NOT ANOTHER DAMNED MOON RACE

 It seems that everyone I read and had respect for keeps defining our moon program as a race to the moon that China may win and oh no! I'm a little disgusted by this incorporation of any kind of race into our space program and trip to the moon. I really outraged that it is being sold in these terms because we got damned near nothing at all from racing to the moon the last time. If you look at it by the right light, say moon light, we got nothing but some rocks.

The goal was to reach the moon. The purpose in reaching the moon was to use it as a stepping stone to the conquest of the solar system and the introduction of man in space beyond Earth. That was the reason we did all that and it somehow turned into the race that the United States of America one, the Soviet Union never really played and then, having won the race everyone came home and wiped the tapes and cut up the left over rockets and rocket motors and forgot every single thing that led to us building space ships capable of reaching the moon using nothing but slide rules and rocket fuel.

The feeble and really alarming attempt to recreate Apollo seem to show that current day rocket scientists and engineers don't have a clue about how to build a rocket ship to take men to the moon. How the hell did that happen? Boeing and United Launch have proven to be absolutely dismal performers in the 21st century. What happened?

People used to be assured that the race to the moon was more than a race, it was about science and engineering and progress and cool space technology. Did anyone else notice that the only spinoff we seemed to pick up from Apollo was Tang? Of all the time, money and effort invested in reaching the moon we got a fake orange drink and that's it. 

There are no mass drivers on the moon, no robots exploring the lunar surface which is just right over there, you can see it with the naked eye, no water wells or ice mines and no manned settlements on the moon, we got nothing. We got all that and less because it somehow became a race and nothing but a race to the moon.

Let's stop racing there and see about staying there once we get there. We may not need the mass drivers anymore if Starship works out because every launch by one of them leaves ton of steel in orbit. Given the numbers that Elon Musk talks about we could have habitats in orbit that even the glitterati would be proud to call home.

But, let's end the race to the moon today and simply build ships that can extend the human frontier.