Wally Funk

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, but he did one incredibly cool thing regarding his trip into space last week aboard his own rocket ship, he invited Wally Funk to join him,

Wally Funk

In case your feelings about the current  billionaires' race to space range from blase to shitting bricks pissed off and you haven't been paying attention, Wally Funk is a pilot who in the early sixties was chosen to be part of a group of women who were tested to see how they would fare during space flight. The tests ran concurrently with the Mercury Program, the United States' first foray into manned space exploration. 

I guess it's appropriate to use the term "manned" here because in the end, the program that Ms. Funk took part in was ignobly scrubbed and the United States wouldn't send a woman into space until 1983 when Sally Ride climbed aboard the space shuttle Challenger for her first of two missions, both aboard that ill fated spacecraft. Ride joined NASA after seeing an ad in her college newspaper soliciting women to become applicants for astronaut training.

Much like everything during the early days of the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, the USSR was way out in the lead as their first female Cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova ventured into space inside her Vostok 6 capsule in June of 1963. Having orbited the earth 48 times in just shy of three days, Tereshkova logged more hours in space than all seven of the American Mercury astronauts combined. She remains the only woman to have flown a solo mission. 

The group of women which included Ms. Funk, took part in a privately funded  initiative called "The Women in Space Program" which was conceived in order to test whether women would make good candidates for space travel. It all began when the program's founder, Dr. William Lovelace who designed many of the tests that NASA used on their candidates for the Mercury Program, invited the highly decorated pilot Jerrie Cobb to take those same tests, all of which she passed. Lovelace's friend, Jacqueline Cochran, another noted pilot and businesswoman, agreed to finance a project that would test more. In all about 25 women, all elite pilots in their own right, were recruited for the project. Thirteen of the women passed the same insanely rigorous tests as the seven men who were chosen for the Mercury Project.

That is until Phase III of the tests which would have been held at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine. After Jerry Cobb took and passed all those as well, the Navy cancelled the tests as NASA, who was not  involved in the project, refused to sign off on it. 

There were a plethora of reasons why NASA might have been reticent to include women astronauts. Some were legitimate concerns (all subsequently put to rest) about how the female anatomy would handle space travel. Along those lines, probably the number one concern was menstruation in a weightless environment. I know that sounds ludicrous, simply a pretext to exclude women, but in space, an environment where even farting is cause for concern, no stone can remain unturned. Another cause for concern was how space would affect a woman's fertility. Apparently it doesn't. Then there were the  typically male concerns such as whether a woman's natural temperament, especially during her period, might prove problematic during a space flight.

On the other hand, the chief motivator for the study of the Women in Space Program, was the idea that there might be several advantages of having women astronauts over men. For example on average, women are smaller then men, they eat less, and consume less oxygen. As prosaic as that sounds, all that adds up to a significant reduction in cargo weight, meaning less fuel required per astronaut, a precious commodity in space travel. Women were also found to do better than men in isolation tests suggesting that they would fare better on very long missions such as a trip to Mars.

But all that would be way in the future and NASA had in the early sixties one and only goal, to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade as President Kennedy proposed during his speech before Congress on May 25, 1961, and no obstacle was going to get in its way.

Perhaps the biggest red flag of all for the ever PR conscious space agency was public opinion. I don't have the stats to back this up, but my guess is that despite the tens of thousands of young American women or maybe more at the time, tingling to get a chance at becoming an astronaut, the very real prospect of sending a woman to her death on a space mission, even if she willingly accepted the risk, would have been unacceptable for the majority of Americans at the time, and almost certainly would have killed the program. 

Pretexts aside, all that was moot. NASA's ace in the hole for not allowing women in space was the requirement imposed on them by President Eisenhower, that candidates for the astronaut corps all be selected from the ranks of elite military test pilots. By elite I mean jet pilots and guess what? The military did not allow women to fly jets in those days. 

Now it must be pointed out that in reality, at least during the Mercury program, there was little flying involved on the part of the astronauts as the flights were controlled remotely from the ground. The original astronauts in fact had to lobby for systems inside their capsules that would enable them to control the spacecraft, if ever so slightly. As I pointed out in my last post, the very first Mercury astronauts were chimpanzees, both of whom I'm guessing never flew planes, let alone jets. Truth be told, the original astronauts didn't need to be pilots at all, (Valentina Tereshkova wasn't) let alone jet pilots. Like practically everything involved with the space program in those days, the jet pilot requirement was pure PR. 

