An old boss of mine was a Hungarian immigrant and said this golf swing was the moment he became an American. He was a teenage veteran of fighting invading Soviet tanks, saw those images on TV, and fell in love with the combination of accomplishment and irreverence. I think he accomplished here what he hoped to back then.
I wonder if things like this would ever happen now. The original Mercury and Apollo astronauts were Air Force test pilots, a group known for picking and choosing which rules they wanted to follow. Sneaking a golf club aboard, not to mention the possibility of falling and tearing his suit, is a non-trivial risk.
It's hard to imagine that culture of risk taking still exists, but at the same time, that culture may be why they were able to get to the moon so quickly.
> So imagine how surprised I was to discover among my more affluent, well-connected students a growing number who seemed to be lacking the ability to make their way independently in the world, as, frankly, 18-22 year olds always had been able to do and just as crucially, used to desire to do. I’m deliberately being vague about what exactly was missing in so many students because frankly I couldn’t quite tell at first. Something was just off. Odd. It took most of my ten years as dean before I figured out what exactly the problem was.
For starters, each year my students were more and more and more and more accomplished. The grades, but not just the grades: the scores. And not just the grades and the scores but the awards, and the accolades, and the activities, and community service, and leadership, and, and, and, and, and, every other prospect for perfection. Yet each year I noticed that more and more could tell you what they’d done but not so much why they’d done it.
I’m old enough that helicopter parenting wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. I find the whole phenomenon incomprehensible.
But, yeah, I imagine people used to accomplish more before everyone got so damned risk adverse.
I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes the university/credential-pedigree system has become, and how essential it is to optimize for a certain outcome at all costs.
When I was high school age, the A students went to good universities and generally ended up with a good professional career, the B students went to state schools and had an average life in an office job. The C students went to community college and limped along. The D students went to trade school and at least had a shot at turning things around.
We're moving towards a world where the A++5.0GPA+awards+accolades students will go to the top universities and end up living in relative luxury, the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not. Competition among students is a complete slug-fest and every parent is doing whatever they can to juice the metrics that universities demand, at the expense of every other part of the student's development/upbringing. You don't want your kid left behind in the dirt.
> the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not.
This is the false dichotomy that’s causing students to incorrectly go to college when it might not be the best path. There is a massive gulf of the middle class you just glossed over between college and Walmart/meth: the trades. Working in skilled blue collar fields (electrician, contractor, plumber, diesel mechanic, etc) will likely give you a better life financially than someone who graduates with a 4 year BA.
I've seen it said a few times that there's a reason why electricians, contractors, plumbers, diesel mechanics, etc send their kids to college and it's because all those trades are hard on your body and a bit dangerous.
Yes they are a route to financial independence, but there's a hidden cost that a banker, marketer, SEO expert, programmer, manager, etc. does not have to pay.
In manual labor you get physically tired, your joints grow steadily more achy, your run the risk of injury - obviously it's unpleasant.
In mental labor you get fat and achy sitting at a desk all day, your sleep schedule gets messed up looking at artificial light constantly, your mental health degrades and your risk of suicide increases - obviously it's also unpleasant.
We can all agree the manual laborer's job is hard because no one can really escape manual labor. Even if your profession doesn't require you to lift a finger, other things in life like taking care of a home expose us to plenty of comparable tasks, and we can easily imagine how much worse it would be to do these tasks all the time. But the manual laborer can forego most of the negatives of office work which require prolonged and continuous exposure to things we would never experience in nature. Thus the manual laborer tends to see greener grass on the other side while the office worker does not.
I fail to see how exercise changes the light coming out of my monitor. Manual laborers can also mitigate their risks, but in neither case do all the issues completely disappear. As someone who's done both, I can tell you that the grass is not greener on the other side, and everyone else I know who has done both has encouraged their kids to at least seriously consider the trades.
I'm sure they fall into the same trap that college == success.
The trades are excellent careers. The issue is see with those careers is that people in the trades don't look ahead. No one wants to haul roofing shingles at 45 or crawling under houses at 50. A master of their trade commands a high hourly rate and should be looking at teaching opportunities, running their own shop opportunities, safety opportunities, or general project overview.
