6 ms·

65 years ago, America announced the names of its first astronauts

103 points by LorenDB 3y ago

unethical_ban 3y ago
I remember when NASA Rd 1 in Clear Lake for renamed "John Glenn Parkway" for a few months due to his flight on the shuttle back in the day. The space program is just one of those amazing moments in US history to read about. A Man on the Moon was a good book for it, and there are some others in the top tier. It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. These guys were top notch.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  > It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. In hindsight, it seems like the middle of the 20th century was right in the middle of an "S-curve" for societal change and technology advancement. Anyone who grew up in the 2nd half of the century thought it was completely normal. But now that we're somewhat removed from that era, it's more like completely bizarre to consider how much things changed in how little time. The 90s when Apollo 13 came out were an interesting time in their own right because that's right around when the societal change started slowing down. Anyone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in particular probably doesn't even think of the 90s as being particularly "old". A lot of the same fashions and music styles that we have today had already emerged, at least in primitive forms. Cell phones and computers and the Internet were becoming mainstream. In a lot of ways, the late 90s and early 00s seem more familiar and similar to today than they do to the 1960s. It's weird to imagine a world where major life-altering advancements aren't happening every decade (no, AI is not one of them, at least not yet). That's been the norm for over a century now, but it's come to some kind of an end. We are entering new cultural territory.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    The smart phone and social media were both transformative. But I get your point. It’s not like being born before the refrigerator and then seeing men walk on the moon as you eat a microwaved TV dinner.
    - 10729287 3y ago
      I'm in my early 40s for reference, and it's always amaze me when i'm listening to an album that I really loved when I was an early adult (so not that far away) and making a comparaison like : "damn, that records is the equivalent of a Led Zeppelin album to me for a young adult of 2024". Suddendly, it appears a million years away as I put myself in the boots of a kid. I'm that old, to them.
  - eru 3y ago
    The 1970s were when change started slowing down, and coincidentally, it's also when we stopped growing yearly per capita energy usage by the customary 2%. (I can dig up the sources on that.) Remember the 1970s oil shocks, for example. All the stuff we were 'promised' that we didn't get, like personal jet packs, flying cars etc, would cost a lot of energy to run. All the computing advances we did see were possible in the stagnant energy budget. Nuclear energy would have helped keep the energy budget growing, but for a variety of reasons, it was never really widely enough adopted. I'm very optimistic about photovoltaic, because thanks to it being a semi-conductor technology its costs have been falling along a similar curve as other electronic products. I expect that to keep going until installation and land rent will be the predominant cost factors. So per capita energy budget might go up again for a while, and with them labour productivity improvements might return for a while.
    - nicoburns 3y ago
      That time period also happens to be when the top rates of income tax started to be cut dramatically.
      - eru 3y ago
        In some countries, yes. But they only had been raised to those crazy levels not too long before. (And people didn't actually pay those crazy top rates in practice, they used tax optimisations.)
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >Anyone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in particular probably doesn't even think of the 90s as being particularly "old". Born in '89, the 90s was my childhood. I will tell you today holds none of the magic the 90s had, it's ancient history. I pity the children of today. Also, what was that old saying?: Everything you grow up with is magic, everything you see in adulthood is mundane, and everything in your senior years is fucking blasphemy?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    I see your point about how many individual, large changes came around in the world between 1930 and 1990. Indoor plumbing, air conditioning, radio, TV, transistor, commercial air flight, space travel, helicopters, nuclear energy, cell phones. But the Internet and social media have truly shifted society. Social media has entirely transformed how people interact with the world and discover new things, for good and very much for bad. People born past 2000 never knew a world without computers in every classroom (or in front of every student). Most never experienced having to be at home to receive messages from people, unless you went to their house. Needing to plan ahead with people when to meet. Everyone in society watching the same shows (mostly). I think AI will fundamentally alter the world, like the Internet did. We're in the infant stages.
dysoco 3y ago
I've just been watching From the Earth to the Moon (1998) these past few days, go check it out if you haven't, I had never heard of it.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I also highly recommend When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_M...