But rules are rules.

However there was another requirement that was waived for one of the male astronauts, a college degree, something John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, did not possess at the time.

Cobb and her fellow astronaut hopeful Janey Hart hoping to take advantage of that Glenn exception, appealed to President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson (who oversaw NASA) and the issue was brought before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics who examined the possibility that gender discrimination may have played a role in the matter, (ya think?). 

Among those testifying before the committee against having women astronauts was none other than John Glenn himself.

 At those hearings, Glenn said:

The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.

As unenlightened as those words sound today, Glenn, definitely a man of his time, wasn't too far off base, at least in describing the social norms if not necessarily the reality of 1962 America. If you're not old enough to remember, take a look at the way popular culture prescribed gender based roles for men and women. It was a world filled with women who served predominantly as homemakers married to professional men. They had names like June Cleaver, Laura Petry, and just plain Jeannie whose fictional partner whom she called Master, was an astronaut. 

Perhaps the baddest pilot of all,
Jerrie Cobb, who when all was said and done,
in William Lovelace's rigorous astronaut tests
finished in the top 2 percentile of all
potential astronauts, male and female. 

What you never saw on TV or in the movies movies in the late fifties and early to mid sixties were bad ass female pilots with names like Myrtle Cagle or Wally Funk, or physicists turned astronauts named Sally Ride. That name did however serve as the refrain to a very cool soul tune from the era made famous by Wilson Pickett called "Mustang Sally."

But it wasn't just pop culture where women's options were limited. Check out this video of clips of John F. Kennedy press conferences and see how he dismissive he was of the woman reporter who sincerely questioned him about promoting equal rights for women in this country.

That reporter, Mae Craig, a highly respected veteran journalist who marched with Suffragists in the twenties, implied in her question that despite working hard to promote the rights "of others", the Kennedy administration was doing little to advance the rights of women. As you can see from Kennedy's response, the issue of equal rights for women was simply not taken very seriously by him, or for that matter mainstream America in the early sixties.  

Mae Craig's question to the president turned out to be prophetic insofar as women astronauts were concerned. While Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin and should have opened the doors for women astronauts, it didn't. It would take another eight years when an amendment was added to the title which granted women the right to legal representation in their quest to become astronauts. Consequently in 1978, NASA dropped its requirement that astronauts be jet pilots and started recruiting female candidates for the corps, precisely the time Sally Ride found the brochure that would change her life.  

Since Sally Ride's first mission in 1983, as of a week ago, 51 American women astronauts have flown into space.

Last Tuesday, Wally Funk raised that number to 52. Coincidentally that day was the 52nd anniversary of the first "manned" lunar landing, 

At age 21, Funk was the youngest member of the Women in Space program and one of the 13 who passed all of the astronaut tests given to them. She also passed equivalents of the Phase III tests, having taken them privately, outside of the naval facilities.

Her background was similar to that of her fellow Women in Space members in that she fell in love with planes and aviation at a very early age, in her case at about the same time that she learned to walk. She had her first flight lesson at nine, and received her pilot's license, AND became a professional pilot at 19. 

Wally Funk was thwarted from pursuing her dreams to their fullest her entire life because of her gender. Perhaps it started in high school when she wanted to take electives in shop and technical drawing but was told she could only take home economics classes. So she did what any sensible person would do, she left high school early and enrolled in a college where she would thrive. I guess you could do that in those days. 

Later when she applied for a job as a commercial airline pilot, a position she was more than qualified for, she was rejected on the pretext that there were no rest rooms for women in their training facilities.  

And on and on. Yet despite that, up to this point by all accounts she has led a very rewarding life in the field of aviation including high level positions in both the FAA and the FTSB. 

I say up to this point because clearly she's not finished. As she emerged from the capsule after her brief encounter with space last week, she was clearly exhilerated but bemoaned the fact that the experience was way too short and couldn't wait to do it again. Long before Bezos asked her to accompany him aboard the maiden passenger flight of his spacecraft, Ms. Funk put down a deposit to fly aboard Richard Branson's spacecraft when it goes into service shuttling passengers for brief trips outside the earth's atmosphere. That spacecraft unlike Bezos's, is a space plane, controlled by two pilots who like the old Space Shuttles, guide their craft to a landing on a runway rather than a capsule parachuting to the ground.

