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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's sad. Most of them did not do well in later life.

Not really a wonder .. they where a special kind of men. Adrenalin junkys and very smart .. they had been Testpilot and Astronaut. What can you do after that .. what job can compete with that ..

They could go back to regular test piloting I guess. But I agree that anything would be unfulfilling compared to what they achieved.

Reminiscent of one of Tom Hanks' lines in Apollo 13 when Jim Lovell announces his retirement: "I'll be walking in a place where there is 400 degrees difference between sunlight and shadow. I can't imagine ever topping that."

Genuinely curious what do you mean by that?

Did they do meth/heroin type of stuff, have tumultuous personal life, or professionally they didn't achieve much after being astronauts ?

Buzz Aldrin had serious problems with depression and alcoholism for years.

They also had rather unique, severe, physical problems that are being studied in other astronauts (macular degeneration, joint problems, etc)

Isn't it sad, because we bought into the coldwar propaganda that this is something extremely valuable? I'm not saying that space exploration isn't worthwhile, I think it is. However, if they were framed as simply very skilled technicians, instead of heroes of a generation, would we feel this bizarre feeling of incongruity about their later lives?

The first humans to walk on another celestial body? I'd say that's a defining moment in human history alongside the discovery of fire, agriculture, metals, oil, plastic, flight, nuclear fission etc.

Just because we haven't fully achieved the potential of sending humans to space yet doesn't make it less of an achievement. Perhaps when we finally colonize space we'll appreciate how pioneering the Apollo program really was, especially as we forced it all through before we were even really ready, technologically.

It’s not really different from the first person standing on the South Pole. At the time we did not have the capability for people to live there making the trip pointless. Now that we have that capacity, we gained nothing from the first explores to make it to the South Pole.

Space exploration is meaningful when the first person is born, grows up, and has a kid on some other celestial body. Whoever that is will be a milestone worth remembering, until that point it’s just flags and video.

You're actually trying to argue that the Apollo program was not meaningful?

Let alone all exploration that doesn't result in immediate colonization?

To rephrase, I'm not saying this isn't a historical milestone. Though since you're leaning quite heavily on this, I'll add that printed word is probably a bigger deal than most of the things you mentioned, even if it doesn't have the ring of space flight or nuclear fission. But, this is not what I meant to discuss.

To come back to my point, the astronauts were singled out and idolized and that didn't have a bearing on reality. If today someone were to muster modern science into an astounding vehicle of marvelous engineering and ambition, and it would require a human technician to operate, and let's say I would be that technician, you wouldn't say that I'm a hero or a person of extreme merit, because I would be just a technician.

Enter framing. If I would operate the device or vehicle on some interesting journey, and I would then go off to shake hands with some politicians, and there was some incentive for the media apparatus to spin this in some simplistic, easily graspable way, they would have everything they needed, and I'd become a vivid symbol of that marvelous flowering of our civilization (or of US, given the Cold War context).

Will you ask the casual observer to grasp the grandiose complexity of what led to this event, or will you just give him a pawn-head in the form of an astronaut and say "idolize him", thus letting him confuse a flashy front-man for the real thing?

They are heros because they risked their lives. There was a serious chance of dying, but they went out there for something that was more of a benefit to other people than it was to them.

That's true, I guess I got carried off with my point and didn't think about what the journey was like for them. Though, it doesn't really retract from my point about misplaced idolization.

It most certainly was not just about cold war propaganda. The dream to reach for the heavens has existed since antiquity. ad astra per aspera, as the saying goes.

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