Five “Woke” Takes on Moonwalk 50th Anniversary
Why can’t these people ever simply enjoy an American success?
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?
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I read on Huffpo that the Apollo 11 astronauts were specifically told NOT to bring back any black or brown moon rocks — only bring back white moon rocks.
Because they are miserable people who hate this country and do not know how to be otherwise. I went to the 50th anniversary of the landing at Johnson Space Center in Houston yesterday. I love Apollo 11 and all the good our nation can achieve.
God bless America.
And today’s private sector space pioneers?
Why, they are Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, the late Paul Allen, etc. All male.
Why won’t rich women get in on the fun?
Because Trump?
/sarc
Here, enjoy some space-race race humor,
Documentary film: Black Astronauts & NASSA,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq7gkQ7UkzI
Saw that years ago, still funny as h e double hockey sticks.
“That was the culture.”
It still is. The stuff that actually works is done by a wall-to-wall sea of white guys with boring ties, mismatched socks, and pocket protectors (although the once-obligatory sliderules are now passé . . . of course I still have mine, “just in case . . .”).
The rival “women & minorities” space program hasn’t left the ground yet.
The funny thing is, men and woman have different tastes–different desires. Can you just imagine??? Whoosh! There’s a difference!
Here’s an interesting article by an female engineer, “As a woman in tech, I realized, ‘These are not my people’,”.. with subheading, “The Google memo, saying women aren’t very into engineering, reached a similar conclusion.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-woman-in-tech-i-realized-these-are-not-my-people
(Oddly, I couldn’t find this article by searching Google but Bing yielded it on the first page!)
The funny thing is, men and woman have different tastes–different desires.
When I was younger and dumber I actually used to put some real time and money (and, what’s worse, my own money) into projects to get intelligent and talented young women to realize that they might have paying careers in engineering.
But I eventually came to my senses and realized I wasn’t really doing anyone any favors.
Clearly someone saw your project as an excellent means for disposing of gobs of unsightly other-people’s-money, so you were helping somebody.
But we won’t hold that against you. 😉
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019
Can’t believe the International Mathematical Olympiad doesn’t give out bonus points for minorities to even the playing field….LOL.
/07/undiverse_us_team_ties_for_first_place_at_international_math_olympiad.html
For the fourth time in five years the US team placed first in the International Mathematical Olympiad, this year tying for first place with China.
Pictured above: 2019 U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad team members from left: Edward Wan, Daniel Zhu, Brandon Wang, Colin Shanmo Tang, Luke Robitaille, Vincent Huang
The competition math world (much to their chagrin) reveals that nature (and its interrelated cousin, culture) is not politically correct. The top of the world heap is very male and very Asian. And this is absolutely NOT because of discrimination or oppression or whatever. As the parent of a daughter who went to Mathcounts Nationals with 2 of this year’s IMO team, please let me hasten to assure you that the math world bends over BACKWARDS to include girls and minorities.
I really hate to see the pressure that is being brought to bear on the STEM fields in academia to “even up the numbers,” so to speak. We can certainly do it, but only at the cost of artificially suppressing results (much like we’ve done in most other areas of study.)
A bit of a side note, but a woman on twitter has produced some wonderful threads in response to the NYT article. She can be found at https://twitter.com/hollymathnerd , and an illustrative tweet is here:
https://twitter.com/hollymathnerd/status/1150740942367985664
Obama wanted NASA to make Muslims “feel good” … what the hell was that all about?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html
BTW like you, I still have a few K&E slide rules in my possession and know how to use them.
I really really wanted one of those bamboo slide rules. Went through nuke engineering and chemistry with slide rule as yours as eventually the HP35 was out of my price range. Later watching students meltdown when calculator battery died was entertaining.
I have a few metal and bamboo ones in storage. When I was in engineering school, the HP35 and HP45 came out my sophomore or junior year. One was $395 and the other $495 – that was a lot of money in the early 1970’s.
Going into MechEng school, had a TI-55 from HS. It died. Got another, it died too. Some weird keypad failure. Finally broke down and got an HP-15C. It still runs like a champ. Problem was learning RPN during exams. I still enjoy the puzzled look when someone borrows it.
Slide rule is ultimate solid state and EMP proof. Do they still teach scientific notation in engineering these days or is it considered racist or something. HP reverse Polish drive me to TI.
I’m proud to have my late father in law’s slide rule. He worked on the Apollo 11 nav team. Never fully trusted those new fangled computers.