As part of the competition between the two billionaires, perhaps Branson will top Bezos by asking Funk to take over the controls in one of his space planes. 

Now THAT would be sweet justice.

In that vein, John Glenn finally got the comeuppance he deserved for the words he spoke at that hearing so many years ago. For twenty three years he held the record as the oldest person, at 77, to have been in space. Wally Funk at 82 beat Glenn's record last Tuesday. Given the current push to send paying customers into space, I'm sure that record will not hold for long. I also wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Ms. Funk breaks her own record. 

Wally Funk's list of accomplishments in aviation as well as other fields is too numerous to list here but in case you're interested, as you should be, you can read all about them here.

Today she is only one of two surviving members of that elite group of pilots who participated in the Women in Space program who long after the fact, received the moniker "The Mercury 13". 

Ironically, most of the members of The Mercury 13 never met one another during the project as their tests were held separately. Many of them finally got together on the occasion of the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-63, the first shuttle mission to be piloted by a woman, Eileen Collins. Here is a photo of them taken at Cape Canaveral in front of the launch pad in 1995:

Seven members of the Mercury 13 from left to right:
Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Ratley,
Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman.

The total number of women of all nationalities who have logged hours in space is 65.* Needless to say all of them owe their careers to these pioneers of space and the rest of their remarkable bad ass comrades. 

Here in alphabetical order, is the list of the Mercury 13:

Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, her twin sister Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane Briggs Hart, Jean Hixson, Irene Leverton, Jerri Truhill Sloan, Bernice Stedman, Gene Nora Stumbough,  and Rhea Woltmann.

In reflecting on the women who could have been astronauts, Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter had this to say:

"NASA never had any intention of putting those women in space. The whole idea was foisted upon it, and it was happy to have the research data, but those women were before their time."

That's for sure.

* Sadly, Christa McAuliffe, NASA's first civilian on a space mission is not counted among the 65 because her one mission which ended tragically aboard the Shuttle Challenger, never technically made it into space.

Including McAuliffe, a total of four women have lost their lives during space missions. The other three are Judith Resnik, McAuliffe's crewmate aboard Challenger, and Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark, both of whom perished as a result of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. 

Tragic as the loss of their lives was, the lessons learned from the mistakes that led to the catastrophic accidents that caused their deaths have helped make space travel a little less risky for their successors. 

I have no doubt that to a woman, each of them would look at their ultimate sacrifice that way.

They and their crewmates who perished aboard Challenger in 1986, and Columbia in 2003, fourteen in all, will never be forgotten. 

Lest We Forget...

Before we know it, we'll be upon the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing. Funny, it seems like just yesterday that I commemorated in this space, the fortieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's four hour stroll on the surface of the moon. No doubt there will be worldwide observances of that momentous event on the 20th of July next year.

There was an equally momentous event in the history of the race to the moon, whose half century anniversary went all but unnoticed last year. Small wonder, it was not the glorious culmination of President Kennedy's daring pledge in 1961 to land a man on the moon within the decade, not to mention thousands of years' worth of human dreams.  The event was in fact, not a triumph at all, but an unmitigated failure which ended in tragedy, the loss of three astronauts whose ill fated mission, Apollo I, never even got off the ground.

Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee pose in front of the launchpad which surrounded the spacecraft
in which they perished on January 27, 1967. 

But most space historians agree that the lessons learned from the catastrophic accident that took place on Launch Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy on January 27, 1967 and took the lives of Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger Chaffee, (names that are forever etched in my memory), were essential building blocks that paved the way for the moon landing that took place just two and one half years later.

Long after his crowning achievement, Neil Armstrong would reflect upon what it took to reach the Moon:

The rate of progress is proportional to the risk encountered, ...the public at large may well be more risk averse than the individuals in our business, but to limit the progress in the name of eliminating risk is no virtue.

There is perhaps no better account of the early days of the U.S. space program than Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff, which was followed in 1983 by an equally inspiring Phillip Kaufman film by the same name. Both open with the story of the engineers, technicians and most importantly the pilots chasing a "demon" known as the sound barrier. Before it was done successfully, no one knew if it was even possible to fly an aircraft faster than 750 mph, the speed of sound. That demon lived somewhere above that speed, "when air could no longer move out of the way" making flight impossible, or so it was thought.

