Space News by Rick Tumlinson — July 18, 2019
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon, you might notice we aren’t celebrating it on the moon. Why? Having achieved the greatest feat in human history, why is all we have to show for it flags, footprints and footage? 50 years after the Wright Brothers, anyone could buy a ticket to fly around the world. 50 years after Henry Ford’s first Model T, regular people around the world were driving their own cars. 50 years after Apollo, we’ve got a few government employees orbiting around this world and no one flying to the moon, let alone any of us.
Why? Two simple reasons: Who’s in charge, and their goal.
The Wright Brothers were citizen engineers who wanted to open the sky so the people could fly. And they did. Ford was a businessman who wanted to give people the freedom to travel. And he did. The U.S. government wanted to beat the Russians to the moon. And it did. It’s that simple. NASA achieved its goal – but it wasn’t opening the moon or the Solar System to the people, no; the goal was just to get that amazing propaganda shot on the TV for all to see. We won! We won! Look at us! We won! And…we’re done.
The reason there is no one on the moon and Mars today to celebrate Neil and Buzz taking those small steps is because the goal of the Apollo program was to create a historic moment, not to change the course of history. And while it did both to some degree, imagine if, instead, the goal of that heroic effort had been to open the Solar System to the people of Earth. Who knows where we’d be today and how many of us would be somewhere out there, far from Earth?
More:
https://spacenews.com/op-ed-why-were-not-on-the-moon-now-and-how-we-can-stay-next-time-we-go/