Why Putting Man on the Moon was Badass, Awesome and Wildly Irresponsible

This past week was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. HOW EXCITING!!! Wait… 40 years ago, it was 1969. Isn’t that the same Summer of Love in which Woodstock occurred? Weren’t people driving around in VW Beetles, dropping acid and listening to Led Zeppelin I? How was anyone in the country sober enough to do long division, let alone astrophysics?

Also at this time computers were the size of Nike Factory Outlets and could be out performed by your basic graphing calculator.


Now, imagine what the astronauts must have thought when NASA said “We’re sending you all to the moon.”

Neil: SWEET! Another chance for me to think up a cheese platitude that will be remembered for all time!

Buzz: SWEET! A chance for me to get drunk in space! (Note: this is not funny because Buzz Aldrin was actually an alcoholic.)

Michael: FUCK! They’re going to strap us into a tin can filled with asbestos with a couple of bottle rockets strapped to the bottom, THEN send us thousands of miles across lifeless abyss hopefully with enough (highly explosive) fuel to make it back, THEN risk incinerating ourselves crash landing in what is essentially a soda can on to another lifeless abyss, that up until a hundred years ago , was commonly believed to be made of cheese. All so we can kick around a few rocks and say we did it before Russia.

Yet they went anyway. Badass? Insane? Isn’t that what America’s all about?

*Cue Music*