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I wonder if things like this would ever happen now. The original Mercury and Apollo astronauts were Air Force test pilots, a group known for picking and choosin

I wonder if things like this would ever happen now. The original Mercury and Apollo astronauts were Air Force test pilots, a group known for picking and choosing which rules they wanted to follow. Sneaking a golf club aboard, not to mention the possibility of falling and tearing his suit, is a non-trivial risk. It's hard to imagine that culture of risk taking still exists, but at the same time, that culture may be why they were able to get to the moon so quickly.

hedora 6y ago
Your comment reminds me of this book: https://time.com/3910020/the-over-parenting-trap-how-to-avoid-checklisted-childhoods-and-raise-adults/ https://time.com/3910020/the-over-parenting-trap-how-to-avoi... > So imagine how surprised I was to discover among my more affluent, well-connected students a growing number who seemed to be lacking the ability to make their way independently in the world, as, frankly, 18-22 year olds always had been able to do and just as crucially, used to desire to do. I’m deliberately being vague about what exactly was missing in so many students because frankly I couldn’t quite tell at first. Something was just off. Odd. It took most of my ten years as dean before I figured out what exactly the problem was. For starters, each year my students were more and more and more and more accomplished. The grades, but not just the grades: the scores. And not just the grades and the scores but the awards, and the accolades, and the activities, and community service, and leadership, and, and, and, and, and, every other prospect for perfection. Yet each year I noticed that more and more could tell you what they’d done but not so much why they’d done it. I’m old enough that helicopter parenting wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. I find the whole phenomenon incomprehensible. But, yeah, I imagine people used to accomplish more before everyone got so damned risk adverse.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes the university/credential-pedigree system has become, and how essential it is to optimize for a certain outcome at all costs. When I was high school age, the A students went to good universities and generally ended up with a good professional career, the B students went to state schools and had an average life in an office job. The C students went to community college and limped along. The D students went to trade school and at least had a shot at turning things around. We're moving towards a world where the A++5.0GPA+awards+accolades students will go to the top universities and end up living in relative luxury, the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not. Competition among students is a complete slug-fest and every parent is doing whatever they can to juice the metrics that universities demand, at the expense of every other part of the student's development/upbringing. You don't want your kid left behind in the dirt.
  - sharadov 6y ago
    I agree, I've some nephews/nieces in college and was talking to their parents about why they were getting them to start applying for tech internships in freshman year, sounded absurd to me. And I was telling them how they should be more adventurous with where they want to work and live after they graduate. But all they wanted to do was work in Silicon Valley ( they grew up around here, so I thought they would want to move and explore other parts of the country). But, no they did not want to. I think it was both risk-averseness and also sheer practicality that all the good tech jobs are here.
    - KMag 6y ago
      I see what you did there. Very subtle and gentle correction of the GP's misunderstanding of the phrase.
  - gbear605 6y ago
    Walmart/Meth is a pretty strong exaggeration. Things aren’t great without a degree, but they’re not (yet) impossible.
    - phs318u 6y ago
      We're straying way off-topic here but I'd suggest that things are pretty terrible for significant numbers of people. As evidence (I'm not US-ian), I present this article [0], which actually tries to make the point that living standards have never been better. In my view, he fails, specifically with the following statement in para 5, "There would surely be a revolution in America if 90% of our citizens have suffered income stagnation or worse". I'd suggest that recent events and the fact that many tens of millions of people supported (and still support) Donald Trump, are proof of a slow-motion revolution in progress - a kind of cold-civil-war. So, maybe parent was being colourful with the "Walmart/meth" exaggeration, but in terms of "effective equivalence" I'd say they are close to the mark. [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-living-standards-are-at-an-all-time-high-heres-proof-2019-05-02 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-living-standards...
