What's Been and What's Ben

I am watching a NASA old timer talk about the Apollo program. The 27th of January 1967 is when three astronauts died on the launch pad in a fire in the rich oxygen atmosphere. The door wouldn’t open. It did start the a major redesign. Without this process we would not have landed on the moon. Without the deaths of three Americans we would not have realized what we did wrong. It kept a whisper in the back on the mind of every engineer on that project. Those young engineers didn’t know what they were doing. They had no formal training in rocketry. The techn0logy did not exist. The engineers were afraid because any of them that actually comprehended what they were doing knew they were in over their head.

When Kennedy asked for something to show up the Russians, NASA said they could go around the moon in 10 years. He asked if they could land. Two weeks later they said they could. In less than ten years we landed on the moon. There were no plans. At first most doubted that we could rendezvous two crafts in space while orbiting the moon. They did this all under the pressure of the media and with the fate of the cold warm looming in the backgrounds.

Going to Mars will be hard. Space travel is no different that explorers of the world when we thought we may run into the edge and fall off only to find that it is round and infinite – not to unlike space. Magellan never got all the way around the world, but his ship did.