And only fifteen years after Tintin, Snowy and captain Haddock, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, as the first non-fictional characters to do so. All skepticism about what Apollo accomplished aside, it was a hell of an achievement, to get human beings walking another world in less than a decade. that Apollo then didn’t lead to a permanent presence on the moon is a pity, at least for this science fiction fan, but it should not distract us from this triumph.
To rate “the space programme” on what it did for us back on Earth, as they’re doing over at Charlie’s, may be interesting but missing the point. Most of those socalled spinoffs always turn out to be not invented for the space race, much of the rest never needed manned spaceflight to get them going. If we’re looking at space exploration from a purely “economic” point of view, we don’t need more than communications, weather and GPS satellites; certainly not manned space flight or space exploration.
Who cares about what Apollo did for us? People walked the fucking moon!