#Apollo50: Looking back and still hoping for a better future for everyone
I firmly believe we can make it happen and not “wait until [its] all over and see whether this grand and glorious thing works out.”
“The open road, still, softly calls.” — Carl Sagan
As we remember the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon on July 20th, the National Air and Space museum will be projecting a full-size 363-foot Apollo rocket on the Washington Monument. The Postal Service has issued a “First Moon Landing Forever Stamp.” The Smithsonian Channel has released “an immersive augmented reality (AR) app that re-creates the full timeline of the Apollo missions,” and one curious computer historian has reprogrammed the Apollo Guidance Computer to see how long it would take it to successfully mine a bitcon block (“about a billion times the age of the universe”). Others are busy debunking old conspiracy theories.
Like the editors of Scientific American, I believe humans should return to the Moon (and go to Mars!) as part of an international collaboration (as JFK originally envisioned in 1961) instead of rival nation states once again engaging in a jingoistic competition (with China in this case, as the current U.S. Administration is…