- ROARosen 6y ago
  > But, yeah, I imagine people used to accomplish more before everyone got so damned risk adverse. I'm looking at you GameStop... (tongue-in-cheek)
- simonh 6y ago
  There's a British children's adventure film called "Swallows and Amazons". A family of children want to go on a sailing trip without adult supervision to camp on an island. Their mother sends a telegram to her husband, who's an officer on a navy ship asking his advice (or permission, it was another time). He sends a telegram back "If not duffers won't drown, if duffers better drowned".
  - dmurray 6y ago
    It was originally a book, or actually a series of books, written and set in the 1930s. Great reading as a child, but to have such permissive parents - they barely make an appearance while their kids as young as 7 spend days at a time boating and camping - seemed as fanciful to me as Harry Potter. I wonder if it was really like that in the 30s.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Apart from the magic, Harry Potter is just the well-worn genre of "school stories" and the social structure of the school is basically that of a select British private school, complete with boarders and "houses" and so on. It really was like that in the 30s (see Roald Dahl's Boy, for another example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co.). I think Swallows and Amazons is a little stretched from what would have been normal levels of parental contact, but not beyond what a reader of the time would have considered normal or reasonable.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Or pretty much any of Enid Blyton's books. As you say, probably an exaggerated view of childhood independence in upper middle class(?) England (and certainly there are American examples as well although boarding school is a less prominent feature), but not something wildly fantastical to many readers.
    - simonh 6y ago
      There are always older children around though, I think there was a much higher expectation that older children would take responsibility for the younger ones back then. S&A is adventure fiction so maybe a little exaggerated, but not outrageously so.
- canadianfella 6y ago
  The students were accomplishing more.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Personally I think the risk aversion has less to do with parenting and more just life experience. For the vast majority of human existence, high child mortality was much higher than today. Even for the wealthiest, watching some of your siblings die was simply a fact of life. It was only in the early 20th century that childhood death became uncommon, and even then these kids were being born to and raised by people who had grown up in such a world. My grandfather, for example, was the youngest of 12 and grew up in a household where no one expected all 12 to make it. The combination of an excessively large number of people and the desensitization to death (with maybe a little bit of lead paint thrown in for good measure) naturally leads to the view of life being cheap. These are the sorts of conditions that make wars that cost tens of millions of lives conceivable, but also the conditions where people are okay with being strapped to a rocket with only a bit of testing. The baby boomers were really the first generation raised entirely with the expectation that they would live, and late genX/early millennial children were likely the first in history to be raised by parents who had been raised with that mindset. The longer you expect to live, the more sensible risk aversion is.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bpodgursky 6y ago
It's also important to note how much a bit of goofing around got the public engaged in the missions. It wasn't a dry, clinical, scientific expedition — real humans were on the moon, and took the opportunity to... be actual humans. Hitting golf balls. Jumping around. Those antics, even if they had nominal risk, are part of what got millions of people (especially young people) excited about manned spaceflight.
- russellbeattie 6y ago
  What in the world are you talking about?? That is actually completely opposite of what happened! As cool as this was to many of us, public support plummeted after seeing NASA "fooling around", and golf especially was seen as an elitist white man's activity. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias. Political support, which was already waning, immediately fell off a cliff as well. Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    I’m not old enough to know how this stunt affected public opinion (although I do remember when golf was an elitist sport). This is the first I’ve heard of a connection between the golf swings and waning political support. Where can I read more about that? > this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias In 1971, even in the wake of the civil rights act, I don’t think many people cared about nasa being a whites boys club.
