Wally Schirra Dead at 84 88
UglyTool writes "Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, died of a heart attack at a hospital in San Diego. Wallyschirra.com has much more on the man, his life, and his contributions to the American Space Program."
Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada (Score:4, Insightful)
We've definitely gone from the days when our astronauts were national heroes, and space flights were major news items, to relatively anonymous folks risking their lives to put the next communications satellite in orbit for our corporate masters. Honestly, does anyone here know the name of a current astronaut off the top of their head without doing a search? We need a mission to Mars or something similar sooner rather than later.
From a different time (Score:5, Insightful)
We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind.
Wally, we need more like you. You will be missed.
Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada (Score:2, Insightful)
The Right Stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
DG
Re:From a different time (Score:1, Insightful)
Fast forward to today. Now we have the infrastructure that the Internet is allowing billions of people to have freedom of expression online when their governments restrict them elsewhere. And not surprisingly, the governments try to restrict them online as well. But the essential point isn't that technology is being used by repressive governments, it is that more people than ever before have the ability to communicate their ideas (even with repression). More freedom of though has been brought about by the Internet than any invention since the printing press. Yet you seem to think that the world is becoming more repressed.
This is what I hate about optimists and pessimists. The optimists think something trivial like the space program will free the world and the pessimists see something new like the Internet and only seeing it oppress people even if it has given freedoms that never existed before.
War drives Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is that Our Corporate Overlords don't like true Progress, of the disruptive sort. They like progress, (with the lower-case "p") of the incremental sort, the kind that keeps their guaranteed spot on top, and keeps them making money the same way they made it last year, only more of it. I would propose that most of the time, they're doing their very best to kill disruptive change, or at least slow it to the point where it is no longer disruptive. Microsoft once mentioned "managing the pace of change in the industry," which I would imply to mean managing the pace of change so they can retain their "leadership" role. Even so, every now and then a disruptive innovation like the Internet manages to sneak through. One might argue that now Corporate America is doing everything in it's power to kill the disruptive basics of the Internet, too.
War changes this.
Real War, that is. War like WWII, not war like Viet Nam or Iraq. Real war threatens the very existence of Our Corporate Overlords, because if we lose, they're toast. So when real War happens, the brakes on disruptive innovation are removed, because survival is at stake. As long as you win, you have a chance of retaining your spot on top, and will most likely be alive. If you lose, both are in doubt.
Look at it this way... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see that innovation and 'pushing towards the future' gives the average man the same vision of hope anymore. I see two groups that look towards the future with bright eyes. Techies that can't wait for the computers that the future will bring and people who believe that tomorrow will bring an ecologically sound and energy secure future (without a real struggle). The best a lot of us are hoping for is a way to innovate so as to avoid disaster. We are missing the part where we think that we might go beyond a possible disaster into a utopian future.
I think that we can agree that most people don't think that we are going to solve our non political struggles without a painful struggle and sacrifice. We realize that what was our 'manifest destiny' of progress is destroying the world we live in and charging into the future doesn't have that child-like glee anymore.
Wally was one person (Score:3, Insightful)
But are talking about Wally here, not NASA. I think the grandparent has every right to be as nostalgic as they want.
There are plenty of people at NASA, then and now, doing things for NASA because it's science and exploration, not because the government wants to build bigger bombs.
Re:From a different time (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a common meme - but there isn't a shred of truth in it. The technologies for (notionally) peaceful boosters and ICBM's diverged right from the start of the space race - and never rejoined. The race was a proxy for technological prowess, granted, but it has little directly to do with nuclear delivery.
Re:War drives Progress (Score:2, Insightful)
In the runup to the war in Iraq, it was obvious to me the whole time that we were going to war because the administration had a hard-on for Saddam. The reasons looked faked and trumped up from the start, as far as I was concerned.
Nor was I the only one not fooled. There were plenty of people taken in. We weren't laughing, because it was war, and people were going to die. But it wouldn't have mattered had we laughed or not, or whether any number of us read Slashdot or not. Nor does it matter if you point and laugh, or read Slashdot.
People with power, even incompetent people with power, do as they want, and the first thing they want is to stay in power.
Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada (Score:3, Insightful)
You bought into the propaganda, but don't be upset that other people aren't quite so enthusiastic about self-deception.