> I've seen it said a few times that there's a reason why electricians, contractors, plumbers, diesel mechanics, etc send their kids to college
It’s because they’ve been sold a lie that a degree is a free pass to the middle class. If you thought all your kid had to do for a middle class lifestyle was study differential literary analysis, you’d be onboard too.
I agree, I've some nephews/nieces in college and was talking to their parents about why they were getting them to start applying for tech internships in freshman year, sounded absurd to me. And I was telling them how they should be more adventurous with where they want to work and live after they graduate. But all they wanted to do was work in Silicon Valley ( they grew up around here, so I thought they would want to move and explore other parts of the country). But, no they did not want to. I think it was both risk-averseness and also sheer practicality that all the good tech jobs are here.
>I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes
From my perspective, these go hand-in-hand. The Meritocracy Trap outlines how the ultra-competitiveness has led parents to invest more and earlier in preparation for college. Excellent Sheep described how many Ivy League bound have to essentially declare their intention in grade school to follow the templated path to reach that goal. This causes a formulaic existence, which is underscored by an increase in the number of young adults who look at college as vocational training rather than to build a life philosophy. Meaning there is very little questioning why and instead just following the inertia of a goal that was predetermined when one was in elementary school.
Very little truth to what you wrote here. You can get into great universities with solid A’s. And you can certainly graduate from a state school with minimal to no debt.
But your claim is built on certain assumptions that there is a certain path to get in based on “stats”. Sometimes you can improve your chances because there are other paths to get in. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but years back schools were clamoring to get veterans. I know some who were accepted to prestigious schools despite relatively underwhelming “stats” had they applied straight out of high school.
I’m not saying military service is for everybody, just that there are more paths than the well-worn templates most people attempt to emulate.
You're not wrong! But the classic "get good grades, get good scores, do A, B, C, D" gets you into a school like UNC in state at best. Most people don't have the opportunities to do the sorts of things that get people into top schools (and hoard opportunity).
We're straying way off-topic here but I'd suggest that things are pretty terrible for significant numbers of people. As evidence (I'm not US-ian), I present this article [0], which actually tries to make the point that living standards have never been better. In my view, he fails, specifically with the following statement in para 5, "There would surely be a revolution in America if 90% of our citizens have suffered income stagnation or worse". I'd suggest that recent events and the fact that many tens of millions of people supported (and still support) Donald Trump, are proof of a slow-motion revolution in progress - a kind of cold-civil-war.
So, maybe parent was being colourful with the "Walmart/meth" exaggeration, but in terms of "effective equivalence" I'd say they are close to the mark.
Yea it was a little exaggeration, but the trend is in the wrong direction. If things don't change, we're going to have no middle class in 20-30 years and probably full-on Elysium in 50-70 years.
Too focused on relative income distribution, not enough on standards of living.
Americans live in bigger houses with fewer people living in them, they own smart phones, cars, huge TVs, appliances, HVAC, video games, plenty of clothes. They get their goods delivered straight to their door, they have their food grown and prepared for them. This is an accurate description of lower class Americans.
While income inequality is real and worsening, I'm still not seeing evidence that this leads to bad outcomes.
So, lots of bread and circuses. Are they healthy? Are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren going to inherit a civilization that they would want to be born in to?
>If a dog is fat it's somebody else's fault, if a person is fat it's their fault.
I don't really care whom you blame, I care about the results. Our society could do much more to stop people from being fat and unhealthy, yet 70% of the country is overweight, and more people have chronic health problems than don't.
>How should I know how people's unborn children feel about a society which doesn't exist yet?
I'm not asking how the unborn children feel, I'm asking whether the existing people would want to be born into the civilization which they expect that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit.
> don't really care whom you blame, I care about the results. Our society could do much more to stop people from being fat and unhealthy, yet 70% of the country is overweight, and more people have chronic health problems than don't.
Unless you want members of society to walk around smacking soda and fried potato products out of people's hands, I'm not sure that I agree.
If we want to pool our resources as a people to solve problems for others, let's start with water scarcity, unstable/oppressive governments, and renewable energy. Please don't sign me up for forcing people onto weight watchers plans.
