One Giant Leap to Nowhere

This article is about the slow decline of NASA’s momentum of exploring additional planets once Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. The columnist, Tom Wolfe, was a child during the first lunar landing and explored Cape Canaveral after the landing. The man describes how the government was given an operation plan to take man to Mars as early as the 1950’s but the government would not approve it. During his tour at the Cape He discovered that his tour guide was actually a very special engineer who on the Apollo project. This man could not be replaced but he was laid off by the government once the landing occurred. Tom states that the whole team of scientist and engineers were being laid off because once the U.S beat the USSR to the moon, the government really did not care anymore about going farther beyond the moon. Tom describes how the government saw the space program as a military operation, not a scientific operation or exploration. He describes how the government was worried about the USSR being able to hurl down such as “thunderbolts” upon US cities and the US not being able to do anything about it. Tom is appalled how the US did little to advance space exploration once we reached the moon.

I find the information provided within the column is well written about NASA’s space program history and possible future. He provides many historical facts and personal experience to prove his opinion of NASA’s effort and enthusiasm on taking man pass the moon. He states the question about why they are this way, provides his opinion on why and backs it up thoroughly in his column. This is a example of how thorough his reasoning is and why his opinion is the way it is, “Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth’s own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes” (Wolfe 1). You can see how thorough his information is and how much he researched this topic. Overall this was a very informative Op-Ed article and I found it interesting to read. Especially since the new rocket is going to replace the Space Shuttle to take man back to the moon sometime next year. This might mean that NASA is going to show more enthusiasm on taken man pass the moon someday.