Cheap Therapy

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:

• Astronaut Edgar Mitchell shared a house with Arthur C. Clarke for a week
• Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Norman Mailer watched the Apollo 14 launch together
• The entire Apollo programme cost $24 billion dollars. At the time Vietnam was costing $30 billion per year.
• Armstrong took Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the trip, along with a theremin piece. (The author was constantly haunted by Also Sprach Zarathrustra throughout researching the book!)
• Real programmers patch the Apollo LEM computer inside a 30 minute hard deadline
• How the Apollo toilets actually worked!
• Landing on the moon effectively ended the astronaut careers of Armstrong and Aldrin, after that they were too valuable to risk on any future space missions
• The alternative for most Apollo astronauts (many ex-Korea pilots) would have been flying missions in Vietnam
• Most of the astronauts were younger than I am now. The average age of staff in Mission Command was 26.

With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.

So it seems that the US is kicking up a stink about the Chinese using an anti-satellite missile to blow up their own satellite. Whilst somewhat irresponsible to put more shrapnel into orbit, it should be remembered that the US tested its anti-satellite missiles back in the 1960s (and actually shot one down in 1983), and is planning its own dominance of space. The US’s National Space Policy states (as of October 2006):

‘Consistent with this policy, the United States will preserve its rights, capabilities and freedom of action in space … and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.’”

Interestingly enough, whilst Googling stuff for this post I discovered this piece “Too high the moon” by Science Fiction writer Norman Spinrad about Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (both also Science Fiction authors), and their influence on Reagan era space policy that gave us Star Wars. (The missile defence shield concept is still being used to annoy the Russians, this time by deploying systems to guard against missiles from Iran).

Of course orbiting space junk may be all that’s left of us after we’re all boiled together in our own global warming pot.