NASA Astronaut Gene Cernan, Last Man To Walk On the Moon, Dies At 82 (engadget.com)

NASA astronaut and retired U.S. Navy captain Gene Cernan was the second American to walk in space and the last to set foot on the moon during that mission. Unfortunately, today Cernan passed away at age 82. Engadget reports: During his time as an astronaut, Cernan logged over 500 hours in space and he spent more than 73 of those on the surface of the moon. Captain Cernan's NASA career began in 1963 and he made his first trip to space as part of the three-day Gemini IX mission in 1966. He went on to serve as the lunar module pilot for the Apollo 10 mission in 1969 before taking the role of spacecraft commander for Apollo 17 in December 1972. Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon for the United States. Cernan retired from the U.S. Navy after a 20-year career in 1976 and left NASA at the same time. Watch Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt sing "I Was Strolling on the Moon One Day" on YouTube.

Comments

Obligatory XKCD

[ClickOnThis]

https://xkcd.com/893/

May need to be updated soon.

RIP, Gene.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Gr8Apes]

We still have folks around, like Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon. The guy that was the last to walk on the moon is no longer with us.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Kjella]

The only significant change to that chart would be if we could start to project increases. Unless any of them plan on becoming super-centenarians we're likely to hit zero since they're all in their 80s and I don't see any credible plans for a return...

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Ranbot]

The phrase, "It's been __ years since man walked on the moon" as a yardstick for progress [or lack of] has been an old, trite phrase many years, but it starts to have some meaning again when you realize these pioneers are dying off.

RIP, Gene.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[shanen]

It's already seriously out of date. It appears there were 9 of the 12 moonwalkers alive around 2010 and we're now down to 6. Just reviewed the Wikipedia page, and the two youngest are 81 and the two oldest are now 86. The middle prediction of 2030 is looking quite optimistic at this time.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[silentcoder]

I also consider it euphemistic.
Try this version: The last human being to ever go anywhere at all beyond low earth orbit is now dead.

Yeah - Apollo was the last time humans went above LEO. Forget the moon, we haven't even gone to high orbit since.

Re:Don't you mean...

[jfdavis668]

Remember, Buzz Aldrin is still around. It's not the last person who had walked on the Moon, it's the last person to have done so.

Re:We leave as we came

[Anonymous Coward]

But who will pay for it? TANSTAAFL!

Re: We leave as we came

[cyber-vandal]

There would be no space travel at all without the evil gubmint and that includes satellites. Too many fucking accountants on here.

Re:Don't you mean...

[Gr8Apes]

Remember, Buzz Aldrin is still around. It's not the last person who had walked on the Moon, it's the person to last have done so.

FTFY

Re:Don't you mean...

[Nutria]

Buzz Aldrin is still around to punch out "brave" people who tell the "hard truth".

Fair Winds

[Anonymous Coward]

And Following Seas.

Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning

Sadly the last man to walk the moon died

[Anonymous Coward]

And also sad in another sense. The last man to walk the moon died of old age, at 82, 45 years after the walking.

Re:We leave as we came

[Anonymous Coward]

Because every time we do, we learn more and develop more technology so that one day - maybe - we'll have a World/galaxy like in Star Trek.

Wouldn't that be cool?

I am very very pessimistic though. To achieve that, we'll have to give up tribalism in all its forms (ex. nationalism, religion), work together and pool resources.

That's won't happen. We're going to be stuck in these pathetic wars over land, religion, nationalism and resources until we pathetic species become extinct. Maybe an intelligent new life form will rise from our ashes and take over this planet and achieve what we are incapable of achieving because we are a pathetic too smart for our own good bald monkies.

Explore the ocean depths

[OffTheLip]

For all of the talk of colonizing space for the future of mankind seems like similar challenges exist on earth. The oceans of our world. Negatives, hostile environment, positives, lots of water and reentry to a civilization we know does not involve wormholes or warp factors.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[mmell]

If only we could find some unobtanium, or noobtanium, or dilithium crystals, or vibranium, or adamantium, or duranium, or quirium, or . . .