The names of those folks who sacrificed everything to chase that demon, military test pilots who during their typically short careers, (about one in four did not to live to see retirement), were unknown to the general public as their missions were classified and their exploits kept top secret. To a man, those who risked their lives on a daily basis had what Wolfe described as, you guessed it, "the right stuff." He wrote:

It was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life, any fool could do that. No, the idea seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go up again the next day ...

The man who piloted the first plane to break the sound barrier was USAF test pilot, Captain Chuck Yeager who accomplished the feat it in an X-1 rocket plane on October 14, 1947, taking off from what would become Edwards Air Force Base in California. The legendary Yeager as Wolfe's ultimate possessor of the right stuff, plays a huge role in both the book and in the film where he makes an uncredited cameo appearance beside the actor who plays him in the movie, the late Sam Shepard. You can see the real Yeager (who is still with us at this writing) working behind the bar in this scene from the movie.

Another prominent figure in the movie is Gus Grissom, who along with fellow Edwards newbie, test pilot Gordon Cooper, serves as a comic foil to the somewhat aloof Yeager, of whom the two men grudgingly stood in awe. When Grissom amd Cooper arrive for the first time at the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the watering hole that served as the focus of social life at the base, the clown-like Cooper, played by Dennis Quaid, brags that one day his likeness will join all the other portraits of pilots that adorned the bar. Cooper is brought down to earth (so to speak) by the formidable proprietor of the bar, Pancho Barnes, herself a notable aviator, who informed the cocky young pilot that those portraits were all of pilots killed on the job.

Once word got out that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first object into space in 1957, a satellite called Sputnik, the U.S. Government scrambled desperately to make up for lost time, and the space race was on. While today it seems obvious that our first astronauts would be chosen from the ranks of military test pilots, that was not always the case. Unlike aircraft that were under total control of their pilots, the new spacecraft could be controlled exclusively from the ground. The real men behind the machines and their success, at least in their own eyes, were the jet propulsion guys, rocket scientists if you prefer, who bristled at the idea that pilots would make good, and by that I mean, obedient passengers aboard their spaceships. For their part, the headstrong test pilots bristled at the idea of not having full control over what they insisted on calling, their spacecraft. Despite objections from the rocket scientists, at least according to the film, it was President Eisenhower who insisted that military test pilots become the first astronauts.

The much decorated Yeager would have been a natural choice, but his lack of a college degree made him ineligible as far as the space program's PR people went. Ever conscious of image, they wanted only America's best and brightest to ride our rocket ships into destiny, and while Yeager may have been one of not the best we had to offer, he wasn't one of the brightest, at least not on paper.

From the Edwards Air Force test pilot group, Grissom and Cooper were selected along with Deke Slayton. From the Navy, aviators Walter Schirra and Alan Shepherd were chosen. Rounding out the group of seven men selected for project Mercury to be America's first astronauts, were U.S. Marine Corps pilots Scott Carpenter and John Glenn.

If I have one criticism of The Right Stuff, the film, it is the extreme lengths it went to contrast the exemplary, goody goody public image of the astronauts that NASA tried to paint, with the real men. This is especially true for its depiction of Gus Grissom as played by Fred Ward. While every description I've read describes Grissom as an exceptionally capable, hard worker as well as an equally hard partier, the movie emphasizes the latter but barely touches on the former. The truth is that Grissom, whom many considered to be the finest pilot of the seven Mercury astronauts, would not have been in the running for America's first man in space, (he ended up being the second), had it not been for his exceptional skill and dedication. Grissom was also selected commander of the first Gemini mission, as well as the ill-fated first Apollo mission. I read somewhere that were it not for his tragic death, Grissom may very well have been selected to be the first man to walk on the moon, instead of Neil Armstrong.

