The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is getting a lot of coverage, and it's well-deserved. It was a bold Cold War adventure, it cost a fortune,(1) and it succeeded.

As a former Army officer during the Cold War it's hard to imagine anyone missing it,(2) but it was a necessary component. We never would have done it without a sense of paranoid purpose. There was no reason to do it outside geopolitics.(3)  

But young people may not know all that, and those in media looking for an angle will revise it in a "Charlie Wilson's War" kind of way to pretend it matched their modern politics or at least debunked journalists of the time. What young and old can appreciate is a music remix of the Apollo 11 mission. I don't know why Eclectic Method did it, just like I don't know why an astronaut once took a corned beef sandwich for a Gemini mission flight, it's still neat that someone did.



(1) Though young people in science who don't understand where money comes from think it should be replicated and lament that NASA's budget "dropped 50 percent" after the Apollo program, it may be because they don't realize its cost was over $250 billion in today's money. And it was a mission, not a job works program. 

When you look at all of the old footage and videos, one thing that sticks out are names like McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed everywhere, not to mention many smaller brands. It was not government employees. Today, if you read the hiring guidelines for NASA you can see why they don't have the best people now, they have the best they can get who match the mandates of government committees.

(2) As a former Army officer who was there it's also funny to watch historical revisionism in real-time. During the Cold War in the 1980s, Democrats denied there even was a Cold War, the Soviet communists were like us, only a few thousand miles away. After they collapsed, using the same drive that got us to the moon, President Clinton rationalized his unwillingness to take a stand against the World Trade Center bombing, Bosnia, or Africa by stating it's not like the Cold War any more, we don't know who the enemy is.

(3) The Russians, of course, immediately began to fund rumors we never did it, just like they fund anti-natural gas and anti-agriculture environmentalists in America today.