    - pvg 6y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
      - russellbeattie 6y ago
        That's a great link, thanks! It demonstrates my point way better than any article I'd be able to find.
mandevil 6y ago
I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. As for risk, Jim Lovell was asked, before he left for his second trip to the moon (Apollo 13), if he worried about the risk. His response was if wasn't an astronaut heading for the moon, he'd be back to his original job as a navy fighter pilot flying missions over North Vietnam, and he'd rather everybody be working to keep him alive than trying to kill him. And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized. If you add KIA+MIA (after this long a time, those are dead bodies that were never recovered), in World War One average US monthly losses were 6260/month, World War Two was 9865/month, Korea was 1116/month, Vietnam was 589/month, and the total combined dead from September 11th attacks, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the operations against ISIS come out to 9766 (all numbers from Wikipedia). So the past 20 years of fairly continuous war comes out to about the dead from a single month of World War Two, for the US. That's in lockstep with the rest of the culture, we simply are much safer in every dimension.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. The people who were test pilots in the 90s were people who succeeded under a system of massive "by the book"-ness. The cowboys of the 60s don't wind up being successful test pilots in that kind of system. The organizations changed so the people who succeed in them changed.
  - mandevil 6y ago
    And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one. The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's and 1960's a lot more death was accepted and because of that, the standards were lower."
oh_sigh 6y ago
To be fair, he only snuck a golf club head aboard. He used the lunar soil sampler as the makeshift club.
- Someone 6y ago
  And a few golf balls.
RandallBrown 6y ago
I believe he had approval from NASA. https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2019/02/three-things-alan-shepard-moon-club.html https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2019/02...
- samizdis 6y ago
  Yes, and he's quoted talking about it in an article in The Smithsonian Magazine [1]: > While stories have persisted that Shepard sprung this stunt on his own—or smuggled the club head and balls to the lunar surface, he had indeed gotten permission. > It took him a while, though, to convince Manned Spaceflight Center director Bob Gilruth, who was not keen on the idea. > “Absolutely no way,” Shepard recalled the initial response. ... > Shepard explained he’d bring the modified Wilson Staff 6-iron club head and two balls in a tube sock “at no expense to the taxpayer.” And he promised not to even try it if anything on the mission went wrong. For that reason, he waited until the end of their lunar visit. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/when-astronaut-alan-shepard-hit-golf-shot-heard-round-world-180976903/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/when-... Edited to add: Of course, later missions had toys built-in - lunar rovers for Apollo 15, 16 and 17. Real-time footage of the complete Apollo 17 mission is at https://apolloinrealtime.org/ https://apolloinrealtime.org/ and I can't recommend it highly enough :-)
m4rtink 6y ago
Yea, like launching a car in space on an interplanetary trajectory complete with a mannequin in a space suit at the driving wheel! Completely unthinkable nowadays! ;-)
Someone 6y ago
There was a regulated way for astronauts to take personal stuff with them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_preference_kitb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_preference_kitb http://spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_ppks.html http://spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_ppks.html. Note that these bags had a part number, showing how well planned this was). That likely was done because it helped, psychologically. What you put in those bags had to be approved, so things got smuggled in, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_items_smuggled_into_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_items_smuggled_into_sp...). I think that was somewhat known, and ‘allowed’, again for psychological reasons.
- rozab 6y ago
  Wow, today I learned that Neil Armstrong took bits of the Wright Flyer to the moon.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It'll become a thing again I'm sure. Since the moon missions, at best we've had people goofing around in the ISS for err, educational purposes. But nowadays, the richest people have space companies, money, and Ambitions.