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[kamapuaa]

The dream of space exploration & colonization is that it's a stepping stone towards other worlds and a vast spread of humanity across the galaxy. Not simply a one-time deal that adds a new region of Earth for humans to live in, but at great expense & difficulty.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[Anonymous Coward]

Or balls.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[Qzukk]

If you thought keeping 1 atmosphere of pressure inside a tin can was too hard, good luck keeping thousands of atmospheres of pressure out.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[Kjella]

The dream of space exploration & colonization is that it's a stepping stone towards other worlds and a vast spread of humanity across the galaxy. Not simply a one-time deal that adds a new region of Earth for humans to live in, but at great expense & difficulty.

Earth to Mars (shortest): 56,000,000 km
Earth to nearest star after the Sun: 40,000,000,000,000 km

I think you need to make the same kind of leap as going from horse and carriage to the Saturn V to go from interplanetary to interstellar. Sure keeping people alive is an interesting challenge, but somehow I don't think generation ships that take ~70000 years is the solution. For that we need a revolution in propulsion technology that we're not going to get from Falcon Heavy, SLS or even Musk's ITS. A bit like if I wanted to lift 100kg, I could do that with exercise but none of those plans or experience really bring me closer to lifting 10000kg.

Re: Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

But...but...but... I don't WANNA dig in Trump's rectum... even his proctologist didn't want to.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

Why should near-light-speed NOT be good enough for colonization ? I can see the complaint about it for a small craft with a few people. Nobody wants to go visit somewhere and come back to find everyone they knew has been dead for thousands of years, empires have risen and fallen and there is no recognizable "home" to come to. Especially when, for them, just a few years have passed.

But for a colony - why not ? You are taking people with you, you're taking your family, you aren't planning to ever come back. Who cares if ten-thousand years pass on earth during your 20 year journey ?

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[meta-monkey]

But for a colony - why not ? You are taking people with you, you're taking your family, you aren't planning to ever come back. Who cares if ten-thousand years pass on earth during your 20 year journey ?

Economically, what's in it for the people left behind on Earth? Are the colonists themselves going to fully fund the expedition? Setting up a colony would be massively expensive. In the past empires created colonies to exploit them for resources and for strategic purposes in competition with other empires.

But for a colony that takes 10k years of travel time (from the Earth's frame of reference) they might as well cease to exist. 10k years is the about the entire age of civilization itself. Whoever contributed to their colonization mission will never trade with them, will never communicate with them. So for capitalists they will get no return on investment, and for governments they will get no PR boost. Besides some appeal to emotion about "the future of humanity" or wanting to LARP as Buck Rogers, what's the appeal of shipping people off 10k years into the future, never to be heard from again?

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

>Economically, what's in it for the people left behind on Earth? Are the colonists themselves going to fully fund the expedition?

Economics is not mankind's only motivation. In this case - there is another rather good one: the survival of the species. Mankind cannot and will not survive if we are confined to one planet. No species can. It's simply physically impossible. Unless we colonize we are as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later the universe is going to throw a giant rock or a massive blast of radiation at us and wipe out just about every living thing except a few extremophile bacteria.

Life will (probably) survive, it's incredibly resilient. Evolution will start over from those bacteria... but there won't be any us.

The odds of two planets getting hit at once are exponentially lower, for every one we add - the chances of humanity existing in the long run gets better.

But lets start simple -lets get a colony on the moon. Even Mars can wait. No reason to hurry there - just being n the moon as well will already double our odds of surviving the next cataclysm since the moon colonists could repopulate earth after.
But there's still plenty of things that could hit earth that would take out a moon colony right with it - so once we've solved the relatively easy task of making the moon livable - Mars awaits... after that, well there's really nothing else in this solar system which can feasibly be made suitable for human habitation. The only thing remotely close is Venus and frankly trying to terraform that atmosphere is so far beyond any technology we have that we can't even begin to imagine what processes may do so. We may never be able to... but if we can get to mars then the stars await.
Not for us. Our grandchildren may make it as far as Mars... but their grandchildren - we could leave them a legacy like that. And we should - because if we don't, they may never exist.
The most fundamental drive of every species is it's own propagation and survival - are you telling me that humans would not spend money to pursue our most fundamental drive ? No amount of laws and pressures and prices have ever stopped prostitution - because it taps into that drive.

