On Monday, December 12, 2016 at 1:02:04 AM UTC-6, wrote:
On Saturday, December 10, 2016 at 5:56:54 AM UTC-6, Stuf4 wrote:
snip
Miles O'Brien's statement is the latest example.

~ CT

My view is that the space race was an example of a single combat warrior, sort of like David and Goliath. The idea is that instead of having the two countries duke it out on the battlefield, their representatives, David and Goliath in ancient times and astronauts and cosmonauts in modern times, would vie for superiority. Russia won the first round, by getting a man into orbit before the U.S. did, but the U.S. raised the stakes, making a man on the moon the new goal, and in this arena, the American warriors were superior.

That's an excellent analogy! I must say that is compelling. Thanks for sharing that.

As for people like Jeff who four decades+ on, who refuse to recognize the direct nuclear ICBM driver behind putting humans atop these boosters, here is the most recent quote by Frank Borman:

“The space program was essentially a battle in the Cold War. Vietnam — we lost. Korea — we tied. And the space business — we won,” Borman said.

(ref - http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/201...k-on-the-moon/ )

That puts the US record during that period at 1-1-1, for anyone counting.
And that's a *war* record, as you so aptly compare with D&G.

Terminology I have presented here in the past include identifying astronauts has having been "placebo nuclear warheads". You pull out the nuke, stuff in a person, launch the rocket, and show your might to the world.

THIS is why John Glenn got such a huge tickertape parade. Americans felt that they could sleep better at night knowing that nuclear ICBM technology had reached parity, and therefore reduced the chances that the USSR would start anything. JFK's drive to get people walking on the Moon was a raising of the stakes by orders of magnitude above the Gagarin vs Glenn showdown.

And the result of that was a dramatic display of how the US dominated nuke warfare technology.

For anyone who might be confused by the private words of JFK to the NASA Administrator on that tape, he was saying that human spaceflight was a "test of the system." The system he was referring to was nuclear ICBMs.

Nuclear ICBMs are the only fielded weapon that has NEVER undergone an end-to-end test. They are far too lethal of a weapon to do that. The boosters have been tested, with no warhead. And the warheads have been tested, with no booster (or short range booster). But once you set up a booster with intercontinental range and put a nuke warhead up top and try to launch it, ALL your adversaries around the planet will have no idea of the actual destination of that rocket, so an easy assumption would be that it was headed for their land, and that they would need to retaliate immediately.

By simply *testing* a full-up ICBM, you would be starting a war.

JFK was explaining to James Webb that this was the way we test the system without starting a war.

~ CT