Thread by @AlexandraErin

Whitey Very Slightly Closer To The Moon

That scene in The Crown where Philip, in a fit of ennui following the moon landing, flies his plane a bit higher than is safe for conventional aircraft, takes on a new poignancy in the era of the Whacky Space Race.

I'm honestly glad there are so many Whitey on the Moon references today because there's also a lot of people talking about how "everybody" used to rally around space flight, which I get what they mean but, like absolutely all absolutes, it does erase nuance.

I've long been somewhat cynically bearish on "space exploration" and when I mention this I get people telling me all the wonderful advances that came out of the space race, in material sciences and engineering and computers and so on.

But none of that stuff was on the moon?

And I think that if the moon landing is emblematic of anything about humanity, it's not necessarily all good. We "came together" and invented all of those marvels in order to stand on the impossible vantage point. That was the accomplishment.

Landing on the moon didn't give us computers. We created computers so that we could stand on the moon. The laws of physics didn't change when we decided to go to the moon; the computers were always possible.

The thing that fills me with a sense of awe and wonder about the moon landing and space flight in general, the way in which I see it as a pinnacle of human achievement, is that we figured out how to keep a human being alive in impossibly inhospitable and dangerous situations.

But we didn't have an actual reason to put human beings in those situations. The space race in 1969 was every bit as much of a pointless, wasteful dick-measuring contest between oligarchs with the power to destroy the world as today's pinewood derby version is.

And again I'll say that we didn't go to the moon to get computers; we got computers to get to the moon. And we did that to say we were there, to say we could, but also to say we did it before THE COMMUNISTS did.

The space race proved that technological knowhow can keep human beings alive in unthinkably dangerous situations, but the amount of work it takes to keep someone alive in space could be spent keeping people alive on earth.

And the amount of work and engineering and resources it would take to make a small compound on Mars habitable for human life... we could be bending that will towards keeping Earth habitable. We should be.