— unpredictable thoughts

Spaced Out: Space Walk Gallery Makes Us Burn With Envy — Gizmodo

Weight­less­ness.

You’ve never been to the moon
But don’t you want to go?
–Melissa Etheridge

When all you read about NASA and the efforts to con­tinue to explore space are about love tri­an­gles, drink­ing astro­nauts, and the star wars mis­sile shield look­ing at pho­tos like this bring me back to the dream. The hair still stands up on the back of my neck when I hear record­ings of John Kennedy say­ing: We choose to go to the moon.

Here’s a lit­tle bit more of what he said in case you have for­got­ten or never hear the speech.

Those who came before us made cer­tain that this coun­try rode the first waves of the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion, the first waves of mod­ern inven­tion, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this gen­er­a­tion does not intend to founder in the back­wash of the com­ing age of space. We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the plan­ets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it gov­erned by a hos­tile flag of con­quest, but by a ban­ner of free­dom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruc­tion, but with instru­ments of knowl­edge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be ful­filled if we in this Nation are first, and, there­fore, we intend to be first. In short, our lead­er­ship in sci­ence and in indus­try, our hopes for peace and secu­rity, our oblig­a­tions to our­selves as well as oth­ers, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mys­ter­ies, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s lead­ing space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowl­edge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all peo­ple. For space sci­ence, like nuclear sci­ence and all tech­nol­ogy, has no con­science of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occu­pies a posi­tion of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new ter­ri­fy­ing the­ater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unpro­tected against the hos­tile mis­use of space any more than we go unpro­tected against the hos­tile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mas­tered with­out feed­ing the fires of war, with­out repeat­ing the mis­takes that man has made in extend­ing his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prej­u­dice, no national con­flict in outer space as yet. Its haz­ards are hos­tile to us all. Its con­quest deserves the best of all mankind, and its oppor­tu­nity for peace­ful coop­er­a­tion may never come again.

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the high­est moun­tain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon — We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to orga­nize and mea­sure the best of our ener­gies and skills, because that chal­lenge is one that we’re will­ing to accept, one we are unwill­ing to post­pone, and one we intend to win, and the oth­ers, too.

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Tags: nasa, space, blue, float­ing, “space walk”