Apollo 11
 

A moment of celebration: 39 years and a couple of hours ago, men landed on the moon for the very first time. :salute:

And be it the will of the people, we'll be back on the moon in just a few years! :D

heck that makes me feel OOOOLLLLD



and still proud.

Yeah, I know what you mean! Golly, I was in my first year of college when that happened! It can't have been too long ago!

And the amount of human will required to do it is still really awesome to think about. Sometimes I wonder if we will ever again see the like of it.

:lol: That makes me feel young! I was in second grade!

Ha! Just a child! Should I have brought a box of Pampers?

This isn't related to Apollo 13, but have you checked out Google's "header" today? (Tuesday, July 29th)

Kinda fun!

(It's a space theme in honor of NASA...)

-ZW

Cool! There's a reason for it: Today is NASA's 50th birthday! :D

:cake:

On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the bill that established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Ike was also the primary architect of NASA, as it was originally conceived. He insisted that it be a civilian agency, not part of the military; and he insisted that it be a builder and developer, not just a political stunt. He favored steady growth, building space stations and the vehicles to get people there, always with an eye on the moon and Mars, but establishing an enduring infrastructure along the way.

(Ike was big on establishing a solid infrastructure. It worked well for him in World War II and as a president. That's why we have the interstate highway system today. It's probably also why the Union Jack flies over London today instead of the swastika.)

Of course, all that changed when President Kennedy changed NASA's mission to land a man on the moon "because nothing we could do in this decade will be more impressive to mankind or more expensive to achive."

Then came the glory days of the U.S. space program. Sadly, sic transit gloria mundi.

I think I was about 10 when the Apollo thing first happened - my Dad let us stay up to see it, on our TV it was happening very late at night - about 12 midnight :)

(Not sure I agree about Ike. One thing Hitler is justly famous for, in Europe, is his Autobahn system, which is still used heavily. Infrastructure worked for both these men, it seems - maybe it was the trend of the times. But the European Space Program is a shambles, underfunded and very very sad compared to NASA).

I didn't mean to imply that Eisenhower invented the highway system; just that it was because of him that we have it here in the United States. When he was in Europe, he saw the Autobahn and was impressed. When he became president, he started the program and cited the Autobahn as a model. That's why the official name of the thing is the Dwight David Eisenhower Memorial Interstate Highway System. You'll see a lot of signs about it in the American heartland but those signs become scarce in the northeast. I suspect politics is at play there. :thinking:

As for his plans for NASA, that is inarguable. Up until JFK's famous "moon" speech, NASA was all about building space stations to use as a base for planetary exploration and other nifty stuff. I suspect there some influence from von Braun there: "Without space stations, space cannot be conquered." While Ike was president, we were just trying to figure out how to get a guy up there; but NASA had big plans!

Somewhere in the Warehouse of Doom I have a collection of illustrations of the space stations that NASA was working on before the moon race came along and put an end it. They were really big on building astronomical observatories in Earth orbit back then. We eventually did that, without the people, but the Hubble Space Telescope would have been unthinkable with the electronics available in 1958.

I was in the 3rd grade, living in Alexandria, Virginia when NASA was formed. Alexandria is the southern tip of the DC diamond; the part that would be part of Washington, DC if Virginia hadn't seceeded from the union. About once a month or so, speakers from NASA would come over to tell us kids how great it was going to be. Back then I fully expected that by the time I was an adult, I'd be living and working on a space station.

When NASA changed direction to land a guy on the moon, I thought that was pretty cool, but I wouldn't have guessed that the idea was to abandon everything else the agency was doing. Neither did Stanley Kubrick, but that's the way it goes.

I was 19 when Neil Armstrong made his small step. By that time, space was no longer about the future of the common man. It was all about celebrites and beating the godless commies to the moon.

My impression of space activities in Europe is that it's running along quite solidly. They're launching Ariane rockets and even have a module on the International Space Station. I don't think it's fair to compare it to NASA, especially not to Apollo--at its peak (in 1967, I think), the Apollo Program spent nearly 5% of total U. S. federal outlays.

Today, NASA's budget amounts to about 0.5% of the federal budget (quite a bit up from where it was under the previous administration) so it's down to about 10% of the level of spending during the Apollo program. I have no idea how that compares to the European Space Agency's cut of the loot.

I was thinking about the Autobahn today, and something amusing came to mind.

When Adolf Hitler came to power, there was worldwide depression on and his biggest problem was putting people to work; so he had folks build superhighways.

Over on this side of the pond, when faced with exactly the same problem, Franklin Roosevelt put people to work building roads, too--streets made of hand-laid brick! :rofl:

Yes... I grew up on a steady diet of SF - Analog, and all the other pulp SF my dad could find in a provincial English city, which was quite a lot. And I think it is quite disappointing that so many predictions have NOT come true. NASA looked for a while as if it would be the means - but now - well I know I won't get to Io, or even Earth's moon. I am not even sure my kids will. Sad. Really. Space Stations would have been so cool.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESA the ESA budget was about $4.26 billion in 2007. Figures for NASA on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA are $17.3 billion for 2008.

Looks like the ESA budget is about one third of the NASA budget. Or maybe a quarter.

But doesn't Europe have a lot more private dollars going into it's program? I though it was a lot more commercialized than the US.

More private dolalrs? Maybe that is so, by comparison - that is, a larger proportion of its funding is private - governements here are pretty stretched and put relatively little in.

Actually, there were quite a few projects to put people to work... the Tennessee Valley Authority power project, quite an assortment of public buildings were built or refurbished, etc. At that point, no one was thinking about needing to move heavy equipment such as tanks across the country by road, so no superhighways.

ESA is funded by the governments (note the plural) of it's 17 member states. The EU has nothing to do with it (yet), which might be a good thing.

If you consider how much NASA spends on the shuttle program and on all those educational and outreach centers all over the US, NASA probably doesn't have that much more money to spend on non-shuttle type space efforts. ESA doesn't have those costs, they also benefit greatly from purchasing technology from NASA, JAXA and RSA instead of having to develop it all themselves.

I don't know beans about how ESA is funded or how they spend their money, so I can't add much to that other than noting that they are heavily into the commercial launch market. I think that's their mainstay.

It has never been clear to me where ESA ends and Arianespace begins. They're joined at the hip and it's unclear which one is the tail and which the dog. Between them they have a very serious share of the commercial satellite market.

I think Arianespace is a commercial company, but I don't know that.

It is Greg, but not publicly traded.

Arianespace has 24 shareholders from 10 European countries.
http://www.arianespace.com/site/abou...sub_index.html

I estimate at least 44% French government ownership, about 32.5% of that directly through CNES the rest through their holdings in EADS and other shareholders. I didn't bother looking at any companies with less than 5% holdings.

Following the money is always interesting and revealing. It would take quite a while to figure out just what percentage is controlled by governments.