By Staff
Llyod Albritton
Columnist
It has been 30 years since we last put a man on the moon. I heard a news blip yesterday which reported that scientists are still studying the data from that trip.
Thirty years we've been studying that information? Hmmm! It only took us about 10 years to get to the moon. Thirty years to study the information gathered from that one trip seems like a long time to me. I suspect somebody might be milking this deal at the taxpayer's expense. I wonder how many scientists are involved in that study project. Hundreds? Thousands?
We know that our scientists developed a great amount of new technology from their intensified creative efforts to get a man to the moon, which was subsequently adapted to the marketplace and is now taken for granted by most of us. The hand-held calculator, for example. I do not doubt that our nation's efforts in the field of space exploration have resulted in an economic payback many times over.
During the years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, space exploration and the development of modern warfare technology were the subject of frenzied competition between the two nations. The big race to see who could get to the moon first was regular news fodder. Every time a rocket shuttle was launched we were all glued to our television sets, rooting for America to beat the Russians. We lived in a state of constant social peril as scientists from both nations worked around the clock to make a bomb bigger than the other guy.
"Our bomb can blow up your largest city!"
"Oh yeah, well, our bomb can blow up your entire state of New York!"
"Well, if you think that's something, we have a bomb that can blow up your whole country!"
"Oh yeah, well, I'll betcha our President can beat up your President with one hand tied behind his back!"
And on and on it went. We learned a lot in our quest to blow one another up and to get to a chunk of barrenless rock in the sky which doesn't even have such basic commodities as air and water. But now that it's all said and done, can someone tell me again what happened?
With the fall of the Soviet Empire, we are now spending massive sums of money to destroy all the weaponry that we spent massive sums of money to build. I don't even remember anymore who beat who to the moon and I don't remember what the grand prize was for the winner. We were supposed to be taking weekend excursions to the moon by now in our own little backyard capsules, but I can't remember the last time I heard anyone at a cocktail party talking about taking the kids to Moon World on vacation.
Did we find any oil up there on the moon? I never heard anybody say. Do we have any pipelines running down from the moon? Or, are we importing anything from the moon these days?
I was talking to a fellow named Charles down at Bubba's Service Station the other day who keeps up with things like this, and Charles said there is a limitless supply of oil on the moon, but it is all controlled by two groups of Arab sheiks who won't let us export.
According to Charles' story, these moon Arabs say they need every ounce of their oil themselves to make some bigger bombs to hopefully blow one another up one day. Just as I was getting interested in what Charles was saying, he rushed off to join an old friend, a long-haired fellow with a ducktail haircut, in a big pink Cadillac.
I know it's weird, but I miss those good old days of new space shuttle launches on the television. After all that trouble getting to the moon, I don't understand why we aren't going back anymore and why we aren't doing something with it. Just think of all that oil we could use.
And what about all those rocks we could be using for construction? Tell me who wouldn't want to buy a house made of moon rocks. All we need to do is send a few big roughnecks up there with oxygen masks and they could push the rocks off to us. They would land, say somewhere in Utah, and we could just haul 'em off to the construction sites in dump trucks. Now, how come nobody else has thought of this?
I'm glad we don't have to worry about the nuclear holocaust anymore, but now that every American family has its own survival bunker stocked with plenty of stale water, dry beans and wheat grain, many have converted their shelters into guest quarters for visiting family members, and the housekeeping is terrible. Trust me, this does not make for a comfortable family visit. It's downright depressing! I'll be glad when all this old stuff is used up too, so my family will start feeding me the fresh stuff.
Lloyd Albritton publishes The Albritton Letters on the Internet at www.Lloyd-Albritton.com. He can be contacted at LloydAlbritton@aol.com.