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Man Conquers Space
dirtyhank writes "Half a century ago space exploration was the ultimate adventure and a team headed by Wernher von Braun dreamed about it for Colliers Magazine. Their vision of the future to come was too optimistic though and we haven't made to Mars yet. Now the dreamers are some people in Australia trying to produce Man Conquers Space, a documentary based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950's in Colliers actually came to pass - and sooner than they expected."
I dunno about you, but I was all choked up just watching the teaser trailer (I was also amazed I *could* watch it and it hadn't been /.ed yet).
Maybe you had to grow up then. I remember staying home from school to see the Gemini flights, when they were spacewalking for the first time. And then watching the moon landing on the neighbor's TV (we were in the country in Vermont and didn't have one there).
People were astonished that it had happened. Even people who intellectually knew it was possible somehow on some level never expected it to really come true.
And then after the moon landings, and after JFK's promise (to put a man on the moon "in this decade")had been fulfilled... nothing.
Sure there was Spacelab, made from leftover Saturn V parts, and there was Apollo/Soyuz, which I never saw the point of, even though it was very politically significant, because nothing *new* was being done there in terms of space travel.
But after Apollo, the space program was cut back. Way back. The fact that the Shuttle program got going at all was nearly a miracle. And the shuttle design we have now, the one with the horrible semi-reusable solid fuel boosters and the ultra-expensive non-reusable tank was a political compromise due entirely to budget cuts and funding limits. The real shuttle design was fully reusable and much safer: no uncontrollable solid boosters to blow up.
The reason seeing this preview choked me up was because it brought back to me the thought that, yes, we could have done it. We could have put those space stations up, we could have gone to Mars. We could have done so much more than we did in space. Instead, the money was spent on military hardware.
I realize it's harmless, but ManConquersSpaceEnter.html is abbreviated MCSEnter, and the MCSE doesn't get past the firewall here.