  - rkagerer 3y ago
    For All Mankind is a fictional alternate history with an awesome first season.
    - fsloth 3y ago
      For All Mankind is so so drama but it becomes super good if you are familiar with the nuts and bolts space program, and all the seasons hold up from this aspect - as the timeline diverges the tech becomes a bit less grounded, but it's forgivable for the audacity of a parallel history space dream the script shows. The character arcs are more like ... Space Soap Opera arcs rather than more grounded but that makes it only more entertaining IMO. They don't fully open the soap box on first season which is probably why it's the best of them. The soap aspect is also somewhat defensible. A number of significant individuals critical to the space program back then had super weird life stories beyond their technical contributions. For sure, you had the stereotypical buttoned up test pilots with nerves of steel... but you also had.. Black magicians and Industrial scale mass murderers. So, it's arguable are the For All Mankind characters too looney or not looney enough by a large margin. [0] Black magician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons [1] Industrial scale mass murderer:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph
      - aebtebeten 3y ago
        Some (sub)orbital geopolitics don't seem to have changed much in 8 decades: You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero "In German oder English I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese" says Wernher von Braun (for countdowns in a Japanese translation, see "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise") Someone on HN convinced me recently that "Hitler in his Bunker" was on the looney side, but up until then the only non-looney explanation I had found for his behaviour was that he had been hoping he could sell germany wholesale either to the US[0] or to the USSR, not anticipating they would actually stay allied until after the war, each picking up the bits[1] they wanted retail (Operations Paperclip and Осоавиахим, respectively). [0] had the Sportpalast speech been given in 1953 instead of 1943, the "only we are protecting the West against communism" shtick might have gone over much better in the States. [1] it turns out that developing not just rockets but also jets is far less useful when, logistically speaking, you no longer have much oil and can no longer refine or synthesise sufficient jet fuel. (someday I'd like to figure out how much early-50's graph theory may have been just the first unclassified publication of network analyses developed during the war for strategic bombing purposes; compare Kantorovich' development and application of linear programming during the Siege of Leningrad) Linebarger relates that at the end of WWII, when getting Nazi units to surrender, they had difficulties[2] because although the officer corps was aware how operationally screwed they were, morale in the ranks was still high. [2] supposedly the difficulties decreased after the psychological warfare operators created an official looking "surrender form", in the blanks of which soldiers could fill in their name, birthplace and Jahrgang, occupation, etc. etc. then provide, dutifully filled out, to Allied units. As an anglophone, it's certainly plausible, but maybe those are just my stereotypes speaking?
boomboomsubban 3y ago
It's crazy that they all joined the military when the idea of space travel was a pipe dream. Only one enlisted after the Air Force was created. That's how quickly it all happened.
- rjsw 3y ago
  Most were from military families and there was a bit of a war around the time they were enlisting.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Indeed it is, and it's unreconcilable with the crazy myth of 'exponential progress'. This is not just space, this is across all industries and society. A person living 1900-1970's would have gone from riding a horse to driving a car on the Interstate high way system, from sailing a ship to flying a plane, they've seen rollout of telephones, invention of nuclear bomb, radar and digital computers, spaceflight, etc. Their society completely transformed. A person living from 1970's to today is still driving on a car on the same interstate highway, possibly living in a house that was built before they were born. And Electric transport is not that new either, London had a fleet of 20 electric busses in year 1908, and they were popular.
  - tiznow 3y ago
    A person living from 1970s to today also went from "having to go to the library or ask someone with domain knowledge about any tidbit" to "being able to find a near-infinite amount of domain knowledge with a pocket-sized gadget".
