Forty years down the drain

Today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. I have a great love for space exploration and for history. It truly was a remarkable achievement.

But it was 40 years ago. Two other big technological feats occurred in 1969: ARPANET, predecessor to the internet, got its first link and the Boeing 747 debuted. Both have had huge effects on American society. Will they be celebrated with as much pomp? No. Why? Because they were not the high water mark of network computing or aviation. The internet and a ton of other planes superceded these earlier iterations, and they don't have much hold on us.

We are about to take our brand new space station and destroy it because we don't know what to do with it and it is pricey. Very shortly we will have no space vehicle to launch people into space. This makes me reluctant to whoop it up over a 40 year old achievement that simply reinforces the embarrassment we have felt ever since. It's just sad.