hedora 6y ago

Your comment reminds me of this book: https://time.com/3910020/the-over-parenting-trap-how-to-avoid-checklisted-childhoods-and-raise-adults/ https://time.com/3910020/the-over-parenting-trap-how-to-avoi... > So imagine how surprised I was to discover among my more affluent, well-connected students a growing number who seemed to be lacking the ability to make their way independently in the world, as, frankly, 18-22 year olds always had been able to do and just as crucially, used to desire to do. I’m deliberately being vague about what exactly was missing in so many students because frankly I couldn’t quite tell at first. Something was just off. Odd. It took most of my ten years as dean before I figured out what exactly the problem was. For starters, each year my students were more and more and more and more accomplished. The grades, but not just the grades: the scores. And not just the grades and the scores but the awards, and the accolades, and the activities, and community service, and leadership, and, and, and, and, and, every other prospect for perfection. Yet each year I noticed that more and more could tell you what they’d done but not so much why they’d done it. I’m old enough that helicopter parenting wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. I find the whole phenomenon incomprehensible. But, yeah, I imagine people used to accomplish more before everyone got so damned risk adverse.

ryandrake 6y ago
I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes the university/credential-pedigree system has become, and how essential it is to optimize for a certain outcome at all costs. When I was high school age, the A students went to good universities and generally ended up with a good professional career, the B students went to state schools and had an average life in an office job. The C students went to community college and limped along. The D students went to trade school and at least had a shot at turning things around. We're moving towards a world where the A++5.0GPA+awards+accolades students will go to the top universities and end up living in relative luxury, the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not. Competition among students is a complete slug-fest and every parent is doing whatever they can to juice the metrics that universities demand, at the expense of every other part of the student's development/upbringing. You don't want your kid left behind in the dirt.
- sharadov 6y ago
  I agree, I've some nephews/nieces in college and was talking to their parents about why they were getting them to start applying for tech internships in freshman year, sounded absurd to me. And I was telling them how they should be more adventurous with where they want to work and live after they graduate. But all they wanted to do was work in Silicon Valley ( they grew up around here, so I thought they would want to move and explore other parts of the country). But, no they did not want to. I think it was both risk-averseness and also sheer practicality that all the good tech jobs are here.
  - KMag 6y ago
    I see what you did there. Very subtle and gentle correction of the GP's misunderstanding of the phrase.
- gbear605 6y ago
  Walmart/Meth is a pretty strong exaggeration. Things aren’t great without a degree, but they’re not (yet) impossible.
  - phs318u 6y ago
    We're straying way off-topic here but I'd suggest that things are pretty terrible for significant numbers of people. As evidence (I'm not US-ian), I present this article [0], which actually tries to make the point that living standards have never been better. In my view, he fails, specifically with the following statement in para 5, "There would surely be a revolution in America if 90% of our citizens have suffered income stagnation or worse". I'd suggest that recent events and the fact that many tens of millions of people supported (and still support) Donald Trump, are proof of a slow-motion revolution in progress - a kind of cold-civil-war. So, maybe parent was being colourful with the "Walmart/meth" exaggeration, but in terms of "effective equivalence" I'd say they are close to the mark. [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-living-standards-are-at-an-all-time-high-heres-proof-2019-05-02 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-living-standards...
ROARosen 6y ago
> But, yeah, I imagine people used to accomplish more before everyone got so damned risk adverse. I'm looking at you GameStop... (tongue-in-cheek)
simonh 6y ago
There's a British children's adventure film called "Swallows and Amazons". A family of children want to go on a sailing trip without adult supervision to camp on an island. Their mother sends a telegram to her husband, who's an officer on a navy ship asking his advice (or permission, it was another time). He sends a telegram back "If not duffers won't drown, if duffers better drowned".
- dmurray 6y ago
  It was originally a book, or actually a series of books, written and set in the 1930s. Great reading as a child, but to have such permissive parents - they barely make an appearance while their kids as young as 7 spend days at a time boating and camping - seemed as fanciful to me as Harry Potter. I wonder if it was really like that in the 30s.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Apart from the magic, Harry Potter is just the well-worn genre of "school stories" and the social structure of the school is basically that of a select British private school, complete with boarders and "houses" and so on. It really was like that in the 30s (see Roald Dahl's Boy, for another example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co.). I think Swallows and Amazons is a little stretched from what would have been normal levels of parental contact, but not beyond what a reader of the time would have considered normal or reasonable.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Or pretty much any of Enid Blyton's books. As you say, probably an exaggerated view of childhood independence in upper middle class(?) England (and certainly there are American examples as well although boarding school is a less prominent feature), but not something wildly fantastical to many readers.
  - simonh 6y ago
    There are always older children around though, I think there was a much higher expectation that older children would take responsibility for the younger ones back then. S&A is adventure fiction so maybe a little exaggerated, but not outrageously so.
canadianfella 6y ago
The students were accomplishing more.
jjk166 6y ago
Personally I think the risk aversion has less to do with parenting and more just life experience. For the vast majority of human existence, high child mortality was much higher than today. Even for the wealthiest, watching some of your siblings die was simply a fact of life. It was only in the early 20th century that childhood death became uncommon, and even then these kids were being born to and raised by people who had grown up in such a world. My grandfather, for example, was the youngest of 12 and grew up in a household where no one expected all 12 to make it. The combination of an excessively large number of people and the desensitization to death (with maybe a little bit of lead paint thrown in for good measure) naturally leads to the view of life being cheap. These are the sorts of conditions that make wars that cost tens of millions of lives conceivable, but also the conditions where people are okay with being strapped to a rocket with only a bit of testing. The baby boomers were really the first generation raised entirely with the expectation that they would live, and late genX/early millennial children were likely the first in history to be raised by parents who had been raised with that mindset. The longer you expect to live, the more sensible risk aversion is.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bpodgursky 6y ago

It's also important to note how much a bit of goofing around got the public engaged in the missions. It wasn't a dry, clinical, scientific expedition — real humans were on the moon, and took the opportunity to... be actual humans. Hitting golf balls. Jumping around. Those antics, even if they had nominal risk, are part of what got millions of people (especially young people) excited about manned spaceflight.