How about locking the soda and sugary snacks away with the cigarettes, instead of having them in your face (and your children's faces) in the checkout aisle? How about putting warning labels on them like cigarette cartons instead of cartoon pictures designed to get the attention of children?
How about devoting multiple hours of every school day in high school to getting students into great shape, so they don't start off their adult lives overweight?
There are many, many things we could easily do, but the people who run our civilization do not want them to be done. Those same people are the ones that are gaining more and more power over the people, by the way, as a consequence of the concentration of wealth.
What water scarcity problem is currently causing problems for 70% of the country?
The root of the problem is a lack of self control, and putting things in scarier packaging will not solve that problem. It's sort of like distributing tissues as a solution to the COVID pandemic, it's just addressing a symptom.
Why would we restrict our charity to this country? Let's solve real problems, which mostly exist in other countries. Unrestricted access to soda and Twinkies is not a real problem.
In addition, prohibition does not work. It doesn't work with alcohol, it doesn't work with drugs, it doesn't work with gambling, and it won't work with cake.
>The root of the problem is a lack of self control
So make it easier for people to control their own behavior, if you want to make a dent in the problem. Teach them how to be in good shape by actually making them do it as adolescents. Teenagers are already required to participate in gym class. Why don't we change gym class so that it actually does something for them?
>and putting things in scarier packaging will not solve that problem.
Do you think that the labeling on a package is irrelevant? Then why do companies spend so much money designing it? Why are they all bright flashy colors, rather than black, white, and grey?
>Why would we restrict our charity to this country?
Because this is where we live, and where our families live, and the quality of their lives is most dependent on what happens to the people here.
>Let's solve real problems, which mostly exist in other countries. Unrestricted access to soda and Twinkies is not a real problem.
70% of the country being overweight is a real problem.
>In addition, prohibition does not work.
I said nothing about prohibition. Having to ask the cashier to go get you your case of Pepsi is not the same as banning the sale of Pepsi.
So you don’t live in the US and only get your information from the media (who don’t sell clicks by saying everything is fine) but you’re willing to make bold statements about how we’re on the edge of a civil war?
Its often much easier looking in to see the problems than looking out. I would say that's also the impression I get too watching/reading your fox/CNN/CNBC channels.
Here in the UK we're suffering from the same malady and what brought this into focus for me was Brexit + the Grenfell fire.
Suddenly I saw people like those from my poor home town on TV (at one point it had the 3rd highest unemployment in the UK). And I hadn't seen anyone like that on TV for years. People with few opportunities, people ALL the UK media had been ignoring because they're not university educated and they say uncomfortable things.
When Jon Snow, a well know TV journalist over here, spoke about his experience meeting the Grenfell survivors and the accusations he had to face that they'd tried to talk to the press and been ignored, it really brought it into focus:
I blame the popularity service degrees. My great great grandparents were gilded age robber barons. Their children earned service degrees (doctors, lawyers) and split things up and sold them off. Their children earned service degrees and worked a little while living off their trusts. Their children earned service degrees and worked hard to run in place. I got an engineering degree and put every penny I could get my hands on into starting a manufacturing business. I will not have my children groomed to serve others who actually achieve.
I understand your point, but don't think the Walmart/Meth comparison is fair. Walmart is full of hardworking people doing honorable work that provides for their families and contributes to their communities.
Agreed--not making them equivalent. It's a deliberately wide spectrum for folks with few opportunities. The overall point is that what the dean perceived as risk aversion may instead be the chilling effect of the growing lack of opportunity for all but the top 1% of the next few generations. If people want to nit pick about two words, I can't stop them.
What you said is horribly offensive and pretty eye opening about how you see the lives of middle and lower class Americans.
There are plenty of hard working, proud Americans of all races who never go to a fancy school or maybe never go to college at all, yet the have good paying jobs (maybe not good paying to you), live in good neighborhoods (again, probably ones you look down on), raise respectable kids who are kind (again, people who you’d never hang out with) and yes, they even shop or work at Walmart.
