On Sun, 3 Sep 2006 05:54:36 GMT, (Henry Spencer) wrote:

In article om,
Eric Chomko wrote:
With a mandate to NASA to "waste anything but time."
Not comparable to any program today, since space is no longer
important.

Says you.

Says anyone who's looked at the politics. Space was important, *then*,
because it had become a symbol of superpower capabilities in the Cold War,
not because it mattered in its own right. But the Cold War is gone, and
in any case, space's symbolic importance died rather earlier, when the
USSR lost the race to the Moon and largely abandoned using space
accomplishments as a propaganda tool.

With all due respect, I think there's a little more to it than that. At the time
of the beginning of the space race, there was still a sense that "progress"
would bring us amazing things and unrecognizably better lives. Look
at the big attractions of the world's fairs- predictions of the world of the
future.

Space travel was the ultimate extension of this. I don't think its importance
was simply political. It was sort of a manifest destiny. Space did matter
"in its own right". But the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War- well, you lived
through the '60s too. By the end of the decade, maybe even a couple of years
beyond, we'd stopped dreaming of the future. Just keeping what we had seemed
like a lofty goal.

Even with all the amazing advances over the past several decades, it
doesn't seem like that wide-eyed dream of the future has come back. It
probably will someday. It's always darkest before the dawn

Dale