Oh -and the argument you just made, was JUST as true in 1961 when a madman said - "Hey, lets commit to going to the moon this decade", that madman just happened to be sitting in the white house.
The cost will never be a factor - what will be, is if we can get the right people in the right positions - to inspire the world to believe it's worth it.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[meta-monkey]

I mostly agree with you, but you're leaving out the critical factor, which is the motivation for the people who stay behind on earth to develop and fund this project. The US got a return on the investment of going to the moon: USA #1 FUCK COMMIES. If we could establish a moon or mars base without breaking the bank it would be similarly useful. Commercialization of anything beyond satellites seems a long way off, but there are at least ideas in development about asteroid mining although the engineering challenges are still daunting. Everybody loves to talk about the trillions of tons of platinum in them thar asteroids, but they don't mention that minerals on earth have been concentrated by eons of geological, hydrological, and biological processes that didn't take place on a dead asteroid. There's tons of platinum! There's an atom over there and an atom over there and an atom over there...

But as far as launching an interstellar colony mission that will take 10k years (earth frame of reference), those people will have (figuratively) fallen out of the light cone of human civilization. Might as well have been swallowed by a black hole. No one will hear back from them for 20k years. No resources will ever be traded between the homeworld and the colony. There is no good PR, there is no ROI, just vast resources shot into space to be forgotten about after the next celebrity scandal knocks the launch out of the news cycle.

I imagine launching such a mission would be one of the most expensive endeavors in human history. And there is absolutely nothing in it for anyone who stays behind on earth, not even the satisfaction of "well at least somewhere else humans have survived if we all die" because everyone on earth who had any part in making the mission happen will have been dead for 10k years before the colonists arrive and 20k years before their descendents (twice as far removed from us as we are from the cavemen) could hear back.

Any attempt to fund such a mission will be met with very obvious responses: "that sounds neat, but what's in it for us? And don't we have plenty of other problems to which we could direct these resources?"

You would have to make it cheap enough that nobody cares that some nutjobs are taking off to the far corners of the galaxy on their own dime. And that ain't happening without new physics.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

Right now - that certainly is the case. But I'm not so sure for two reasons you're leaving out. The first is, there was huge pay-offs from the Apollo program which were not foreseen (certainly not by the many, many naysayers who tried so very hard to prevent it happening). In fact, despite it's massive cost it was one of the most profitable investments the US ever made. The "beat the communists" was the foreseen one. The scientific and engineering advances made to do it - those made money, lots of money, lots more than the project cost.

The first difference then is, if you're trying to sell such a project a hundred or two hundred years from now, you have that learned lesson. You may not know what values will come out, but you can say with reasonable certainty that in the process of developing it there will huge advances which will directly benefit the people back home who get to use them for other purposes.

The second factor is - if these nearer, easier, colonies were done - a lot of lessons will have been learned, a lot of problems solved. Much of this will overlap - so you can reduce the total cost because some of it's already spent.

The third factor is - we have absolutely no idea what the world will look like in a hundred years. If you had asked anybody in the 15th century what they thought the 16th century would be like they would predict "pretty much the same, a few minor new technologies, a couple of governments changed, some countries destroyed and new ones formed"... and they would be right.
Ask anybody born after the 19th the same question and they predict vast changes - because they've all seen vast changes in living memory and can reasonably expect that to keep happening. The world now changes rapidly and 200 years is a very, very long time.

We don't know what politics or economics will look like. Which powers will have the money, whether the concept of money itself will have been replaced by something better. What problems there will be to solve. For all we know we'll have built a world where all labour is done by automation and humans spend their lives in leisure - relying on the unquenchable thirst of creative people to create to provide their advances (this is not so far-fetched - we are right now not far from being technologically capable of such a world, even if politically it seems unlikely in the short term). There's no reason to assume the economic question would ever even be asked, we don't know if it will be a world where that question is still relevant.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[meta-monkey]

So, essentially after we've solved every other problem and are just bored we'll throw some people towards the other end of the galaxy. I can believe that.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

It's one scenario, and certainly a pleasant one.

