So.
Forty years ago today a couple engineers from this flying ball landed on another flying ball and planted a flag.
Let's all pat ourselves on the back one more time for humanity's great ingenuity.
"We got to the moon!" Yippee.
We can all hunker down and worry about more serious things now - apparently.
The bottom line is that we went to the moon and did nothing with that success. Really we could have never gone and would the world have been really different? Was the psychological effect of a moon landing stunt really of that much value to humanity?
I have to admit to thinking it was once. Today though I can't say that. It would have been far better for humanity to have hunkered down and tried to develop safe and cheap access to space for everyone. That's the stuff that changes things. That's the stuff that people should be patting themselves on the back for.
Where people really need to be focusing their attention on is the work that companies like SpaceX are doing.
The timing of their recent launch success is the thing we need to latch unto as a benchmark for human progress. Not the antics of a select few in another century who in the end did not do much to change the essential reality that spaceflight is expensive and dangerous.
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