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      The difference is almost everyone is driving on the freeways at times, but only a few are searching out new domain knowledge with their pocket-sized gadget; most seem to use it to consume short snippets of entertainment, dance, pranks, pro sports, and ASMR, all interrupted by ads. (more encouragingly, fitness may also be up there; was Vysotsky just a bit ahead of his time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HWJlBSMSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HWJlBSMSc ) EDIT: more specifically, access to domain knowledge hasn't increased that much; in the 1970s I was already in biking distance of 3 libraries and had several university libraries in a 1 hour radius, so there was already more domain knowledge available (probably even in a single library) than I could have learned in a lifetime. Yes, now I can browse talk slides that I would've had to attend in person back then, but we still had journals, and they are almost as good if one is not on the bleeding edge of a field. What has changed dramatically is access to worlds beyond one's own. In the 1980s, I was involved in anime fandom and tangentially with UK sci fi fen. The first was paradoxically easier, because both Japan and the US were NTSC, so they didn't require camera copying. We samizdat'ed madly, and "sub or dub" wasn't even an issue, because neither was widely available. Now with the internet I can see what soviet 80's hairdo rock was like; what real Caucasian pop music is; Finnish tango; various Monkey King cartoons; etc. (anyone have recommendations for chinese pop?) at the click of a mouse. EDIT2: in part why I think life hasn't changed that much may be because the future, back then, was supposed to be: https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Bernal_Interior_AC76-0628_5716-scaled.jpg https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Bernal_Interior_AC76-0628... , which would have been a major difference.
roenxi 3y ago
That might have been the US industrial peak. Since then the big industrial projects have been getting smaller and/or got outsourced to Asia. Nuclear could have powered the next big thing, but they slammed the abort button on the progress in that direction. Semiconductors maybe, but the US sort-of removed itself from that market.
- lostemptations5 3y ago
  But at least we are healthy and not all radioactive -- aside from the microplastics and forever chemicals.
  - keyle 3y ago
    not just microplastics and forever chemicals. Just take a look at the population and compare it to 50 years ago.
  - melling 3y ago
    And the mercury emitted from all that coal we still burn: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09080-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09080-6 And in our chemical processes https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/chinese-companies-slated-for-mercury-pollution-in-cameroon/ https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/chinese-companies-slated-f... I imagine we’d be talking about going carbon neutral by 2100 instead of 2050 if we hadn’t burned so much coal We should reach peak coal sometime in this decade: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-15/coal-s-peak-is-here-but-demise-of-dirtiest-fuel-will-be-slow https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-15/coal-s-pe...
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    Coal power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment than nuclear ones...
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  it really is f-ing over for the US. Good thing we have AI though without it China would 100% be the sole superpower by 2035
082349872349872 3y ago
Funny that Y.A. Gagarin [Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961] wasn't chosen until a little later, in 1960. Less funny that V.V. Tereshkova [Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963], chosen in 1962, is now in the Duma ... representing ER.
- mcculley 3y ago
  What does ER mean in this context? I read her Wikipedia page and didn’t see it. [Never mind. ChatGPT explained to me: “ER in the statement likely stands for "United Russia" (Edinaya Rossiya in Russian), which is a political party in Russia. United Russia is the largest and the ruling political party of the Russian Federation, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space with her flight on Vostok 6 in 1963, has been a member of the Duma (the Russian parliament) representing this party.”]
  - sandspar 3y ago
    Sounds like a highly competent, publicly spirited woman.
fsloth 3y ago
The historical narrative of Apollo program contains so many awesome aspects of leadership, teamwork, technological innovation, excellence in operations, that the more you read about it the astronaut's contributions tend to fall to the background. Yes, they were a critical part of the process, and earn their place in history books, but similarly we should remember the stories of people like Margaret Hamilton, Werner von Braun, Gene Kranz among many others.
- gradus_ad 3y ago
  The astronauts add that raw aspect of bravery and potential sacrifice to the story. Not that long hours over years and years dedicated to a single project is not sacrifice. But that doesn't hold a candle to a risk your life type of sacrifice. In 2024 people still get nervous going on domestic flights. I can't imagine how someone could muster the sheer courage to volunteer as an astronaut, either then or now. It's a testament to humanity's willingness to risk even death in pursuit of something greater.
  - fsloth 3y ago
    "humanity's willingness to risk even death in pursuit of something greater." I would rephraze this as 'humanity's capability to sustain a large range of psychological profiles and the capability to filter out from the general population the particular individuals fitting for a given task'. My understanding is the astronauts were a very specific niche group and mostly wanted to fly faster and higher than anyone before them, and were willing to pay any price to achieve this.
RobotToaster 3y ago
Maybe the second cold war with China that everyone in the American government* seems to want will get us back into space, and we'll stay there this time. *Okay some of them don't want it cold.