Wow, I don't know what brush you're trying to paint me with but it's the wrong one. I'm one of those B-C students who, through luck of when I was born, managed to grab a tiny bit of upward mobility and cobble together an OK middle-of-the-road life. No Ivy League track for me. If I was born today and took the same path, I'd probably be struggling a lot due to how bifurcated and winner-take-all things are getting. I look around today and am very worried that my child and her generation will not have any opportunities unless they're valedictorian. Those good paying jobs you talk about are good, but they're disappearing rapidly.
I don't speak for the parent poster but it seems abundantly clear they're decrying the widening gap between those with access to good-paying jobs and those who are deprived of opportunity.
No, it’s the implication that without a college degree you have some shitty life deprived of opportunity. This is both paternalistic and condescending.
There is nothing wrong with making 80k a year in Iowa as an electrician and paying down a mortgage on a 250k house. That’s not a deprivation of opportunity.
80k a year’s a pretty good salary almost anywhere. There’s plenty in NYC who live on less.
GP wasn’t saying everyone in Idaho is a crack head or heroin junkie due to the unfulfilled nature of their work, they were saying there’s too many jobs in America at below living wages and there’s this huge huge gap between the working poor and the white collar that’s only expanding.
Trade schools are great and put out talented professionals who earn decent salaries.
Many people outside of white collar positions and Yale alumni live very rewarding, cultured, and fulfilling lives.
But it doesn’t mean we can’t as a society do better for our lower classes, and a lot of parents are understandably concerned about their children graduating with a mountain of debt, getting a job that pays like shit, not having access to health care, and living an unfulfilling life.
If your life is rewarding in those conditions it is despite your circumstance which certainly does not optimize for a stress free, meaningful and rewarding existence.
Thank you for this comment. The elitist caste in America have gotten far too big for their britches. And then they wonder why Trump won and why we did not have a peaceful transfer of power for arguably the first time in our nation's history. Being born into comfort only takes a generation to wonder why doesn't everyone just "get more money?".
There's a British children's adventure film called "Swallows and Amazons". A family of children want to go on a sailing trip without adult supervision to camp on an island. Their mother sends a telegram to her husband, who's an officer on a navy ship asking his advice (or permission, it was another time). He sends a telegram back "If not duffers won't drown, if duffers better drowned".
It was originally a book, or actually a series of books, written and set in the 1930s. Great reading as a child, but to have such permissive parents - they barely make an appearance while their kids as young as 7 spend days at a time boating and camping - seemed as fanciful to me as Harry Potter. I wonder if it was really like that in the 30s.
Apart from the magic, Harry Potter is just the well-worn genre of "school stories" and the social structure of the school is basically that of a select British private school, complete with boarders and "houses" and so on. It really was like that in the 30s (see Roald Dahl's Boy, for another example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co.).
I think Swallows and Amazons is a little stretched from what would have been normal levels of parental contact, but not beyond what a reader of the time would have considered normal or reasonable.
Or pretty much any of Enid Blyton's books. As you say, probably an exaggerated view of childhood independence in upper middle class(?) England (and certainly there are American examples as well although boarding school is a less prominent feature), but not something wildly fantastical to many readers.
There are always older children around though, I think there was a much higher expectation that older children would take responsibility for the younger ones back then. S&A is adventure fiction so maybe a little exaggerated, but not outrageously so.
Personally I think the risk aversion has less to do with parenting and more just life experience. For the vast majority of human existence, high child mortality was much higher than today. Even for the wealthiest, watching some of your siblings die was simply a fact of life. It was only in the early 20th century that childhood death became uncommon, and even then these kids were being born to and raised by people who had grown up in such a world. My grandfather, for example, was the youngest of 12 and grew up in a household where no one expected all 12 to make it. The combination of an excessively large number of people and the desensitization to death (with maybe a little bit of lead paint thrown in for good measure) naturally leads to the view of life being cheap. These are the sorts of conditions that make wars that cost tens of millions of lives conceivable, but also the conditions where people are okay with being strapped to a rocket with only a bit of testing. The baby boomers were really the first generation raised entirely with the expectation that they would live, and late genX/early millennial children were likely the first in history to be raised by parents who had been raised with that mindset. The longer you expect to live, the more sensible risk aversion is.
I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent.
