Wirt Atmar wrote:

> I was 24 at the time of Apollo 11's launch -- and was nearly 100%
> certain that I personally was going to make it to the Moon.

I wasn't that old by around a decade, and nowhere near armed with any
knowledge of the specifics that were going on to know, but it surely did
look that way at the time, given that...

> I believed then that I was exactly the right age for the next round
> of trips to the Moon. The next set of trips weren't going to the
> test pilot-type trips. They were going to be the scientific
> exploration of the Moon, in the same manner as was being done in
> Antarctica, then and now, and they were going to use a lot of
> scientist-types.

My favorite "revelational" movie was 2001.  Not only did it give me some
concept (although twisted at the time, and perhaps still now) of what a
"computer programmer" did (HAL, and the "Daisy, Daisy" sequence along
with the initial one).  At the time of 2001, it didn't seem altogether
incredible, given that we had done low-earth orbit to lunar landing and
return in about a decade, and we had three decades left before 2001.

There is also, however unfortunate, the public image.  The Apollo
mission was important to a lot of people at the time, but after the
first one, the level of public interest declined almost exponentially.
That was at least a factor in the decline of the space program.  And
the same might hold true for a possible Mars mission, it would likely
suffer the same PR fate.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>  "Where was NASA cable TV when we needed
it?"