Five “Woke” Takes on Moonwalk 50th Anniversary

Five “Woke” Takes on Moonwalk 50th Anniversary

Professor Jacobson shared his boyhood memories of the first time a man walked on the moon, and he spoke of how moving that was and remains.  Indeed, across the nation, the majority of Americans feel the same way about a defining moment in our shared history.

Not so much in America’s “woke” media outlets, though.

Following are the five appalling “woke” takes on the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk.

5. The Washington Post: “The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck”

Excerpt:

In archival Apollo 11 photos and footage, it’s a “Where’s Waldo?” exercise to spot a woman or person of color.

“I don’t want to be politically incorrect here, but the workforce, the culture, was white male. In the firing room, we had almost 500 people and we have one female, one black guy and one Hispanic,” says Ike Rigell, 96, chief engineer and deputy director of launch vehicle operations at the Kennedy Space Center in Central Florida. “That was the culture.”

4. CNN:  “She endured obscene phone calls, had to use men’s bathrooms, as one of NASA’s first female engineers”

Excerpt:

During the historic launch of Apollo 11 which put the first men on the moon, rows of men in shirts and ties lined the consoles inside Kennedy Space Center.

But one woman stood out — 28-year-old JoAnn Morgan.

Morgan, who worked as an instrumentation controller for the mission, was the only woman allowed inside the firing room where NASA employees were locked during Apollo 11’s historic lift off on July 16, 1969.

Morgan needed to be in the room to alert the test team if anything went wrong. But she had to get special permission to be there.

3. The Guardian: “‘Whitey’s on the moon’: why Apollo 11 looked so different to black America”

Excerpt:

The Apollo programme, motivated by the space race against the Soviet Union, cost $25.4bn, the equivalent of $180bn today; only the Vietnam war hit taxpayers harder. While Nasa warned Congress “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”, polls showed a majority of Americans opposed the “moondoggle”.

The black press questioned how the price tag could be justified when millions of African Americans were still mired in poverty. Testifying to the US Senate on race and urban poverty in 1966, King had observed “in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon and with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slums on Earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence”.

2. The Nation: “Is Spaceflight Colonialism?”

Excerpt:

As Americans celebrate the monumental semi-centennial of the Apollo 11 landing, the commemorations should also invite reflection on the troubled history of spaceflight and the laws that govern it. Two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 had ensured that no nation could declare sovereignty in space; planting an American flag on the lunar surface, US officials knew, did not amount to a national claim.

But while this “anti-imperial” element of the Space Treaty has received deserved attention, it by no means represents the history of spaceflight and outer-space law as practiced by countries and corporations in the Global North—a point upon which I elaborate in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. While the recent spate of billionaires cashing in on spaceflight points to the inequalities that shape its development, these inequalities are hardly new.

1. The New York Times:  “To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth’s Gender Bias”

The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it. https://t.co/Mt7rVLgAaf

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 17, 2019

No one is surprised that the leftstream media sees everything through prisms of race, gender, etc., but it’s so tedious and exhausting.  Why can’t these people ever simply enjoy an American, a human success on its own merits?

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.