103 points by LorenDB 3y ago

I remember when NASA Rd 1 in Clear Lake for renamed "John Glenn Parkway" for a few months due to his flight on the shuttle back in the day. The space program is just one of those amazing moments in US history to read about. A Man on the Moon was a good book for it, and there are some others in the top tier. It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. These guys were top notch.

nerdponx 3y ago
> It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. In hindsight, it seems like the middle of the 20th century was right in the middle of an "S-curve" for societal change and technology advancement. Anyone who grew up in the 2nd half of the century thought it was completely normal. But now that we're somewhat removed from that era, it's more like completely bizarre to consider how much things changed in how little time. The 90s when Apollo 13 came out were an interesting time in their own right because that's right around when the societal change started slowing down. Anyone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in particular probably doesn't even think of the 90s as being particularly "old". A lot of the same fashions and music styles that we have today had already emerged, at least in primitive forms. Cell phones and computers and the Internet were becoming mainstream. In a lot of ways, the late 90s and early 00s seem more familiar and similar to today than they do to the 1960s. It's weird to imagine a world where major life-altering advancements aren't happening every decade (no, AI is not one of them, at least not yet). That's been the norm for over a century now, but it's come to some kind of an end. We are entering new cultural territory.
- mulmen 3y ago
  The smart phone and social media were both transformative. But I get your point. It’s not like being born before the refrigerator and then seeing men walk on the moon as you eat a microwaved TV dinner.
  - 10729287 3y ago
    I'm in my early 40s for reference, and it's always amaze me when i'm listening to an album that I really loved when I was an early adult (so not that far away) and making a comparaison like : "damn, that records is the equivalent of a Led Zeppelin album to me for a young adult of 2024". Suddendly, it appears a million years away as I put myself in the boots of a kid. I'm that old, to them.
- eru 3y ago
  The 1970s were when change started slowing down, and coincidentally, it's also when we stopped growing yearly per capita energy usage by the customary 2%. (I can dig up the sources on that.) Remember the 1970s oil shocks, for example. All the stuff we were 'promised' that we didn't get, like personal jet packs, flying cars etc, would cost a lot of energy to run. All the computing advances we did see were possible in the stagnant energy budget. Nuclear energy would have helped keep the energy budget growing, but for a variety of reasons, it was never really widely enough adopted. I'm very optimistic about photovoltaic, because thanks to it being a semi-conductor technology its costs have been falling along a similar curve as other electronic products. I expect that to keep going until installation and land rent will be the predominant cost factors. So per capita energy budget might go up again for a while, and with them labour productivity improvements might return for a while.
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    That time period also happens to be when the top rates of income tax started to be cut dramatically.
    - eru 3y ago
      In some countries, yes. But they only had been raised to those crazy levels not too long before. (And people didn't actually pay those crazy top rates in practice, they used tax optimisations.)
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Anyone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in particular probably doesn't even think of the 90s as being particularly "old". Born in '89, the 90s was my childhood. I will tell you today holds none of the magic the 90s had, it's ancient history. I pity the children of today. Also, what was that old saying?: Everything you grow up with is magic, everything you see in adulthood is mundane, and everything in your senior years is fucking blasphemy?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  I see your point about how many individual, large changes came around in the world between 1930 and 1990. Indoor plumbing, air conditioning, radio, TV, transistor, commercial air flight, space travel, helicopters, nuclear energy, cell phones. But the Internet and social media have truly shifted society. Social media has entirely transformed how people interact with the world and discover new things, for good and very much for bad. People born past 2000 never knew a world without computers in every classroom (or in front of every student). Most never experienced having to be at home to receive messages from people, unless you went to their house. Needing to plan ahead with people when to meet. Everyone in society watching the same shows (mostly). I think AI will fundamentally alter the world, like the Internet did. We're in the infant stages.

dysoco 3y ago

I've just been watching From the Earth to the Moon (1998) these past few days, go check it out if you haven't, I had never heard of it.

