have done.

[Pana]

Competition breeds excellence?

[lkwalker]

When Sputnik was launched in 1957 it also launched a sense of urgency in American science. Of course the Soviet's success, and our's, was just a matter of who's paperclipians were superior. In the end it fell to our guy- a reformed Nazi named Wernher Von Braun, who had developed the V2 missiles that had rained down death upon London twenty years earlier. "I just send them up. Where they fall is not my department."

[Pigeon]

"I just send them up. Where they fall is not important as long as some guy is killed. Of course, we prefer that it is a bad guy." - US MIC

[lkwalker]

Well, you can"t say we didn't learn some important stuff from old Wernher! hahahaha

[Dr Exile]

Had they not, what would we have done.

We would have continued with the development of a space plane instead of a modified ballistic missile. In the end, our downfall.

(And no, the stupid shuttle was not a space plane.)