But I guess my point was - if economics is the biggest concern - then the biggest concern is based on something both unknown and unpredictable. It may turn out not to be an issue at all.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[meta-monkey]

if economics is the biggest concern

But I don't think it's possible for economics to not be a concern. The "economy" is just the interactions of people exchanging resources, sometimes controlled by individuals, sometimes controlled by collectives. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum...it always serves some purpose to someone, even if people don't agree on the usefulness of the purpose (i.e., resources used to drop bombs on the middle east is wasteful from the point of view of the taxpayer but useful from the point of view of the bomb manufacturer). Star Trek handwaves away the economy by saying they don't have money any more...but then they're constantly visiting "mining colonies" or transporting medicines to stop a plague that for some reason they can't just replicate on the infected planet. And while everyone has free energy and wants for nothing you can replicate they never explain how they decide who gets the ocean front property with a view and who's stuck inland. They say they've risen above concerns like "money," but basically everyone you see who isn't in Starfleet is still behaving like someone participating in an economy.

The only way anyone will ever launch themselves 10,000 light years away is if all the resources needed to do so are essentially free, because it serves no purpose to anyone else (no return on investment, no political/PR utility). By the time that happens human society would be so radically different that who knows what we'd consider important.

Also we could hopefully find planets that could support life much closer. A 10 or 20 year journey (from earth's frame) is still perhaps useful in human time spans. For a look at a future like that, have you read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books? Very engaging, well-written books with fascinating characters and a space faring human civilization with as little magical physics as possible (i.e., no FTL*, 20-40+ years travel time between systems so the books span centuries).

* Well, there's one part in one book where they sort of try FTL but horrible things happen and it essentially breaks reality.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

You answered my point in your very response. What's the price of air to breath ? Oh right, it's free.... but this is the most essential resource there is. Take it away and anybody is dead in a few minutes. Even water we can survive a few days without. It costs nothing - because the supply is sufficiently larger than the demand that there is no profit to be made in selling it, no motivation to try and own it, and if you try to privatise it the political fallout would simply be too big.

One scenario for long range stellar exploration would be, if we find sources for the required resources that are so abundant they become effectively free. Your complaints about Star Trek's economy, by the way, are not very true to the source material. The shows, under network pressure, added things which couldn't be replicated in order to create conflict and drama. Roddenberry's vision had no room for such things, they were a dramatic addition - not part of what he actually thought would happen. ToS is also the furthest removed from his vision (which is why it's incredibly sexist - while the later series which were not network shows were significantly better). In later series they somewhat tried to reconcile that approach to dramatic irony by claiming that the full fruition of an economy that provides for all regardless of what they do so they can do whatever they love - was only achieved on earth. Sisko describes earth as "paradise".

There are other scenarios too - for example the one postulated in several SF stories as wide-ranging as Firefly/Serenity and Interstellar. An extinction level event that isn't rapid - but is defying all our efforts at adapting. Being able to see our extinction looming, with enough time to flee would certainly motivate us.

Getting to near light speed is probably feasible even with current technology. It doesn't need a lot of acceleration, just a constant one and you'll get there in a few years. It would take a lot of energy - but if you're fleeing for your species, who cares ? Use up all the stored energy earth has, why not - it will be worthless after you're gone.

Frankly I think there are more interesting problems to solve. One of which is that extended periods in relative-zero-gravity is known to cause severe health problems in humans, skeletal problems which we have no cure for. Any long-term trip requires somehow solving that. This could mean medical advances, perhaps genetic, or maybe something more prosaic like artificial gravity of some sort. Right now the only viable technology we have for the latter (and the only one I know physics allows) is to spin the shift constantly and let the the centripetal-force effect provide a decent gravity-analog. But that has it's own (significant) engineering challenges, not to mention massively increasing an already significant energy budget.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[meta-monkey]

But even on DS9 you still had Sisko's dad's restaurant. With wait staff. How did Sisko's dad get the property for the restaurant? Why is anyone "doing what they love" busing tables? And on a daily basis to have a functioning restaurant? Again, people acting like they're participating in an economy. I don't know what a post scarcity society would look like, but it wouldn't look like Star Trek.