Dalewyn 3y ago
I also highly recommend When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_M...
- rkagerer 3y ago
  For All Mankind is a fictional alternate history with an awesome first season.
  - fsloth 3y ago
    For All Mankind is so so drama but it becomes super good if you are familiar with the nuts and bolts space program, and all the seasons hold up from this aspect - as the timeline diverges the tech becomes a bit less grounded, but it's forgivable for the audacity of a parallel history space dream the script shows. The character arcs are more like ... Space Soap Opera arcs rather than more grounded but that makes it only more entertaining IMO. They don't fully open the soap box on first season which is probably why it's the best of them. The soap aspect is also somewhat defensible. A number of significant individuals critical to the space program back then had super weird life stories beyond their technical contributions. For sure, you had the stereotypical buttoned up test pilots with nerves of steel... but you also had.. Black magicians and Industrial scale mass murderers. So, it's arguable are the For All Mankind characters too looney or not looney enough by a large margin. [0] Black magician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons [1] Industrial scale mass murderer:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph
    - aebtebeten 3y ago
      Some (sub)orbital geopolitics don't seem to have changed much in 8 decades: You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero "In German oder English I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese" says Wernher von Braun (for countdowns in a Japanese translation, see "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise") Someone on HN convinced me recently that "Hitler in his Bunker" was on the looney side, but up until then the only non-looney explanation I had found for his behaviour was that he had been hoping he could sell germany wholesale either to the US[0] or to the USSR, not anticipating they would actually stay allied until after the war, each picking up the bits[1] they wanted retail (Operations Paperclip and Осоавиахим, respectively). [0] had the Sportpalast speech been given in 1953 instead of 1943, the "only we are protecting the West against communism" shtick might have gone over much better in the States. [1] it turns out that developing not just rockets but also jets is far less useful when, logistically speaking, you no longer have much oil and can no longer refine or synthesise sufficient jet fuel. (someday I'd like to figure out how much early-50's graph theory may have been just the first unclassified publication of network analyses developed during the war for strategic bombing purposes; compare Kantorovich' development and application of linear programming during the Siege of Leningrad) Linebarger relates that at the end of WWII, when getting Nazi units to surrender, they had difficulties[2] because although the officer corps was aware how operationally screwed they were, morale in the ranks was still high. [2] supposedly the difficulties decreased after the psychological warfare operators created an official looking "surrender form", in the blanks of which soldiers could fill in their name, birthplace and Jahrgang, occupation, etc. etc. then provide, dutifully filled out, to Allied units. As an anglophone, it's certainly plausible, but maybe those are just my stereotypes speaking?

boomboomsubban 3y ago

It's crazy that they all joined the military when the idea of space travel was a pipe dream. Only one enlisted after the Air Force was created. That's how quickly it all happened.

rjsw 3y ago
Most were from military families and there was a bit of a war around the time they were enlisting.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Indeed it is, and it's unreconcilable with the crazy myth of 'exponential progress'. This is not just space, this is across all industries and society. A person living 1900-1970's would have gone from riding a horse to driving a car on the Interstate high way system, from sailing a ship to flying a plane, they've seen rollout of telephones, invention of nuclear bomb, radar and digital computers, spaceflight, etc. Their society completely transformed. A person living from 1970's to today is still driving on a car on the same interstate highway, possibly living in a house that was built before they were born. And Electric transport is not that new either, London had a fleet of 20 electric busses in year 1908, and they were popular.
- tiznow 3y ago
  A person living from 1970s to today also went from "having to go to the library or ask someone with domain knowledge about any tidbit" to "being able to find a near-infinite amount of domain knowledge with a pocket-sized gadget".
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    The difference is almost everyone is driving on the freeways at times, but only a few are searching out new domain knowledge with their pocket-sized gadget; most seem to use it to consume short snippets of entertainment, dance, pranks, pro sports, and ASMR, all interrupted by ads. (more encouragingly, fitness may also be up there; was Vysotsky just a bit ahead of his time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HWJlBSMSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HWJlBSMSc ) EDIT: more specifically, access to domain knowledge hasn't increased that much; in the 1970s I was already in biking distance of 3 libraries and had several university libraries in a 1 hour radius, so there was already more domain knowledge available (probably even in a single library) than I could have learned in a lifetime. Yes, now I can browse talk slides that I would've had to attend in person back then, but we still had journals, and they are almost as good if one is not on the bleeding edge of a field. What has changed dramatically is access to worlds beyond one's own. In the 1980s, I was involved in anime fandom and tangentially with UK sci fi fen. The first was paradoxically easier, because both Japan and the US were NTSC, so they didn't require camera copying. We samizdat'ed madly, and "sub or dub" wasn't even an issue, because neither was widely available. Now with the internet I can see what soviet 80's hairdo rock was like; what real Caucasian pop music is; Finnish tango; various Monkey King cartoons; etc. (anyone have recommendations for chinese pop?) at the click of a mouse. EDIT2: in part why I think life hasn't changed that much may be because the future, back then, was supposed to be: https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Bernal_Interior_AC76-0628_5716-scaled.jpg https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Bernal_Interior_AC76-0628... , which would have been a major difference.

