Dreams Of Chariots: 50 Years Ago Today, Apollo 11 Launched The fourth manned launch of the massive Saturn V rocket needed to bring a modular spacecraft to orbit and land on the moon demanded the culmination of many sundry technological achievements.By G.W. Thielman
July 16, 2019 Anyone who has read history intuitively realizes that humans can be (and have been) cruel and destructive. With great ingenuity, humans have also built monuments of grace and beauty, such as the Cheops pyramid at Giza (26th century BC), the Parthenon in Athens (fifth century BC), the Colosseum in Rome (first century), the Chartres cathedral (13th century), etc.
A touch of melancholy graces these achievements, for although not technical dead ends, these precursors didn’t usher in an ongoing legacy. Instead, they stand as mute testimony of our predecessors who possessed more apparent talent and devotion to build something magnificent than we can imagine ourselves doing today.
In the space arena, while Americans share the International Space Station in earth orbit with many other nations, we’ve been dependent on Russian spacecraft to ferry us there since the end of Space Shuttle operations nine years prior. Not so long ago, we seemed to be masters of our fate, conquering the cosmos with slide-rules and bent sheet metal, and now we gripe about those whose cast down eyes bore into cell-phones while ignoring friends and neighbors.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. The fourth manned launch of the massive Saturn V rocket needed to bring a modular spacecraft to orbit and land on the moon demanded the culmination of many sundry technological achievements. That story could and has filled many volumes. This is a thumbnail sketch of those developments and the impetus that drove them.
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https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/16/dreams-chariots-50-years-ago-today-apollo-11-launched/