drbuzz0 said:

So does this mean that once you cross the border and get into the areas of Quebec where communications are dominated by French you find yourself surrounded by adventurous, science-supporting, progressive-humanist, knowledge-thirsty, rational, spirited Sagan and Asimov types?

Were it only so! Actually we are only a generation passed from a Catholic theocracy, and to call it a theocracy is not in any way an exaggeration. It was La Révolution tranquille (The Quiet Revolution) in the 1960’s brought about the effective secularization of Québec society, and a diminishing of the power of the Church in our everyday lives.

Books have been written about the period and the excesses of the Church that preceded it, however to give you a taste of how much power the Archbishops Palace could wield: just after WWII they had Montreal’s Mount Royal park (the hill in the center of the city) denuded of trees, because it would seem couples were going there to have sex.

So we have had our issues with religious thinking, but at the same time there is no sense of some reflexive respect for self-sacrifice for it’s own sake, or at least some broad sense that the path that involves self-sacrifice and ‘doing without’ is inherently more noble and more right than one that is not, in French cultures that I see in English-speaking ones.

It is this that I am alluding to when I write ‘residual Calvinism’.

        DV82XL said:

Again, this is attitude is more of the residual Calvinism that seems to still plague English speaking cultures.

So does this mean thatonce you cross the border and get into the areas of Quebec where communications are dominated by French you find yourself surrounded by adventurous, science-supporting, progressive-humanist, knowledge-thirsty, rational, spirited Sagan and Asimov types?

        Bruce said:

That is pretty cool, but I wonder what the utility of putting someone on the moon is when we have so many problems back here on earth.

The standard answer to this is to quote: “Man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for”

The world is full of problems, and always will be. Human progress has never been dependent on making sure everything is just so before moving forward, in fact it has been quite the opposite – problems have pushed us to go where we might not otherwise have gone. It has never been part of the human condition to stop pushing ahead without stagnating. This is what happened to much of the Orient. In the early part of the last millennium, they were far more advanced than the West on almost every level – but they stalled, started to look inward and thus they were ‘discovered’ by us, instead of the other way around.

Again, this is attitude is more of the residual Calvinism that seems to still plague English speaking cultures.

        Bruce said:

That is pretty cool, but I wonder what the utility of putting someone on the moon is when we have so many problems back here on earth.

I remember Obama’s plan originally called for diverting some money from NASA to education.

http://obama.3cdn.net/a8dfc36246b3dcc3cb_iem6bxpgh.pdf

Its in that PDF file I think, not sure if he’s still planning to do that. But in a down economy we’ve got people who have no homes and so forth I don’t think this is the best time to be spending lots of money on big space exploration. Just my opinion.

Our educational system’s number one problem is not lack of money, but lack of purpose and lack direction. There is no unified educational strategy and no coherent mission. Throwing money at it means nothing. It will solve nothing. Buying some new computers for schools or putting more coats of varnish on the gym floor accomplishes little without a good solid curriculum and mission.

If we are unwilling to take on the big projects of science and engineering as a country and develop a spirit of exploration and curiosity then what hope does education have?

Diverting money from something like a space program is a bad idea. Going to the moon and developing a space capacity costs what it costs and you pay what it costs to do it properly or you shouldn’t pay at all. If it costs 100 billion dollars to have a moon program than you either pay 100 billion or you decide it’s too expensive and don’t do it at all. You absolutely don’t compromise and pay 75 billion to do it in a substandard way. That’s a complete waste and we should have learned that by now. It is all or nothing.

The Space Shuttle was an exercise in compromise. They decided they wanted a reusable way of getting to space but they also decided that it was too expensive to keep the Saturn or develop a new heavy lifter so they decided to make the Shuttle do two wholly incompatible missions to save money. Then they decided to use the solid boosters and use the same pad infrastructure (both to save money) instead of using better systems like aerospike engines and HOTL systems that they wanted early on.

Did it save money? No! The government was unwilling to do it properly and we ended up with a super-expensive launch system that turned out to be incapable of what we wanted, forcing us to go back and resurrect the Atlas and Delta and we lost 14 astronauts and two vehicles.

The moral of this story should be that if you want a space capability you pay what you need for it or just live without it.

I remember Obama’s plan originally called for diverting some money from NASA to education.

http://obama.3cdn.net/a8dfc36246b3dcc3cb_iem6bxpgh.pdf

Its in that PDF file I think, not sure if he’s still planning to do that. But in a down economy we’ve got people who have no homes and so forth I don’t think this is the best time to be spending lots of money on big space exploration. Just my opinion.

I think a better argument is that the USA found itself unable to pay for both a war in Vietnam and men on the Moon. Ludicrously, the awe inspiring, wealth-creating exercise was crap-canned … and they lost the war anyways.

Man, the loss — the momentum that was Apollo, not that stupid war — isn’t really all that well known. More than 20 years ago, as a teenager, I found the NASA Technical Memorandum section at a university library. The mid-60’s to early 70’s parts were sobering reading even then: it was clear the whole program was an unparalleled research and development effort, nothing like it has existed since. Today, if that TM collection still exists, I don’t think I could bring myself to walk in. How could anyone turn their back on such an achievement?

It is indeed incredibly difficult to believe that the country with the same name today, the one mired in political and financial corruption on a truly frightening scale, the one losing another war it didn’t even have to fight in the first place, this is the same country that put footprints on the Moon.

I agree with DV82XL: the USA needs a re-boot, and quick.

Apollo was the last chance because it happened at the end of the 1960’s at the same time that the Great Society plan came into full blown effect and cost. Apollo had to be cut because the early 1970’s is when the social programs first became truely crippling and it became impossible for the US to do anything signifficant like Apollo because the will of the government had shifted and so did funding.

We were lucky in the 1950’s and 1960’s because despite the enormous cost of the New Deal and it’s continuing programs like Social Security we also were riding the post-war boom and we were receiving a lot of payments from Britain, France and even Russia for war debt. That helped us keep going despite social security but too much of it dried up by the 1960’s and then got hit by the Great Society. The first few years just racked up short term debt but the early 1970’s was when it hit the red ink big time, so big that we had to ditch the gold standard because otherwise we’d have a debt collapse. It hasn’t gotten any better since then. Not even the “great conservative” Regan changed the tide on that. We only had a minor reprieve during the information boom.

Apollo is stratigic because it is ultimately a program to grow a national capability and it’s also a discretionary program. The current budget precludes this from happening because of the mandatory spending balloon that has been taking over the budget. Mandatory spending can’t be undone and is not subject to annual review because it’s a commitment that was set in stone in the past. Mandatory spending is always easy to pass because it doesn’t give the full hit right away. It’s not possible to repeal like other appropriations. It is open ended and nobody tolerates the repeal because it creates a dependent class.

        Biff Henderson said:

They took film movies on the moon as well as television?

I did not know that.

Does it really qualify as being as good as high definition though?

I realize that youtube quality is not going to allow for judging the true quality but I’m just wondering could the movie film really compete with it.

Absolutely! Comparing film to hdtv video is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison because video is in terms of absoilute pixels but film depends on the film grain and the optics and film grain is not as uniform as pixels, but good 16mm film stock should always be at least as good as 1080p and 35mm stock is far better than the best HDTV systems. NASA didn’t just use good 16mm film stock, they used the best of the days technology and developed the ultra fine and high range film for the program, so it’s better than even the best modern video systems by comparison. Plus, there’s no compression at all.