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On July 20, 1969 we put people on the moon. They flew there in a rocket made of steel and foil using a computer system about as powerful as you might find in your washing machine these days. It’s perhaps an over-simplification but it happened (unless the conspiracy theories are true and it was all fake).
In the years that followed, several missions were sent to the moon culminating in the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. Over those few years NASA and the United States landed 12 people on the moon. Then we stopped.
Fast forward 50 years and in all that time we haven’t put anyone else back on the moon. There has been unmanned missions and robots landed on the moon but it seems for all intents and purposes that we have all but abandoned space travel beyond low earth orbit. In fifty years our technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in some aspects. Yet space travel it seems hasn’t.
Sure, Space X has developed re-usable rocket boosters (and blown up many along the way) but shouldn’t we have developed a better way to launch into space by now that doesn’t use the same technology we had fifty years ago?
I ask myself such questions and consider the amount of changes in technology over the years and wonder why it seems like nothing much has changed. Then again we still primarily use internal combustion engines for our cars and trucks so is there really much advancement there?
In 1888 the Flocken Elektrowagen was released as what is considered the first electric…
