Did any of the outlets actually show stage one landing on the ship? The feed we were watching cut out and didn't come back until it was already at rest on the deck of the ship.
Did any of the outlets actually show stage one landing on the ship? The feed we were watching cut out and didn't come back until it was already at rest on the deck of the ship.
I watched all the early crewed space launches. This is the first time I ever heard a female do a countdown. Of course, in the 60's, there were also no female news anchors.
Did any of the outlets actually show stage one landing on the ship? The feed we were watching cut out and didn't come back until it was already at rest on the deck of the ship.
When the rocket comes in for a landing, the plume from the exhaust frequently disrupts transmission from the drone ship. They don't often have ships or helicopters nearby the landing ship to record from afar as this is potentially dangerous. They have done it before when they were trying to get footage of the early landings to learn from them but since they've become routine they have stopped.
Yes but no. Unlike the contractors from Apollo, SpaceX employs a whole lot of people of color with good paying jobs in a city that underwent enormous economic distress in the 90's to 2000's. NASA's spending on this effort is also a pittance both compared to Apollo and especially when compared to the overall federal budget. I think it is very hard to make the case that this money is spent unwisely or in ways that are harmful (by way of neglect) to communities of color. When NASA was gobbling up 5% of all federal funds in the 1960's while black kids weren't even allowed to attend school, 'whitey on the moon' was definitely a valid complaint.
I watched all the early crewed space launches. This is the first time I ever heard a female do a countdown. Of course, in the 60's, there were also no female news anchors.
I don't want to dog pile but I have to add to what Hobbs said. While the majority of SpaceX engineers are definitely white guys, this isn't your father's space program. The engineering force is much more diverse and the technicians and manufacturers are mostly Latino, Vietnamese, Korean, Armenian, and African American. When you see Falcon 9 lifting off the pad with astronauts or see it landing on the drone ship, you should know that the marvel you're witnessing was accomplished by the effort and ingenuity of thousands of Latino and Asian immigrants and other people of color. If you get to know many of these immigrants from Latin America and Vietnam etc. you'll know they have extreme pride in the fact that their families came from abroad and they're now part of a company that has single handedly become the (arguably) most advanced space entity in the world. Let's not get carried away with cliches from the 1960s.
NASA itself isn't your father's space program either. They take diversity very seriously and I was personally astonished at how Bridenstine (the NASA Administrator and a Trump appointee) stood up to Trump's assault on his LGBTQ workforce. NASA itself has also driven a ton of economic opportunity that was not apparent during Apollo. Back then the only benefits derived were mostly direct in the form of contract money flowing into communities that were supporting the program. But now we can see the long tail of indirect opportunity that has come about from decades of intense R&D. For every dollar put into a community through direct contracting, there are easily 10 dollars flowing into a broader set of communities brought about by the technical revolution that NASA has underwritten. How many Uber drivers* are people of color? There are many jobs that are only possible through GPS, which while not directly a NASA program, was still in that same sphere of government spending. The same can be said for so many other economic activities that are only possible due to massive R&D efforts driven by the space program.
In Apollo, NASA was also directed to set up shop in poor communities across the south which further helped bring direct investment into those communities. It is true that NASA then was racist and sexist and truly the complaints that Apollo money would have been better directed to helping the poor and people of color were valid. I just don't think those underlying arguments are true anymore and with hindsight we can even see that Apollo itself was a net win even if the primary benefits have been delayed and indirect. But that's how most economic programs work - outside of food stamps and welfare its rare for economic programs to just dump money directly into people's pockets. More often the money is funneled into programs which hope to grow the entire economic base of the targeted community which unfortunately takes time.
I think one of the biggest problems NASA has had is their inability to present themselves first and foremost as a jobs program with a massive secondary benefit in the form of R&D.
*Yeah I know Uber itself is a pretty crappy company but that's not GPS's fault
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