RPN is nothing more than pushing and popping stacks. For someone who learned linear programming, I find the concept of classes and objects rather confusing!
There are many, for various reasons, that are afraid to be at the top. Too bad. Lucky for them, the producers at the top will provide them with leftovers for them to bitch about.
Complainers R us.
I remember a time when you could just have a drink with a woman. Not go through h3ll.
Yeah, grandpa told me about the 19th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmzuRXLzqKk
“Mass hysteria”
H8rs gotta H8…
as unhappy as they are here, you’d think they’d leave, but i suspect they think they will be in charge when the Civil War is over.
boy, are *they* delusional.
“They” forget who has the guns.
Let me just take a moment to say that whole landing on the moon thing was pretty cool. May humanity achieve more great things together.
Actually, no, I don’t remember a time when you could have a drink with a woman and not go through h#ll.
I used to date a Dominican chick who had to be served Crown and Coke. So one day I go to the bartender and tell him, just serve me whatever whiskey is in the well.
She never caught on I wasn’t ordering her Crown.
There are certain virtues that surpass nationality. That everyone can recognize. It isn’t so much that I remember where I was when we landed men on the moon. I remember where my high school biology teacher was when we landed men on the moon.
He was in Africa. And it was a huge deal in Africa in 1968.
I think I’m going to do some push ups now.
This is a perfect example of Gramsian Damage
Anybody think what we are seeing today – the tearing down of Apollo 11 and the rise of “The Squad” is just a coincidence?
Those that are tearing down “white supremacy” have no successes to point to as every communist takeover has led to miserable, oppressive and impoverished societies. So they try to persuade us that our successes were not really successes. In fact, they are trying to tell us that they were pointless wastes of money that could have been better used to pull people out of poverty. Of course, they completely toss out the roll that high-skilled, high-paying jobs play in lifting people out of poverty and giving lives purpose. Better to be equally poor and living pointless lives doing each other’s laundry under the supervision of robots while being closely monitored by….????? Pointless diversity will make it all work somehow.
I really didn’t care about the moon landing. I’d just received news a best friend had died in Vietnam and knew so many more people would die for who knew what. To me, Apollo 11 was bread and circuses.
I still don’t really care about it.
All that being said, the constant bickering about this or that racial or sex-based slight is infuriating and I’m sick to death of it.
I did twenty. I think that’s pretty good for fifty seven. I might have mentioned that but I get forgeteful in my old age.
Just did 30. I’m 62. Haven’t done push-ups for years, but in the gym I’m a pocket monster – not big, but with a high power-to-weight ratio, which is declining noticeably with age. But I’m not dead yet.
Take it from someone who’s been there—there’s a big difference between 62 and 63.
Number 1 is a left-handed way of saying that today’s world is different and an acknowledgement that we have come a long way. It’s not really as bad today as the SJWs seem, and would like others, to believe. However, the fact that there was “one woman, one black guy and one Hispanic” shows that even back then, sex and race did not stop people from achieving their goals. “Racist” America was still a meritocracy.
Number 5 is best answered with this short clip of Jordan Peterson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxY_5-N81Q
In archival Apollo 11 photos and footage, it’s a “Where’s Waldo?” exercise to spot a woman or person of color….”
So affirmative action at NASA? They could have hired professor obama. The Apollo mission would have wound up a Muslim outreach instead of landing someone on the moon.
““She endured obscene phone calls, had to use men’s bathrooms, as one of NASA’s first female engineers…” Omar, tlaib, michelle obama. I rest my case. And what’s wrong with her using the men’s bathroom?????????? Morons.
“‘Whitey’s on the moon’: why Apollo 11 looked so different to black America” So if ‘blacky’ was on the moon, would Apollo 11 look different to white America? What racist pigs.
“Is Spaceflight Colonialism?” Yes. We enslaved the little green men on the moon. Or the little green maintainenceholes, if you’re from Berkley.
“To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth’s Gender Bias” I remember the old sit com “The Honeymooners” where Jackie Gleason was always trying to send his tv wife Alice to the moon. Anyway, we had women barefoot and pregnant in 1969, so the moon was not within their reach. We also had lesbianism in the closet. But if omar, tliab, cortez, waters, pelosi, or michelle obama want to go to the moon, we can all chip in for one-way tickets.
History proves it: as soon as gender fluidity becomes mainstream in a society, so goes the society:
Cross-dressing among Nazi-era German Wehrmacht soldiers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkzmfUjpwA&pbjreload=10
And what’s wrong with her using the men’s bathroom??????????