roenxi 3y ago

That might have been the US industrial peak. Since then the big industrial projects have been getting smaller and/or got outsourced to Asia. Nuclear could have powered the next big thing, but they slammed the abort button on the progress in that direction. Semiconductors maybe, but the US sort-of removed itself from that market.

lostemptations5 3y ago
But at least we are healthy and not all radioactive -- aside from the microplastics and forever chemicals.
- keyle 3y ago
  not just microplastics and forever chemicals. Just take a look at the population and compare it to 50 years ago.
- melling 3y ago
  And the mercury emitted from all that coal we still burn: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09080-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09080-6 And in our chemical processes https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/chinese-companies-slated-for-mercury-pollution-in-cameroon/ https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/chinese-companies-slated-f... I imagine we’d be talking about going carbon neutral by 2100 instead of 2050 if we hadn’t burned so much coal We should reach peak coal sometime in this decade: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-15/coal-s-peak-is-here-but-demise-of-dirtiest-fuel-will-be-slow https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-15/coal-s-pe...
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Coal power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment than nuclear ones...
atleastoptimal 3y ago
it really is f-ing over for the US. Good thing we have AI though without it China would 100% be the sole superpower by 2035

082349872349872 3y ago

Funny that Y.A. Gagarin [Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961] wasn't chosen until a little later, in 1960. Less funny that V.V. Tereshkova [Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963], chosen in 1962, is now in the Duma ... representing ER.

mcculley 3y ago
What does ER mean in this context? I read her Wikipedia page and didn’t see it. [Never mind. ChatGPT explained to me: “ER in the statement likely stands for "United Russia" (Edinaya Rossiya in Russian), which is a political party in Russia. United Russia is the largest and the ruling political party of the Russian Federation, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space with her flight on Vostok 6 in 1963, has been a member of the Duma (the Russian parliament) representing this party.”]
- sandspar 3y ago
  Sounds like a highly competent, publicly spirited woman.

fsloth 3y ago

The historical narrative of Apollo program contains so many awesome aspects of leadership, teamwork, technological innovation, excellence in operations, that the more you read about it the astronaut's contributions tend to fall to the background. Yes, they were a critical part of the process, and earn their place in history books, but similarly we should remember the stories of people like Margaret Hamilton, Werner von Braun, Gene Kranz among many others.

gradus_ad 3y ago
The astronauts add that raw aspect of bravery and potential sacrifice to the story. Not that long hours over years and years dedicated to a single project is not sacrifice. But that doesn't hold a candle to a risk your life type of sacrifice. In 2024 people still get nervous going on domestic flights. I can't imagine how someone could muster the sheer courage to volunteer as an astronaut, either then or now. It's a testament to humanity's willingness to risk even death in pursuit of something greater.
- fsloth 3y ago
  "humanity's willingness to risk even death in pursuit of something greater." I would rephraze this as 'humanity's capability to sustain a large range of psychological profiles and the capability to filter out from the general population the particular individuals fitting for a given task'. My understanding is the astronauts were a very specific niche group and mostly wanted to fly faster and higher than anyone before them, and were willing to pay any price to achieve this.

RobotToaster 3y ago

Maybe the second cold war with China that everyone in the American government* seems to want will get us back into space, and we'll stay there this time. *Okay some of them don't want it cold.