Apollo 11 moon landing highlights (CBS News)
Here’s what America watched as history was made in 1969.
It’s not the government. It’s private enterprise. The real space flight advances of the last decade have come from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and, to a lesser extent Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Other, much smaller companies, such as Astrobotic, already have plans to make deliveries to the moon.
If we are to return to the moon in my lifetime, it will be because of private companies and visionaries like Musk. NASA has its marching orders, but it doesn’t have the funding.
Back on that night in rural West Virginia, I’d thought about Robert A. Heinlein’s stories of D.D.Harriman. In the novella The Man who Sold the Moon, Harriman, a take-no-prisoners businessman, does whatever he must to fund the first moon landing. When I think about Musk today, I see that fictional entrepreneur in real life.
Recently, in a Time Magazine interview, Musk said, ” It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.” His timeframe? “With an uncrewed vehicle I believe we could land on the moon in two years. So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside.”
Musk has a lot of other things on his plate — like Tesla — but if we are to make it back to the moon, I’d bet on private adventurers. I hope they make it. It’s profoundly sad to grow old and see us unable to match what we did 50 years ago, never mind bettering it.
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