Grissom's career was the most star-crossed of all his peers. His first trip into space on July 21, 1961, the second Mercury sub-orbital mission, went off without a hitch until splashdown. The plan had it for Grissom to remain put inside his capsule until a rescue helicopter arrived on the scene to help stabilize the craft. But before the chopper arrived, an explosive charge that enabled the hatch to open went off, causing sea water to rush into the capsule. Grissom exited the sinking capsule to escape the possibility of a watery grave. The first helicopter crew to arrive on he scene made a valiant effort to save the capsule but it was for naught, the water logged capsule sank along with its valuable contents. Grissom himself barely escaped death as he had to fend for himself in the choppy water as the chopper crew worked on saving the capsule. Grissom claimed that the hatch blew on its own, an idea that was disputed by the rocket scientists who suggested that Grissom triggered the hatch himself as he panicked while bobbing around inside the capsule as he awaited the rescue helicopter.

That incident prompted the following exchange in the movie where Edwards test pilots not selected for the astronaut program scoffed at Grissom and his fellow astronauts:

Jack Ridley: Pull that stuff on flight test, it's all over for him. I say he screwed the pooch, pardner. Plain and simple.
Chuck Yeager: Yeah, well, sometimes you get a pooch that can't be screwed, ya know?
Liaison Man: [chuckling] Exactly! Right now the President's got his own problems with the Bay of Pigs, he doesn't want the astronauts' image tarnished. Nothing these guys do is gonna be called a failure... But you'd think the public'd know that they're just doing what monkeys have done... (American's first living space traveler was indeed a chimpanzee by the name of Ham).
Chuck Yeager: Monkeys? Think a monkey knows he's sitting on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys, they know that, see? Well, I'll tell you somethin' - it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that's on TV. Ol' Gus, he did alright.

Perhaps it was sour grapes but Yeager and the liaison man in that exchange had a point. The race to beat the Russians to the moon was so intense that no obstacle, not even incompetence or the possible death of an astronaut, would have stood in the way of NASA's inexorable charge forward. In that vein, the public's perception of the astronauts had to be kept pure and no one, not even the press in those days would dare to openly suggest that Grissom might have "screwed the pooch."

Incidentally, Grissom's story about the hatch blowing on its own was corroborated by evidence unearthed years later.

As I mentioned above, NASA's opinion of Grissom was certainly high enough for him to be selected to command two subsequent missions, both of which were to be the inaugural flights of new programs.  Gemini, America's first two manned spacecraft would incorporate new techniques and maneuvers into the skill sets of the U.S. space program such as space walks, the rendezvous between two spacecraft, and extended time in space, and the Apollo program which would use those new skill sets to enable it land on the moon.

It was a quantum leap from Grissom's primitive first flight, which lasted only about fifteen minutes, to landing on the moon, which would happen almost exactly eight years later to the day. That fact was made tragically clear, 51 years ago today. Up to that point there had been sixteen NASA manned space missions with a few mishaps and partial failures, but no loss of life. The Gemini program had catapulted the United States ahead of the Soviet Union for the first time in the space race, and all systems were go, or so they seemed, for a trip to the moon. But Grissom and his crewmates on Apollo 1 knew better, they were skeptical that their spacecraft was ready. Design flaws were abundant and the crew knew that corners were being cut in the haste to get to the moon in a timely matter. Things got so bad that Grissom hung a lemon in the Apollo flight simulator.

In this picture, the crew posed in mock prayer with a model of their space capsule to illustrate their frustrations with the preparations for their trip, scheduled for February, 1967, the debut of the three man Apollo spacecraft. The picture was meant to be a joke, but it was a tragic harbinger for what in retrospect was the inevitable result of complacency and ill preparedness.

At 1PM EST on January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White, the first American to walk in space, and Roger Chaffee a rookie astronaut, climbed into their spacecraft for what was intended to be a routine "plugs out" launch simulation to determine if the systems inside the craft were working normally on their own. The test was assumed to be without risk as the rocket sitting underneath the capsule was not loaded with fuel. The astronauts were sealed inside their capsule with full flight conditions in place, spacesuits connected to a steady stream of pure oxygen. Things began to go wrong almost immediately as the astronauts detected a foul odor emanating from their suits. Then a communication problem took place which caused a frustrated Grissom to blurt out: "how are we going to get to the moon if we can't communicate two or three buildings over?" Delay upon delay took place to troubleshoot the problems.

