50 years. Recent accomplishments seem so slight compared to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth" .

For about 10 years, NASA and it's manned space flight programs were really interesting and exciting. Those days are gone.

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

Not for lack of trying. NASA is at the mercy of the President and Congress. More than one program has been cancelled due to a change of administration and a desire by an incoming administration to put their own mark on potential missions. Toss in Congress, where senators and representatives fight for $$$ for their states and districts and you have an organization that has a tremendous challenge trying to plan. I can tell you that there are definite plans for beyond LEO missions (moon, Mars, etc), but with Presidents and Congress constantly changing direction every few years it's tough. Budgets are fought for every year - you don't have a 5 or 10 year budget allocation to better plan and be firm with a mission direction.

And then you have the entire "failure is not an option" mindset. The public seems quite enthused about SpaceX, but guess what? They've failed several times. How many failed first stage landings did SpaceX have before their sting of fantastic landings? NASA doesn't have that luxury. Each failure is played up in the media or serves as a potential cancellation point by politicians. The commercial sector doesn't face cancellation of a program after one accident (though they do face extinction if they have a string of accidents as paying customers will go elsewhere). And be assured that if NASA had the same first stage landing history as SpaceX, that Congress would have questioned the program after the first failure, and more than likely cancelled it after the second in a row.

Despite that, you do have to look at some more recent accomplishments. The International Space Station was an incredible feat. That would not have been possible in the '60s or '70s. It may seem somewhat boring, but as someone on the inside, I know just how complicated the process or assembling in space and ensuring systems work under extreme environments for years on end.

Thanks for sharing. That was a great read of what was a terrible tragedy.

However, that was heady times for space travel. I remember it all well. I was a young kid. My Dad at the time was a High School Science teacher, and his enthusiasm and enthrallment with it all passed on to me.

We watched as much of the subsequent Apollo missions as we could live on TV.

When you think of all the technological advances that have happened in the past 50 years, and you think of what they had to operate with back then - these really were aluminum tin-cans with crude computers and a bunch of wires, all sitting on top of what was essentially a controlled bomb!

They did make it to the moon and back - First with Apollo 8 to make it too the moon and back and then of course, the epic actually landing on the moon for the first time with Apollo 11 - I still get chills whenever I hear the grainy recording of Neil Armstrong saying, "That's one small step . . . . ". There were so many un-knowns! One example - they really did not know if they could lift-off back up to the command module after they had been on the moon. I mean they had a very good idea that it would work - but it was not 100%.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

I read that a couple days ago. this comment from the author was pretty cool:

"Had in interesting conversation with a former mentor and scuba dive master about the oxygen environment in the block 1 CM for ground testing. He asked about oxygen toxicity at 16.7psia, and the question brought me up short. My immediate response was "Oh, well, they were wearing their suits, so it doesn't matter what the cabin was pressurized at........oh." Because pressure suits need to be pressurized to work. And the block 1 CM didn't have a multigas system, as Eric mentioned, so that means their suits were pressurized with pure O2 at a level even higher than the 16.7psia of the CM.

So, I asked Apollo EECOM Sy Liebergot about it, since he's pretty friendly with Ars (EECOMs were the flight controllers responsible for watching over the spacecraft's environmental systems, among other things). He also didn't know and made some inquiries, and then he told me the crew's suits would have been at about 17 psia, just a whisker over ambient pressure in the cabin.

So what about toxicity?

In what can only be called a marvelous example of a laconic reply, Sy drawled, "I've been told it takes a while."

One more example of how NASA's culture of risk avoidance differs now versus back then. "

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LLLEEEEEEEEEEEERRRROOOYYY JEEENNNNNKKKIIINNNNNS!!!

this, in my mind, is what made these guys heroes. They were essentially taking their lives in their hands daily to stretch our capabilities. Everything they did was the first time it was done. Or the first time we learned something, for good or bad.