If I had to illustrate in a short video the glories of Western Civilization, I’d choose the following. (full screen volume up recommended)
More thoughts @ Cjunk.
If I had to illustrate in a short video the glories of Western Civilization, I’d choose the following. (full screen volume up recommended)
More thoughts @ Cjunk.
You know you are motoring right along when you DEcelerate during freefall……LOL.
It is so damn big you don’t realize how fast it’s accelerating. Almost 100 mph by the time it cleared the tower! 0-60 in 4.5 seconds!!!
Fascinating clip, thanks for that!
Educated people always think before they feel .
Neat! Saw this the other day and just watched it again. The boosters departed at less than 3,000 miles an hour, that means the Ship has to gain another 14,000 miles an hour on its own to maintain orbit! Just cool.
I know it, you know it, everyone know’s it!
You just can’t say it.
🙂
Savour the moment and IGNORE
BiB
PULEESE!
Please don’t follow the trail of guano left by the troll.
When I was born, they talked about going to the moon, exploring the planets, and reaching to the stars. We landed on the moon before I was 10 years old. We created supersonic airliners and nuclear power plants. As a kid, I read and dreamed about the future.
By the time I was 20, we abandoned the moon and gave up on creating supersonic airliners.
I am over 50 now and we have given up on manned space flight altogether. They say it will take 20 years or more to get back to the moon. The last Concords are in museums. New power plants are windmills and gas turbines (stationary jet engines).
What legacy are we leaving to our children and granchildren?
My civilization created that.
And I’m proud of that.
but since my civilization has a lot of people with blue eyes and blond hair, I guess that makes me a racist…
@Canadian Friend
I don’t understand what could possibly motivate you into commenting about racism. You couldn’t have picked something more off-topic if you tried.
rd – the golden age of science fiction is 14. If you read (and believe) then, you’ll be a reader for life. I’m disappointed that it looks like I won’t be able to retire to an orbital habitat after all.
NASA is now a Muslim youth center for self esteem. With a sideline in green propaganda. So says the Obama, so does it happen. Forget Space travel its all about Islam now.
The incredible achievements for mankind has been left in the dust, to tickle the ego of the Muslim Marxist.
For the Barbarians. This makes the Roman retreat from England look small time.
The video is magnificent.
As for the supreme and unequalled achievements of Western culture, I’d be inclined just to pick up a book of electrical engineering and leaf through it.
What separates us from anybody before 1800? What did we do that noone else dreamed of? Go to your electrical wall switch, and flip it on and off.
Turn your radio and then your TV on and off. Pick up and admire the book on electrical engineering, then a book on electromagnetic waves. WE DID IT;
NOBODY ELSE DID IT.
EM is now the common stock of scientifically literate people everywhere. The Space Shuttle is a great achievement of the Americans,
our great though now faltering cousins.
According to Jared Diamond we only achieved that because we were lucky; in short, we had better cattle than other people.
Luck got us to this super high level of technology?
I’m laughing so hard I scared the cat!
Andrew,
It is politically incorrect for white people of European origin to be proud of anything our people has accomplished.
The politically correct way is to be ashamed of having so much success and abundance while other people live in mud huts and choose to drink water from the same pond their cattle defecates in ( saw this on PBS news hour, just stating facts ).
great accomplishements by whites = bad.
Whites ashamed of accomplishements = good
get with the program!
John Lewis – “If I have seen farther than it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” The stream of individuals that made the movie possible shared something – a culture. Not a language, those come and go and change over time. A want to understand what physical rules we must live by (totally divorced to legal or political rules) and a desire to know more and do more.
Where will this lead us? That depends upon whether we want to follow those who want to stand on the shoulders of giants, or those who want to measure his shoes to make sure that the length to width measurement falls within the parameters for legal feet. Or worse, those who would force us to be the giant’s proctologist and hand us a torch.
Every single thing about it is amazing. Notice the drag chutes deploy before the spent boosters impact the ocean. That in itself is a meticulously sequenced operation, with the chutes having to go from reefed to unreefed at just the right moment. It orients the booster in a tail-first attitude at just the right speed so when it impacts the water, air is trapped in the rocket body to keep it buoyant while waiting for the retrieval vessel.
Glorious, yes – but like so many other things, a past glory. Add the STS to the list of magnificent things we once did that we can’t do anymore.
I was six when the last human walked on the Moon. I knew then – just as we ALL did – that we would walk on Mars before the century was out. And here we sit.
Dying civilizations revel in past glories. Vibrant ones ask: what’s next?
Revnant Dream, it’s more than just about Islam. Our civilization started to retreat long before any of that became a significant issue. Just look around you. How many people do you see living in a virtual world, totally caught up in useless things like twitter and social interaction sites? We have turned inward because the barbarians have been with us all along.
We call them the Greens. Theirs is a nihilist vision of wanting humans to achieve and be less, not more. They started undermining the fabric and structure of our civilization back in the late 1960s, and the rot continues to spread.