Getting to near light speed is probably feasible even with current technology. It doesn't need a lot of acceleration, just a constant one and you'll get there in a few years. It would take a lot of energy - but if you're fleeing for your species, who cares ? Use up all the stored energy earth has, why not - it will be worthless after you're gone.

Not a chance. Remember you don't just need energy you need reaction mass. Stuff to throw out the back of the ship (usually violently) in order to make it go forward. And when you're just starting out pushing the ship you have to accelerate all the reaction mass you'll need to get near light speed and then turn around and decelerate. The only hope for anything like what you're describing would be that EM drive thing, which is reactionless. Just add electricity and you apparently get thrust. We'll see if it works in a vacuum. I'm still thinking it's having a very, very tiny reaction with the earth's magnetic field and will not work in space away from a magnetic field, but we'll see. If that works, then yeah. Mine the moon for He3 for easier fusion reactors and you can carry all the energy you need to zip around the solar system and maybe even beyond without having to carry reaction mass.

But no, with today's proven, working technology any significant fraction of light speed is impossible. You can't carry enough reaction mass to accelerate and decelerate all your reaction mass.

Re:Explore the ocean depths

[silentcoder]

>But even on DS9 you still had Sisko's dad's restaurant

And if you had paid better attention - you would have noticed that he didn't charge the people who came to eat. He ran the restaurant because he got personal satisfaction from keeping his cultural cuisine heritage alive. His "wait staff" likewise did it because they got some or other personal benefit out of it.

>How did Sisko's dad get the property for the restaurant?
That one wasn't well answered in the show, land is tricky since on the planet itself it's definitely finite. But there are many possible ways to solve it. For example those who require land for something could request it, and some democratic process would allocate available land to people based on what they want to use it for - the less beneficial it is to other people, the lower on the list it goes. You could easily factor in exceptions for things like ancestral land (and there is evidence in other episodes and series that such exist). There are economic philosophies NOW that have potential answers to that question. For example anarcho-communism rejects the idea of OWNING land but considers entirely legitimate the idea of USING land. So if you're using it - you get to keep it, if you stop using it, somebody else can use it. As long as you use it though - nobody else can lay claim to it.

>Why is anyone "doing what they love" busing tables?
You'd have to ask them - but near the top of the list of possibilities would be: because they want to learn the recipes of their cultural cuisine heritage from a master, and working in his restaurant is their best opportunity to learn from him. But what any given individual finds rewarding - only that person can know.
If I had an income that removed the need to ever work again - I would still do lots of work, I'd code FOSS projects and relish being able to do them full-time as long as I wanted, I'd write stories, I'd study aeronotical engineering, I'd finally make a really good video game... and I'd also spend weeks sitting on the couch playing with my daughter and just relaxing. And sometimes, I'd do some pretty serious manual labour - building cupboards and such, just because I want them and something you made yourself is special in a way something you bought can never be.

>Again, people acting like they're participating in an economy.
They are- but it's a fundamentally different kind of economy. It's an economy without scarcity. So that changes the entire thing from the bottom up. The whole concept changes - what is valuable changes, what is tradeable is different. We're currently seeing some of the difficulties in making post-scarcity work in a scarcity-based economy in a topic that gets discussed on ./ all the time: copyright law. When copyright was created - printing presses were huge, expensive things that few people had. It was a minor industrial regulation that affected almost nobody. But now, the means to copy things is cheap and ubiquitous, and any particular copy is essentially free to make, so ewe can make unlimited numbers of copies. It's a post-scarcity technology now.
And it's messing up the scarcity based economy - so right now the answer being pursued is totalitarian market controls to induce artificial scarcity - that's a pretty terrible approach but it's also almost certainly doomed in the long term. When we solve that one, we can probably adapt that solution to all your other questions.

