Cosmic Dave asked in one of his posts on the locked thread: "So all this Apollo stuff was only done for political security? Kennedy's speech about it being 'for the people' was a load of balony and only a kind of bargaining chip in the Cold War with Russia to make the Soviets believe that the US were more powerful and advance. Yeah I've heard that before too. And your accusing me of making the excuses?"

When I read questions like that, it makes me wonder about the world I grew up in, and whether my memory is going.

And of course, the world I grew up in was the world of the Cold War (am I giving away my age? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] ). It was a time in which two superpowers faced each other with their stockpiles of missiles and fought their proxy wars in Africa, Central America and South East Asia. It was the world of Greenham Common protests, Mushroom Clouds, the Doomsday Clock, ICBMs, Mutual Assured Destruction.

It was also the world where both sides played propaganda games to attract the support of regimes around the world, like a pair of chest-thumping gorillas.

If people think Apollo at its heart was anything other than another piece of that propaganda game, then they don't know anything about the Cold War. That NASA was actually able to squeeze any science out of Apollo was a bonus.

In fact, when Cosmic Dave asked his question, he revealled the sterility of his arguments, and his seemingly complete lack of knowledge. Ask yourself why NASA would do Apollo for real. Then ask yourself why NASA would fake Apollo. In the former case, the answers would be either as propaganda or for science. But in the latter case, it could only be for propaganda. NASA certainly couldn't hope to do any science on a faked mission.

And finally, did Kennedy EVER say that Apollo was, as Dave quoted, "for the people"? I know Lincoln used the phrase in his Gettysburg speech, but the words of Kennedy that I associate with Apollo are these (from memory; someone tell me how close I am): [cue Boston accent] "We choose to go to the Moon - we choose to go to the Moon and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard."