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Moonbase Armstrong?

W

watermelony2k

Vice Admiral
Admiral
A bill recently passed in congress that is giving NASA more money next year, authorizing an additional shuttle launch, and there's also this interesting tidbit..

http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/tariqmalik/

A new bill, the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063), that cleared the House Science and Technology space and aeronautics subcommittee on Monday carries an interesting caveat. If passed into law, NASA apparently MUST name its first lunar outpost after Armstrong – the first human to set foot on another world during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969.
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Would have preferred Moonbase Alpha....
moonbase_alpha.jpg


(Especally since Armstrong has done NOTHING to further our conquest of space since coming back. Instead of becoming the Lindbergh of the Space Age and promoting exploration, he retreated into hiding. A large part of what is wrong with NASA today resulted....)
 
JustAFriend said:
Would have preferred Moonbase Alpha....
moonbase_alpha.jpg


(Especally since Armstrong has done NOTHING to further our conquest of space since coming back. Instead of becoming the Lindbergh of the Space Age and promoting exploration, he retreated into hiding. A large part of what is wrong with NASA today resulted....)
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Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. Neil Armstrong served on the Rogers Commission that investigated the causes of the shuttle Challenger explosion. Go blame someone else for NASA's ills.

Despite NASA's problems, they've done fantastic work with the unmanned exploration of the solar system.
 
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I would prefer the Von Braun Moonbase as he was responsible for putting Armstrong on the Moon.
 
JustAFriend said:
(Especally since Armstrong has done NOTHING to further our conquest of space since coming back. Instead of becoming the Lindbergh of the Space Age and promoting exploration, he retreated into hiding. A large part of what is wrong with NASA today resulted....)
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You blame Armstrong for NASA's downfall? How about an organizational culture that went from pioneering to bean-counting?
 
Bad Bishop said:
Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer.
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He really wasn't. Lindbergh was a strident advocate of democracy, was opposed to the oppression of the Jews (it doesn't seem he was aware of the Holocaust, as many informed Americans were not), and wasn't any greater a proponent of Nordicism or eugenics than were Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, or George Patton. He also provided intelligence reports to the US government regarding the progress of German industry and military aviation, and his warnings to the British and French regarding their military weaknesses may have saved the United Kingdom from invasion. The most pro-Nazi statement I've been able to find of his is this:
“the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization.”
​
This statement seems more anti-Soviet than pro-Nazi, and was basically correct. The Soviet victory in eastern and central Europe deeply wounded Western society, and it nearly ended the world in 1962. At the very least, it heralded a half century of the world living in fear.


Despite my remarks in Lindbergh's favor, I agree that one must respect Armstrong's philosophy toward post-lunar life. As the first man on the moon, he has an obligation to remain as unblemished a person as he can. Involvement in politics can easily tarnish one's reputation, even when engaged in only worthy causes.
 
I think Armstrong was in a unique position to further space program aims, one that nobody else on Earth could get to at the time. So it does seem like he turned his back in large part, and I think you can be critical in the same way (though a much greater magnitude) that you be with respect to Timothy Dalton ducking publicity while playing James Bond. Why? IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY! Don't be the first man to set foot on another world and think it is business as usual just because you treat it that way. If so, then get out of the way for somebody else who won't exploit it but won't squander it either.

I was almost 9 when Apollo XI landed. I'd been following the space program for years, subscribed to NASA FACTS, the works. The years that followed (and I'm talking way before all the shuttle delays, let alone the shuttle years) really proved that notion of Heinlein's that it takes a special kind of incompetence to take the greatest achievement in human history and make it seem boring ... and NASA did that.

I'm not suggesting Moonbase Aldrin or Moonbase Lucas or something sillyass like that (Maybe Moonbase Grissom ... he was commander for what should have been the first Apollo flight) And I guess you couldn't get away with calling it Moonbase Coon for the guy who made Trek work.

Most everybody who has heroes as children wind up seeing them with feet of clay. For me, it happened in spades with folks like Pete Rose. But by the same token, there are folks with feet of clay who somehow still stride like giants (Orson Welles comes to mind.) If I plop Armstrong into the equation, he doesn't even have feet of clay, he just sinks into quicksand rather than taking any sort of significant steps. I would not name it after him, any more than I'd've named the first orbiter ENTERPRISE.
 
I like the idea of Moonbase Armstrong. After all, he was the first man to set foot on the moon. By the way, has anyone read Armstrong's biography, First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong by James R. Hansen. It's an excellent book.
 
C. Cole-Chakotay said:
I like the idea of Moonbase Armstrong. After all, he was the first man to set foot on the moon. By the way, has anyone read Armstrong's biography, First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong by James R. Hansen. It's an excellent book.
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And, as that book points out (at least by implication), one thing he's done for the space programme in his 'retirement' is teach aeronautical engineering. You can't get back to the Moon without funding to build the ships, so there is a need for political campaigning, but you can't do it without engineers to design and build them either...
 
Let's find a really popular fascist to name it after, like Dirty Harry Callaghan.

The Armstrong named is too loaded anyway. Can't you see headlines from a couple decades hence about "strong arm tactics quash freedom movement on Armstrong?"

As much as I blame Armstrong for not being an out-there proponent, the guy talking about NASA screwing up is right too. Ever since NASA started hiring from the Mormon Mafia (I think with Tom Paine, around the time of the moon landing), it really started going to Hell.
 
I know Aldrin's name doesn't carry quite the weight of Armstrong's but he's remained a strong proponent of a more active space program for years, as with his Mars cycler idea, to little or no effect. So long as the American people don't see sufficient value in a well-funded and managed aggressive space program it doesn't matter who's advocating for it, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, or Buck Rogers.

And I have no doubt Buzz would be more than willing to submit his name as a compromise for that of the first moon base.
 
Who cares what they call it, it can be called Moonbase Farthole for all I care, as long as they DO build it, and soon!!!!!
 
Brent said:
Who cares what they call it, it can be called Moonbase Farthole for all I care, as long as they DO build it, and soon!!!!!
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LOL this is how I feel, at the rate we're going I feel like we aren't even going to GET a moonbase. While a good name for the base, it seems like jumping the gun to me
 
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