I'm watching this HBO miniseries from about a decade ago for the first time. Currently I'm on the 4th episode.

This is an awesome production. It took me a while to grow accustomed to different actor's faces for real people like Alan Shepherd (Scott Glenn, The Right Stuff), John Glenn (Ed Harris, The Right Stuff), and Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks, Apollo 13).

I'm also amazed at the engineering that had to take place to simply put that spacecraft in orbit around the moon. One mistake and the ship likely would have slammed into the surface of the moon. All of this with slide rules and a lot of ingenuity!

Too bad will never see the like again.

Wonderful miniseries.

Great series.

Ep. 5 was one of my favorites.

Yep...Obama killed off Man Space Flight. Now it is the domain of the Russians, the Chinese and well, everybody but us.

^
Well, I wasn't going to do any political commenting on this, but in watching the second disk last night that included the episode of Apollo 11's moon landing, I kept thinking of the term "American Exceptionalism".

Would we as a nation even be capable of this feat now (had it not already been done)? It would be insanely expensive now, but it was insanely expensive then as well. How would beating the Russians to the moon fit into Obama's worldview that NASA must outreach to the Muslim world?

George HW Bush had a public goal of a manned mission to Mars by 2020 if I recall, yet that seemed to have faded away before he even left office. I think W might have mentioned such a mission somewhere along the way but it doesn't seem to me that our political climate would ever allow for a Mars mission.

Best episodes: 1 (Mercury and Gemini), 2 (Apollo 1), 4 (1968/Apollo 8), 5 (Development of the LM/Apollo 9), 6 (Apollo 11), 7 (Apollo 12), and 10 (Geologists/Apollo 15)

Well if it was found out that Muhammad was taken to Mons Olympus instead of the temple mount when he went to see Allah, we would get to Mars.

Obama is irrelevant to the discussion. It's a lot more than that.

When Kennedy was elected in 1960 (my freshman year at Brenham High School) he began talking about putting a man on the moon. There was a period of American optimism that lasted until 1974 but came to a screeching halt with Watergate.

I'm not going to moderate a debate about whether we should or shouldn't have spent this half century investing in the space program as heavily as we have. But what hurts, and hurts a lot, is seeing America becoming another England.

One of the things I loved about the series was the way it captured the get it done attitude we had in the 60s. It was a step by step thing to get to the moon. But we took each step and moved on.

First we had to do this, then this, then that, etc. And we did it. We did what we had to do to take the next step then moved on.

We've totally lost that with our space program. We're running in place.