As A Society We Have To Learn To Be Unsafe Again
Our future may just depend on it
Over ten years ago I went to the Smithsonian National Air And Space Museum and saw a duplicate of the lunar lander used by NASA to land on the moon. It was utterly amazing, and I’ll never forget it to this day. What was so amazing about it? The thing looked like a flimsy piece of crap — that’s what captured my mind.
Suddenly, I understood why conspiracy theorists doubt the moon landing. I joked with a friend I could put my fist through the side of the lander. It would turn out my joke wasn’t far off. According to Bill Whittle in his documentary “Apollo 11 What We Saw”, the lander was extremely fragile.
The actual lander I saw had to be modified to even be displayed in the museum. Whittle explains the true lander, called The Eagle, was “essentially a silver and gold soap bubble just barely able to hold 5 PSI of pure oxygen in the 1/6 gravity of the moon.” He also says that at a point in the landing, the astronauts would have to flip away from the surface and not see how they were descending. It’s pretty crazy when you think how dangerous that was.
Moreover, each Apollo mission had a number attached to it because it was a stage getting them closer to landing on the moon. Every number before was a test, attempting something that was…