It’s a cheap cop-out to blame Islam. We did this to ourselves, and we continue to diminish every time we kowtow to the Green altar of smallness. Our civilization has a disease, and it’s called ganGREEN.
Thanks for the link!
Amazing cinematography of an amazing piece of history. Kudos for the cameraman too for not getting airsick.
Cool video BUT this is the tech that killed the space program. The shuttle was so expensive because the it had to be re-used (not that the Apollo program wasn’t the most expensive science project in history). All funding since Apollo went into this beast and we haven’t been anywhere since.
Spitzer, Hubble, etc are very cool at LOOKING at the universe but the shuttle program is the reason we haven’t been anywhere since the moon.
I’m more exited about the idea of private space tourism. It has far more potential to open up space to people other than government space-bureaucrats (don’t get me wrong – I’d love the job!)
cgh;
As one, who grew up in the late 50’s early 60’s, I can agree with your thought. Whether there ever was a ‘golden age’ is also debateable. The introspection that hit our society in the ’60’s has never subsided. In fact it grows.
More and more people ‘tune out’ on a regular basis using electronics. Walk thru any airport and it really hits you. As a conservative, conservation appeals to my nature. The Greenies have poluted that thought process into ‘growth is bad’.
I kept waiting to see this.
magnificant , love the rough look of the burnt ceramic tiles. I have one , or a piece of one about 4 inches square. weighs maybe half an ounce.
still cant beat that solid fuel for lifting tonnage, the problem with it is the shake rattle and roll and how once its ignited you cant put it out . the new gen commercial flights use a hybrid of solid pellets of rubber and laughing gas as the oxidizer. lift and control
Astounding. I remember the quote from the first French astronaut to ride the Space Shuttle, who on returning to France said, with unusually British-like understatement, “The Americans have built a magnificent machine…but it’s a little dangerous.”
CT, all true. Yes, there is a golden age. We’re living in it. What I mean is that never in the history of the world has there been such a high proportion of humanity having enough to eat, being protected from the ravages of disease, having so much leisure to pursue their interests, having so much potential for education. Never has humanity been as free from backbreaking, fruitless manual labour.
Never before has humanity had such a clear understanding of the nature of the universe around us. Today if we so chose, we could literally do just about anything that science fiction deems possible within the laws of physics. We have all the technology we need to settle other planets, voyage to other stars.
But there’s three worms in the apple. The first is called decadence, and all civilizations are threatened by it at some time or another. It’s the notion that life can be simply enjoyed without having to work to continue what was built. It leads to a mocking and degrading of the institutions and systems of thinking that led to the creation of the civilization in the first place. Post modernist thought is a prime example here.
A second worm comes from those who fail to adapt to changes. This is where the Greens come from. They want to stop the clock, turn it back to some supposedly ideal earlier, disease-ridden, bare subsistence time. It’s a view shared by Greens, Naziism, the flagelants of the 14th century and others. These are society’s failures. And because they personally have failed, they strive to bring down some or much of what they see around them.
The third worm in the apple are the barbarians. The most important of these are among us, and they’re not islam. They are those with so little knowledge and understanding that essentially everything around them is magic. To them, there’s no meaningful difference between an electronics manual and a Harry Potter novel. Both are magic, and the underlying understanding is inscrutable to them. These are the most dangerous of the three worms, because they become readily captivated by the second worm.
I refer to Arthur C Clarke’s definition.
“Barbarism is a state of manipulating technology without understanding it.”
So the three worms in our apple are:
1. decadence, or post-modernist ignorance
2. nihilism, or the Green disease,
3. barbarism, or useless, pampered,ignorant kids these days.
It doesn’t matter if we deal successfully or not with islamic integration into Western society. These things alone will bring us down. They are the critical issues, not islam. It’s a trivial threat by comparison.
“These things alone will bring us down. They are the critical issues, not islam.”
YES! That’s what I’m sayin’.
We have seen the enemy….and he is us….
Pogo…..
So nice when the laboratory specimen volunteers.
Ladies and gentlemen: Exhibit 1 here demonstrating essentially all the features of barbarism: Obsoiver.
While Obsoiver has some good points, he skillfully leaves out the most important benefit, which ironically in his socialistic mentality doesn’t exist – dreams.
In the fact we, the West can dream and then do something with the dream is what is missing from Socialistic Communistic civilizations. Everything is done for the masses, and done as a number.
Here in the West, we revel at uniqueness and identity.
What was the name of the first Russian again?
Sputnik we know, because that was an inanimate object, so appropro to my point.
Yuri Gagarin, and he died in space in one of their seriously defective vehicles. And Obsoiver’s only good point is the one on top of his head.
Yuri Gagarin didn’t die in space. He died in a plane crash, flying a jet. Yes, a crappy Soviet jet, but still.
In his memory:
http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=3962
You’re right, EBT. I was thinking of Vladimir Komarov in 1967.
Hey, no sweat, cgh. In those funny helmets I can hardly tell them apart myself.