The men’s doesn’t have leather furniture or wide-screen TV.
I quit at twenty. I actually exceeded expectations as I was only aiming for 18. But twenty is a nice round number.
Alright.
I don’t know where they get these doom and gloom memories but that is far from reality. Out of the incessant doom and gloom media following the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, Viet Nam War, war on poverty, endless protests etc…, emerged a shining moment where the entire world (not just white male Americans) was glued to TV screens watching one of the greatest moments in human history unfold live before their eyes. It was “one giant leap for MANKIND” and that was the feeling everywhere. It was truly magic.
With archaic technology barely good enough to get it done (with luck), there was no wiggle room for “diversity” for its own sake. It was done by the best of the best of the best available. Men with brains, nerves of steel and ice flowing through their veins from a generation that emerged from one-room school houses to win the most devastating war in history had just put a man on the moon. With today’s technology, the focus is on shopping and corporations/government taking control of every detail of people’s lives. Diversity is our strength. Yep.
Many wait in line days to be the first to pay exorbitant prices for toys that enable our own enslavement. Toys that are made by foreign slave labor. What inspiring times we live in. Yep, empty-headed diversity for its own sake is so much better. Makes for better photos. Now let’s all return to our tribes and pretend that the world we are being herded into is not racist.
I would wager that none of those toys are things like Erector Sets, or chemistry sets, or the like that were the toys of so many of us in the 40s and 50s. Today these things are either banned or restricted because of “dangers” from small parts and chemicals…
And no alarm clock stood a chance of ever running again if there was a young boy with a screwdriver in the room.
Unfortunately comparisons between NASA now and then are not very flattering to NASA-now.
NASA-then mostly did what it said it was going to do, and usually when it said it would do it. 1960s NASA was costly, but it delivered.
Today’s NASA might be exemplified by the Space Launch System (SLS). The SLS is a super-heavy, expendible launch system that’s been in development for a decade or so now and, having spent $billions, does not yet have much of anything to show for it.
The SLS is to cost about $1billion per launch, and that’s just for the launcher (not the payload). It continues to go over-budget and slip schedules, yet it’s difficult to see that there’s any real need for it. Other than perhaps to maintain NASA and favored-contractor employment.
At least in the old days we got what we paid for. And sometimes more. Today we just pay, and don’t seem to get much. And perhaps that’s somehow acceptable, so long as NASA meets its diversity goals/quotas. I’m sure that sending a female astronaut to the moon (when/if NASA regains that capability) is a very, very high priority for NASA.
I hope it’s colonialism. That is the future of humanity. Anyone who has watched a sci-fi series/movie knows that.
well said, phil–wish that could disagree with your prognosis but honestly cannot–when we traded merit-based excellence for race-based something else, we, as a nation, lost a lot
Why can’t these people ever simply enjoy an American success?
Well, it’s simple, really. Success is racist and a tool of the patriarchy.
I mean, duh!
bwahaha
Do you have a sister? Asking for a friend.
During Apollo NASA bought up and used 75% of all available integrated circuits. This boosted development and Apollo kick started all that we have today in miniaturized electronics. For every dollar spent on Apollo, 11 dollars in value to U.S. occurred. The naysayers are using gear birthed by Apollo. Ingrates.
20 pushups is pretty good. For a 45 y.o. woman. I looked up the Navy physical readiness standards.
I have no excuses. If I were to come up with one, it’s that I need a double hip replacement. So just getting down to the ground takes like fifty percent out of me.
Seriously. If you could see the x-rays.
I remember years ago laying on my bed. Master Jet Base Oceana. After watching something on MTV. Not able to get up. Just laying there, like an iguana on a cold morning. And I’m like, “Well, it’s Saturday. Looks like I’ll be here until Monday.”
I couldn’t even roll over and grab the remote. It was laying right there, next to me. Beyond my reach.
https://mobile.twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1152696180989747201/photo/1
They came in peace for all mankind
Yeah, and the American Bald Eagle is a symbol of all mankind… oh wait, that’s American!
The Space Race was won by Americans, whether Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks so or not. Those brave and intrepid American astronauts also flew a space ship emblazoned with the American flag, which was also on every spacesuit they wore and on the craft in which they landed.
They even planted an American flag on the Moon; for all mankind to see, if they ever get there to look!
NASA was so racist, imperialist, and misogynist I’m surprised that communist lesbians of color didn’t just go to the moon themselves and leave white men behind.