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Neil Armstrong Gives Rare Interview
pcritter writes "In a rare coup for accountants' association CPA Australia, CEO Alex Malley interviews Neil Armstrong, whose dad worked as an Auditor, bringing him back four decades to the pinnacle of the space race. Neil reveals, 'I thought we had a 90 per cent chance of getting back safely to Earth on that flight but only a 50-50 chance of making a landing on that first attempt.' The four-part video series is now posted on CPA Australia's website."
What the hell happened to America?
Too busy spending money on killing people and figuring out more efficient ways of killing people.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Or maybe because even most scientists (actual scientists, not armchair commentators on slashdot) can't find an actual utilitarian reason to build a moon base other than juvenile delight at living out their sci-fi fantasies?
Indeed. If Osama bin Laden hid on the Moon you would be there by now... for about the same money and with fewer people killed in the process.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
The spinoffs from Apollo did end up making it worthwhile but its not really clear you would get anything close to the same spinoffs going back. Apollo had to actually invent a lot of things to pull it off. If you go back to the moon you would mostly be revisiting technologies that have already been developed so the spinoffs would almost certainly be much less.
Yeah, but you wouldn't just be "going back". Building a long-term habitat on the moon is likely to bring about just as many - if not more - useful spinoffs. In fact, since the challenges that need to be met are largely centred around making a limited-resource environment friendly and liveable, I'd think their application would be even more direct, since we're all into the whole sustainable living/climate change/peak oil thing these days.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
" All countries should be working together on this."
Excepting that multinational consortiums tend to turn in to bureaucratic quagmires. Haggling over who does what, who pays for what, whose astornauts get what rides. Some countries fall short on their commitments, others have to pick up the slack, schedules slip, budget soars. Just look at the history of the ISS.
If you want to do things fast, cheap and well a Kelly Johnson Skunkworks model is probably a much better choice than a bureaucratic quagmire. Find very talented engineers and program managers, give them a very precise goal and sufficient funds to do it, and keep the politicians as far away from it as possible.
Ones of NASA's now fatal flaws is politicians change the goal and the plan about every four years right before anything is actually done. They also dictate where and how things are done, not for engineering reasons but to insure they get pork in their states and districts. For example, every recent NASA proposed launcher has Shuttle SRB's in it just to insure Orrin Hatch wont try to kill it. That's why Ares I turned in to the monstrosity it was, and why Allient and Astrium have resuscitated the design that will not die as their proposed Liberty launcher.
@de_machina
Also fine, don't force me to spend my money on failed military adventures into the Mountains of Afghanistan. The Russians weren't inept or weak, and after nine years trying, they just recently proved that there's nothing to gain from a military occupation there, do we really need to repeat their mistake, but more expensively?
If you really want to impress the world with your military might, a precision guided asteroid strike on a nuclear weapons production bunker would probably do the trick. Think long and hard enough and you might even come up with a "peaceful, scientific" pretext for the practice/demonstration (smaller) asteroid diversions.