Tuesday 17 January 2017

Another One Bites The (Moon) Dust

For those of us with an interest all astronomy, it is a depressing fact that 1969 saw the first man to walk on the moon and 1972 saqw the last one because we haven't bothered going back since.
With the death of Eugene Cernan, of the 12 men who have walked on the moon, six are now dead and of the remaining half dozen the youngest is 81 so we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other the our own planet.   
Eugene Cernan was the last person to walk on the moon although that was due to his seat being closest to the door of the lunar module so he was last in and had to shut the door behind him.
During the interviews being shown during clips on the TV, he said something quite revealing, stating that to his mind man went to the moon 'too early considering what we’re doing now in space'.
He did make a good point because the next step should have been moon bases and manned landings on Mars but almost 50 years on we have abandoned our lunar partner and we are still trying, and failing, to successfully land probes on the red planet so landing a man on one of our nearest planetary neighbours is still a pipe dream.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've had breakfast and lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Cool stories.

Falling on a bruise said...

He gave a few lectures here last year but I failed to get tickets.

Anonymous said...

15 years ago. Frankly, he was very very odd. Body language was wrong. Non-verbals were unusual. Carrying a conversation difficult. It was a casual situation with another astronaut (my boss) do he should have been comfortable. He used a lot innuendo. He also used a lot of locker room talk.

Falling on a bruise said...

I have heard he can be a bit spikey and awkward and apparently he was a bit bitter about being the second man on the moon, don't know if he was penciled in to be the first and Armstrong beat him to it.