> I don't know what a post scarcity society would look like, but it wouldn't look like Star Trek.
I never claimed it would. In fact I'm pretty sure you brought Star Trek up and I merely responded to it. And like I said, the ST depicted on screen was quite far removed economically from whatever Gene had envisioned - simply because an actual paradise leaves you no conflict and without conflict there's no drama. That's why diluthium crystals were supposedly impossible to replicate - there had to be something for peoples to fight over or you couldn't have fights.
Roddenberry's vis

Re:Sad that the Republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

A republican president created NASA, you dimwit.

With an obligatory quote . . .

[mmell]

Jim Lovell: Imagine if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World and no one returned in his footsteps.

Re:With an obligatory quote . . .

[dgatwood]

There would be a lot more American Indians alive today. Beyond that, though the outcome would be anybody's guess. :-)

Re:With an obligatory quote . . .

[murdocj]

Imagine if we spent all of our money and time on sending guys on the moon and didn't send robotic explorers out.

Re:With an obligatory quote . . .

[AmiMoJo]

Fortunately it's not a question of one or the other, we can do both!

Re:With an obligatory quote . . .

[meta-monkey]

So, what do you think the Europeans should have done when they discovered the New World? "Shit, captain, I see a bunch of fuckers in loin cloths on the beach. Looks like the place is full, guess we better fuck off back to Europe?"

Re:Sad that the Republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

While you need science to go to the Moon, *going* to the Moon is not very scientific.

Sure it is. You just don't value it highly, so you classify the science done as not being science. It's possible that you may actually think the same way about all geology, of course. Maybe you feel the same about all science that doesn't have immediate applications in engineering?

Re:Don't you mean...

[jfdavis668]

Who really need a good punch in the mouth.

Re:Don't you mean...

[jfdavis668]

Remember, if the Moon landings were faked, the coverup was lead by Richard Nixon. A man who couldn't cover up an office break in.

Re: We leave as we came

[Applehu Akbar]

Milton Friedman mostly.

NASA and the military may have been first to push the technology of integrated circuitry, but it was Milton Friedman who gave rise to Silicon Valley and its privatization of space programs. That will be our return to the Moon and beyond.

So are we going back to the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where "we" means USA (government or private), probably in conjunction with other countries.

I think we should. Not so that we can learn more about the moon, but that we can learn more about the process of human space flight. Back in the days of Apollo our computing resources were primitive, we couldn't even archive the data properly. Now we can, and we can collect orders of magnitude more data per mission.

Re:Sad that the Republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

A republican president created NASA, you dimwit.

At the time, it was the party of Lincoln. Since then, for better or for worse, it has become the party of Nixon, Reagan, Two Bushes, and now Trump (ignoring the Ford hiccup.)

The point is that today's Republicans have taken a much more selective stance in their support (or non-support) of science than their mid-20th-century predecessors.

I hope humans walk on the moon again in my lifetime. And I'll cheer them on, no matter what party (or nation) makes it happen.

Re:Sad that the Republicans...

[Applehu Akbar]

hate science so much that they made sure he would be the last person to do so.

Meanwhile, you people won't even eat GMOs or vaccinate your kids, so please hurry up and die of the next plague to come along so the rest of us can get science going again.

Re: Sad that the Republicans...

[MachineShedFred]

That was a far different Republican Party than the one we have today. Eisenhower would be called a leftist by today's Republicans

Re: Sad that the Republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the democrats and Obama love science so much that the space shuttle program was ended during their reign with no viable replacement in the near future.

Yes, the shuttle program ended during the Obama Administration. But the retirement of the shuttle was set in motion in 2004, by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush.

Thank you Gene

[MrKaos]

Netflix had a great documentary on him called, predictably, 'Last man on the moon', it's worth watching just for the stories of how they slept on the moon (IIRC).

There is some small consolation for the nerds.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The real moon walker outlived a singer/dancer who moonwalked on earth.

Re:Don't you mean...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is like Al Capone. They couldn't get him for murder, so nailed him for tax evasion.

They could not prove Nixon faking moon landings. So they nailed him for cover up of office break in.

Re: Sad that the Republicans...

