Fifty years ago we landed a man on the moon. Now we can’t even put a man in low earth orbit and have to pay the Russians millions to send people to the International Space Station.

Where is that spinning space station that we saw in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Where is the moon base we saw in 2001 and the cheesy British TV show Space 1999?

What do we have now? A space station in low earth orbit that we’re gonna have to eventually dump into the ocean.

I remember taking a trip through Officer’s Country on the Iredell County when we were off the coast of Viet Nam. They had a black and white TV and they were watching a replay of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. At that time, America thought the sky was the limit. The spinning space station and the moon bases in 2001 were possible. Back then whoda thunk that fifty years later we wouldn’t have the ability to put men on the moon and we would have to start all over?

I know whoda thunk it. That stupid African civil rights leader from Atlanta who drove a mule driven cart to one of the moon shots bitching about us wasting money on scientific advancement when instead we should be wasting money supporting a parasitic underclass.

But he was successful. We turned away from the moon. Since then we have wasted trillions in the war on poverty and what do we have to show for it? Crime infested cities like Detoilet, Chicongo, St. Louis, and many others.

Yeah, we built the space shuttle which was an engineering marvel, but that only took us to low earth orbit. We needed sumpin’ to take us higher. We needed that spinning space station as a way point to the moon. A space station in geosynchronous orbit or at a Lagrange Point.

By the way, that was how von Braun wanted to go to the moon. The challenge Kennedy gave us and the race with Russia was OK but von Braun wanted to do it in stages. He wanted that space station and from there to go to the moon. But that couldn’t be done in the time frame Kennedy gave NASA. We got to the moon but didn’t have a plan after that.

And what did we have after the space shuttle? Nothing. We had a president who decided NASA should be an outreach organization for Moslems and not a space agency. And of course, most importantly, NASA had to put more importance in Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) than in merit. Look at all of the stories lately about how racist and sexist NASA was because it was all white men involved in sending men to the moon. Newsflash! It was only white men who were engineers back then.

Fuck all of you assholes writing these stories!

And now fifty years later we’re now talking about going back to the moon, hopefully in 2024. We’re finally talking about moon bases, sumpin’ we should already have.

All I can think about with all of the hoopla over the fifty year anniversary of the moon landing is we have wasted fifty years.