russellbeattie 6y ago
What in the world are you talking about?? That is actually completely opposite of what happened! As cool as this was to many of us, public support plummeted after seeing NASA "fooling around", and golf especially was seen as an elitist white man's activity. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias. Political support, which was already waning, immediately fell off a cliff as well. Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I’m not old enough to know how this stunt affected public opinion (although I do remember when golf was an elitist sport). This is the first I’ve heard of a connection between the golf swings and waning political support. Where can I read more about that? > this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias In 1971, even in the wake of the civil rights act, I don’t think many people cared about nasa being a whites boys club.
  - pvg 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
    - russellbeattie 6y ago
      That's a great link, thanks! It demonstrates my point way better than any article I'd be able to find.

mandevil 6y ago

I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. As for risk, Jim Lovell was asked, before he left for his second trip to the moon (Apollo 13), if he worried about the risk. His response was if wasn't an astronaut heading for the moon, he'd be back to his original job as a navy fighter pilot flying missions over North Vietnam, and he'd rather everybody be working to keep him alive than trying to kill him. And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized. If you add KIA+MIA (after this long a time, those are dead bodies that were never recovered), in World War One average US monthly losses were 6260/month, World War Two was 9865/month, Korea was 1116/month, Vietnam was 589/month, and the total combined dead from September 11th attacks, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the operations against ISIS come out to 9766 (all numbers from Wikipedia). So the past 20 years of fairly continuous war comes out to about the dead from a single month of World War Two, for the US. That's in lockstep with the rest of the culture, we simply are much safer in every dimension.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. The people who were test pilots in the 90s were people who succeeded under a system of massive "by the book"-ness. The cowboys of the 60s don't wind up being successful test pilots in that kind of system. The organizations changed so the people who succeed in them changed.
- mandevil 6y ago
  And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one. The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's and 1960's a lot more death was accepted and because of that, the standards were lower."

oh_sigh 6y ago

To be fair, he only snuck a golf club head aboard. He used the lunar soil sampler as the makeshift club.

Someone 6y ago
And a few golf balls.

RandallBrown 6y ago

I believe he had approval from NASA. https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2019/02/three-things-alan-shepard-moon-club.html https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2019/02...

samizdis 6y ago
Yes, and he's quoted talking about it in an article in The Smithsonian Magazine [1]: > While stories have persisted that Shepard sprung this stunt on his own—or smuggled the club head and balls to the lunar surface, he had indeed gotten permission. > It took him a while, though, to convince Manned Spaceflight Center director Bob Gilruth, who was not keen on the idea. > “Absolutely no way,” Shepard recalled the initial response. ... > Shepard explained he’d bring the modified Wilson Staff 6-iron club head and two balls in a tube sock “at no expense to the taxpayer.” And he promised not to even try it if anything on the mission went wrong. For that reason, he waited until the end of their lunar visit. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/when-astronaut-alan-shepard-hit-golf-shot-heard-round-world-180976903/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/when-... Edited to add: Of course, later missions had toys built-in - lunar rovers for Apollo 15, 16 and 17. Real-time footage of the complete Apollo 17 mission is at https://apolloinrealtime.org/ https://apolloinrealtime.org/ and I can't recommend it highly enough :-)

m4rtink 6y ago

Yea, like launching a car in space on an interplanetary trajectory complete with a mannequin in a space suit at the driving wheel! Completely unthinkable nowadays! ;-)

Someone 6y ago

There was a regulated way for astronauts to take personal stuff with them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_preference_kitb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_preference_kitb http://spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_ppks.html http://spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_ppks.html. Note that these bags had a part number, showing how well planned this was). That likely was done because it helped, psychologically. What you put in those bags had to be approved, so things got smuggled in, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_items_smuggled_into_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_items_smuggled_into_sp...). I think that was somewhat known, and ‘allowed’, again for psychological reasons.

rozab 6y ago
Wow, today I learned that Neil Armstrong took bits of the Wright Flyer to the moon.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

It'll become a thing again I'm sure. Since the moon missions, at best we've had people goofing around in the ISS for err, educational purposes. But nowadays, the richest people have space companies, money, and Ambitions.