[dgatwood]

Nonsense. That's much too technical a term for modern Republicans. They'd just call him a "Libruhl" and then run him out of town on a rail.

Re: We leave as we came

[murdocj]

I'm guessing that building robots that can survive for years without maintenance in the airless void of space or on the dusty surface of Mars has also yielded us some amazing technology.

Re: Sad that the Republicans...

[Ol Olsoc]

Because the democrats and Obama love science so much that the space shuttle program was ended during their reign with no viable replacement in the near future.

From G.W. Bush's "Vision for Space exploration speech, January 14, 2004:

The Shuttle's chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the International Space Station. In 2010, the Space Shuttle — after nearly 30 years of duty — will be retired from service.

— President George W. Bush

January 14, 2004

reference http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2...

It was extended by a few lights after Bush left office.

Alarming...

[beheaderaswp]

Well the day had to come. Though it's too bad these guys are dying off while there's a "moon landing denial movement". Which is sad.

We need to get another crew up there soon as a way to combat ongoing anti-scientific "belief systems" before we dumb down the entire country to the point we do something really stupid.

Re:Alarming...

[silentcoder]

Good luck doing that with president pussy-grabber and the austerity cowboys setting the budget. In fact, hope and pray that it isn't attempted until the next one takes office - the LAST thing you want is moonlanding attempt being directed by somebody who couldn't figure out how to make money out of a casino !

Re:Don't you mean...

[rhodium_mir]

Watergate was staged to make the sheeple believe that. Archibald Cox was a crisis actor.

Re:Don't you mean...

[jfdavis668]

Who are "they"? "They" would have to be in on the Moon landing hoax, too. Otherwise it couldn't be covered up for so long.

Re:We leave as we came

[sysrammer]

"Do you also attach the same emotional importance to Evel Knievel's jump over the canyon? " No, but people are still talking about it, aren't you?

Re:Don't you mean...

[silentcoder]

And if this guy said that where Buzz could here the old guy would punch him in the face. He may be old, but he is a many-year Navy vet and by all accounts he *still* has a killer right-hook.

Re:Don't you mean...

[silentcoder]

I always preferred Archibald Cox over Archie Harry Cox.

Re:Prisoners to the vastness of space

[silentcoder]

And convenient ignorance of time-dilation.

A ship that can travel at half the speed of light can reach Proxima Century in just 8 years. But for the guy piloting it - it would take what ? About 3 months ?

Re:Prisoners to the vastness of space

[prolitariac]

That's not how it works. You have to get to about .85 c to get 1/2 the time from the pilot perspective (I'm just looking at a graph I didn't want to do the calculation, although I'm sure there is a calculator out there). at .5c it probably only saves you about a year of the 8 years.

Half the moonwalkers are now gone...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Still Alive:
Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11)
Alan Bean (12)
Dave Scott (15)
John Young (16)
Charlie Duke (16)
Harrison Schmitt (17)

Deceased:
Neil Armstrong (11)
Pete Conrad (12)
Alan Shepard (14)
Edgar Mitchell (14)
Jim Irwin (15)
Gene Cernan (17)

Re:We leave as we came

[meta-monkey]

To achieve that, we'll have to give up tribalism in all its forms (ex. nationalism, religion), work together and pool resources.

So we have to stop being human.

You can't change human nature. We will always be tribal, because those who didn't care more about their in-group than the out-group got killed by the out-group and their genes were not passed along.

Instead of trying to change human nature and try to force everyone to pretend there are no more tribes, or that all tribes are the same, we acknowledge our differences and cooperate out of mutual self-interest?

Re:Don't you mean...

[SensitiveMale]

You people that voted this "troll" are humorless idiots.

Yeesh.

Re:Don't you mean...

[S.O.B.]

If anyone knows better, I'd be happy to be corrected but as I see it the correct forms are the OP's

...it's the last person to have done so (adjective before a noun)

and

...it's the person to have last done so (adverb before a verb)

and also

...it's the person to have done so last (adverb after another adverb)

The two "corrections" are incorrect:

...it's the person to last have done so (adverb in an infinitive: WRONG)

and

...it's the person last to have done so (adjective after a noun: WRONG)