Your words give weight and meaning to this new era, this new beginning.

We should all aspire to be “…the first of the new men..” as mentioned that Norman Mailer put it.

It wont happen or reach “the tipping point” on the backs of the taxpayer, but will take flight when private enterprise and the enlightened self interest of the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs, and the visionaries begins to take root.

What an interesting time to be alive, to watch the genesis of man’s next frontier.

Thank you for your artful, insightful & penetrating words.

Brian Koester

ps Now I am going to have to watch Gattacca tonight….

Patrick, I natter on about Apollonian and Dionysian tensions all the time (too much A & not enough D in my own life). But it hadn’t hit me to explore the moon shot from that perspective, I’m sad to say. But Apollo is Narcissus to the counterculture’s Goldmund, for sure. The astronauts often have observed how they simply didn’t know about the war, the assassinations, the riots; they were too intent upon their heavenly meditations.

Kristin, your grandfather’s story is moving. And Aldrin’s an interesting character–the intellectual among the astronauts. Except maybe for Rusty Schweickart, who hung out with Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey for a time.

And last night I was watching Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth–Apollo outtakes are its special effects–and there was Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander, in a cameo, farewelling Bowie as he prepares to leave Earth.

And winds: that’s a good joke. But it’s chips. Those men were *Americans.

Two best-selling British science texts — Thomas Dick’s “The Christian Philosopher,” and Sir John Herschel’s “A Treatise on Astronomy” — had recently sparked a craze in America for astronomy. The former employed pious platitudes and scientific-sounding theories to argue that the Almighty would not have created a universe devoid, except for Earth, of intelligent life; and that in harsh environments like the moon’s, life-forms would surely be more advanced, less sinful. The latter, whose world-famous author had recently relocated his telescopes to South Africa, inspired a star-gazing fad among those eager to learn of any discoveries he might make.

Eager to capitalize on such manias was the Sun, a two-year-old New York newspaper almost daily reinventing the medium, Matthew Goodman recounts in his recent book “The Sun and the Moon,” as politically independent, designed to be read by the average person, and featuring the sort of reporting that continues to mark newspaper journalism today: crime, scandal, sports, entertainment.

Nor did the Sun ignore the vogue for astronomy. In fact, on August 21, 1835, the paper’s editor, Richard Adams Locke, began serializing an account — attributed to a respectable British scientific journal, and jam-packed with technical details — of the astonishing lunar discoveries made the previous winter by Herschel. The moon, New Yorkers were astounded and delighted to read, was populated by one-horned goats, bipedal beavers, and a race of civilized, bat-winged humanoids who built temples, eschewed clothes, and lived in harmony.

“Great Astronomical Discoveries” — or the “Moon Hoax,” as it was dubbed, after Locke admitted to having invented it — was a sensation. Locke had produced “the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism,” asserts Goodman, effortlessly switching gears from historian to philosopher… and yet he had not intended it as a hoax at all.

Contrasting the “diddling” (a performance aimed at demonstrating the public’s foolishness) of Edgar Allan Poe, whose “Hans Phaall — A Tale,” a moon voyage penned with maximum verisimilitude, was published earlier that summer, with Barnum-esque “humbugs,” which winkingly invite us to participate in our own deception, Goodman argues that Locke’s moon series was not a hoax, but a failed humbug. As Locke himself would later claim, he’d expected New York to read “Great Astronomical Discoveries” as a satire of Thomas Dick — and, for that matter, all “theological and devotional encroachments upon the legitimate province of science.”

What? Science and intellectual freedom trumping moral objectives… here, in America? Sorry, Mr. Locke, but no amount of benign humbuggery on this — or any other — planet will ever suffice for that.

“How do we place the energies and emanations of Apollo amidst the bloody kaleidoscope that was 1968?”

This immediately got me thinking of the oft-discussed dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (I was thinking especially of Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy”, which is the only treatment of it that I’ve read). Not only were the Apollo engineers truly Apollonian, appropriately enough, but the counterculturalists were truly Dionysian. Has anyone considered this before? It perhaps merits the scratching of a chin or two.

Any case. A pleasure. If you ever want to swap ideas on colonization tactics (I’m shooting for Europa – regardless of what Arthur C. Clarke says about leaving it alone – or Mars) let me know. Also. Insurance for an Inhospitable Earth Foundation? Who needs to concern themselves with the environment when you can just build self-sufficient pod-houses that recycle your oxygen and/or urine? Like colonizing space without ever leaving home.

2 things –

1. a joke: 2 astronauts sit on the lunar surface, looking back at the tranquil blue orb of their home planet.

first astronaut: amazing, isn’t it? really makes you think.
second astronaut: yeah… got any crisps?

2. this all made me think of the great moon hoax, new york 1835… winged moon-men sexually cavorting by the lunar lakes etc. if only.

I was most struck by Pete Conrad admitting, after dreaming of the moon, that it became nothing but facts to him, unable to see it in its mysterious state. The New York Times Magazine did a little interview with Buzz Aldrin last weekend and I found it really interesting that he gave himself communion on the surface of the moon, but now, instead of attending church, he attends rehab meetings on Sundays.

Did meeting their dreams disappoint?

So what’s our mundane, terrestrial version of the machine that whirled the astronauts around making their faces all rubbery — seeing how many Gs they could handle?