In all the astronauts remained strapped into their seats in the confinement of the capsule for five and one half hours before a spark, probably from faulty wiring ignited a fire that was fed by the pure oxygen environment inside the capsule and the scores of objects made of combustible materials. At 6:31 EST, Grissom could be heard over the communications system yelling "Fire". A few other scrambled voices and screams from the astronauts could be heard in the subsequent seconds. A desperate attempt was made by them to release the ridiculously complicated escape hatch, ironic given Gus Grissom's problems with the hatch on his first space flight. In normal circumstances, it would take about ninety seconds to open the hatch from the inside of the Apollo capsule, much longer from the outside. It was estimated that the astronauts were rendered unconscious from the noxious gasses produced by the fire in fifteen seconds. Despite the desperate efforts of the ground crew who risked their own lives trying to free the men, the astronauts never had a chance.

The tragedy may have been a real eye opener to the American public and especially to the powers that be who ran the space program, but not of course to the astronauts who knew all along that they were putting their lives on the line every time they stepped into a spacecraft. After all the investigations, out of necessity, heads rolled, layers of bureaucracy were eliminated, and most of the kinks in the process were worked out. The spacecraft was re-worked, including eliminating most of the combustible materials, a complete overhaul of the hatch system and most importantly replacing the all oxygen environment with one combining oxygen and nitrogen. On October 11th the following year, the backup crew for Apollo I, Walter Cunningham, Donn Eislie, and one of the Mercury 7, Walter Schirra, blasted off from the same launchpad, atop the same rocket, the Saturn 1B, as their predecessors hoped to twenty months earlier. Apollo VII as it was dubbed, orbited the earth 163 times and was the first successful manned mission of the Apollo program. On December 21, 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, sitting atop a much larger Saturn V rocket, blasted off from Cape Kennedy. That rocket's size was necessary to enable the spacecraft to leave the earth's orbit, which it did later that day. By Christmas Eve, the three were orbiting the moon. In doing so, they became the first human beings to set eyes on the earth from outer space. This is how it looked:

Earthrise from the moon, December 24, 1968.  Photograph by William Anders.

Here is a fascinating account of the Apollo VIII mission.

As the late Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon said:

We went to explore the moon and in fact discovered the earth.

I don't think it would be hyperbolic to call this image, made by astronaut William Anders, the most important photograph ever made.  For the first time we saw our beautiful blue planet as it truly is, all alone, cast adrift in a sea of darkness and desolation. It certainly should come as no surprize that the publication of this and subsequent photographs of the earth made from the moon helped inspire the environmental movement and the idea that the resources of our lovely planet, abundant as they may be, are finite and worth preserving.

For a brief shining moment in the sixties, amidst all the turmoil of that decade, human beings undertook a seemingly impossible mission and accomplished it. Along the way we learned a lot, not only about space travel, but about ourselves. At that time it seemed that with hard work and sacrifice, anything might be possible.

Unfortunately, today we all know better.

Out of greed and convenience, the powers that be in our time, have all but rejected science and what we have learned about the fragility of our planet since we went to the moon almost fifty years ago. Some even go so far to say that the moon landing was fake news, that it was in fact, staged by Hollywood. The climate for ignorance and irrationality is so intense these days, there are even people who are proud to publicly proclaim that the earth is indeed flat.

We could go on and on about the merits of sending human beings into space. But given the current attacks, even from the very top on knowledge, science and even human intelligence itself, perhaps it's time to return to space, if only to awaken ourselves from the slumber of complacency, indifference  and ignorance. Because it wasn't slumber, indifference and ignorance that got us to the moon, it was hard work, sacrifice and perhaps above all, science.

Perhaps on this day, the anniversary of the death of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, we can honor them and their sacrifice* by re-confirming our commitment to hard work and sacrifice in the name of truth, knowledge and science, and the eradication of ignorance, be it self-imposed or not, especially where it concerns our beautiful planet, our one and only home.

I think they'd be OK with that.


* not to forget the last crew members of the space shuttle Challenger whom we lost on January 28, 1983:

Francis R. Scobee, Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Gregory Jarvis, Payload Specialist.
Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, Teacher

and the last crew members of the space shuttle Columbia whom we lost on February 1, 2003:

Rick Husband, Commander

William C. McCool, Pilot

Michael P. Anderson, Payload Commander/Mission Specialist 3 

David M. Brown, Mission Specialist 1 

Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist 2 

Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist 4 

Ilan Ramon, Payload Specialist