Notes from around the Human Experience…
TO BOLDLY GO…WHERE WE’VE ALREADY GONE BEFORE: Vice President Mike Pence – whose motorcade we witnessed then reviewed in this space a couple of weeks ago – visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last week and talked about America’s space program.
Usually when a vice president is dispatched to places like this a major policy announcement is forthcoming, but like everything that comes out of the Trump Administration, very little of substance was offered. Pence did say America would return to the moon and eventually put Americans on Mars, and he did announce the National Space Council, which Pence chairs, would meet for the first time since the first Bush Administration later this summer.
Perhaps Pence didn’t know, or chose not to mention, that America has a program in place to return to the moon and go to Mars. Project Orion was announced in 2011.
How The Mighty Have Fallen: America, the only nation to put men on the moon, cannot put anybody into space anymore and in six (6) years Project Orion has had one (1) unmanned spaceflight so far and a manned flight is not expected until 2023 and even that might be a stretch.
Dry, Technical Matter: Recall that in the 1960’s America – spurred on by President Kennedy’s demand that we put a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth before that decade was out – started from scratch and met that goal with a few months to spare.
Please Pass The Dry, Technical Matter: To be exact, 2,983 days elapsed from the time Kennedy said let’s go to the moon to the time Apollo 11 returned safely home. Now we need 14 years, minimum, to get someone into space again and you don’t have to be Neil Armstrong to figure it will be at least 2035 before we put anyone on Mars.
2035!
Get Your Official Daily Dose Policy Right Here: We fully support a manned mission to Mars, it’s a shame we haven’t done so already and it is a sign of how far this once-great nation has fallen that it is taking us so long to do it now.
Regular reader(s) of this crap know we are unabashed fans of the space program. We’re on record as saying the Apollo 11 mission which first put man on the moon was our species’ finest hour and we also believe that had we wanted to we could have used the momentum provided by the entire Apollo program to have had men on Mars in the 1980’s.
America took a flier on that, though, and the loss is ours. We missed out on both the great national effort that going to Mars would have required, not to mention whatever technological advances that would have presented themselves. America had a responsibility to itself and the rest of the planet to go to Mars and we were, and continue to be, derelict in that responsibility.
GREAT MOMENTS IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Wall Street Journal debuts on this date in 1889. It had its origins in hand-delivered news bulletins delivered to traders at the New York Stock Exchange earlier in the decade and, later, a daily summary called Customer’s Afternoon Letters.
The Wall Street Journal cost two cents in 1889, about 51 cents in today’s money. With an average circulation of over 2.3 million, the Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation.
Let’s Go To Ted With Business News: The previous Saturday, July 6, 1889, what come to be known as the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 12 industrial stocks closed at 87.71, down from the last noted close of 91.38 on June 12.
FunFact: This past Friday the Dow, now comprised of 30 stocks, closed at 21,414.34, up 94.30.
Oh Yeah: The period that appears at the end of the word ‘Journal’ in the masthead was there in that first edition, too.
As Long As We’re In The Area: The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits its lowest point of the Great Depression, 41.22, on this date in 1932. It would not reach its pre-Depression high of 380.33 on August 30, 1929 until November, 1954.
This Type Of Irony Is Difficult To Take: The United States sends humans into space for the final time on this date in 2011, when the space shuttle Atlantis, with a crew of four, blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis would return to Earth on July 21, marking the end of American manned space flight.
QuoteBook: …the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards. – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Answer To The Last Trivia Question: Hawaii consumes the most Spam per capita of any state in the Union.
Today’s Stumper: What is the only company whose stock has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average continuously since its inception? – Answer next time!