As for risk, Jim Lovell was asked, before he left for his second trip to the moon (Apollo 13), if he worried about the risk. His response was if wasn't an astronaut heading for the moon, he'd be back to his original job as a navy fighter pilot flying missions over North Vietnam, and he'd rather everybody be working to keep him alive than trying to kill him. And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized.
If you add KIA+MIA (after this long a time, those are dead bodies that were never recovered), in World War One average US monthly losses were 6260/month, World War Two was 9865/month, Korea was 1116/month, Vietnam was 589/month, and the total combined dead from September 11th attacks, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the operations against ISIS come out to 9766 (all numbers from Wikipedia). So the past 20 years of fairly continuous war comes out to about the dead from a single month of World War Two, for the US. That's in lockstep with the rest of the culture, we simply are much safer in every dimension.
> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized.
This seems plausible, but I wonder if what you calculated is the best way to measure it.
First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other side of these conflicts? At least in the past 20 years' examples, the U.S. military wasn't fighting adversaries who were equipped nearly as well as it was.
Second, the number of people who fought in each of these wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per month" rather than "deaths per month"? (I don't know how that comparison would come out.)
First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the
world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other
side of these conflicts?
Yeah and no. It's so hard to measure the human cost of war because so many of the deaths are indirect.
Operation Rolling Thunder (50 years ago) was probably the last time the US took mass numbers of lives directly, with the high end of estimates approaching something like an average of 5,000/month.
Those are horrific levels of loss but nowhere near the toll of WWII.
Second, the number of people who fought in each of these
wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct
comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per
month" rather than "deaths per month"?
It depends. Do we want to measure how risky it is to be a combatant, or how risky it is to be a human being on Earth?
If it's the former, then "deaths per combatant per month" is what we want. That would be interesting, though I question how broadly useful it would be. It would obviously be directly useful for combatants (or those considering becoming combatants) but is probably not useful as an overall indicator of "hey, how's the human race doing in general?"
If it's the latter, the stat we probably want is "war-related deaths per human being per month" or something like that. That would be a good indicator of overall levels of war and strife. It would take into account the increased population of the world as well.
Even if (heaven forbid) we had a conflict that results in WWII-like absolute levels of deaths today, that would represent a far lower number of deaths as a percentage of the human population lost.
On the first question, there is some scholarly debate, but as far as I can tell as an outsider the general consensus is that there are fewer deaths due to armed conflict than anytime in the last two millennia. Even something as terrible as the Syrian Civil War (~half a million dead over a decade) is the sort of civil unrest that was happening at multiple places across the world during the 17th century (see _Global Crisis_ by Geoffrey Parker for how horrible the 17th century was, all around the world). It's just the numbers are a lot less precise than we have for American deaths in military operations, so there is a lot more room for debate. This can be complicated even for something well documented and recent like World War Two: do you count the Bengal famine as part of the war dead? It killed ~2 million Indians, but not directly due to the war, it's just that the ships that in peacetime would have been carrying food to India to relieve the famine were instead carrying weapons (and food) from the US to Britain. Did they die due to the war? Or due to British colonialism and evil Winston Churchill? Well, a whole lot of the deaths in 17th century wars were due to war-related famine and disease, so if you don't count the Bengal Famine but do use the higher numbers for the 30 Years War it isn't a clean comparison, etc.
On the second question it's even harder to say. Would probably be a masters degree level of work to compute. There are all sorts of confounding factors: during World War Two, for the US Army, infantry made up about 20% of the personnel (half were in logistics, various other combat arms like artillery, tankers, engineers etc. made up the balance) but did the vast majority of the dying: something like 80% of US Army deaths came from that 20% of the force. So is the combatant count just infantry (and the small number of other combat arms who were forward of the gun line)? Similarly, about half the total US deaths during WW2 came during the Northwest Europe campaign (D-Day to V-E Day, France-Low Countries-Germany). The other half of the deaths came from the entire Battle of the Atlantic, the Bomber Offensive, Mediterranean and Pacific combined. So those 11 months were much deadlier than the rest.
This is the advantage of the straightforward monthly average, it can be computed in five minutes from Wikipedia. Trying to get more detail quickly becomes a whole bunch of tricky choices that reasonable people can disagree on, but which leave you with wildly different numbers.
> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be
My hunch for wars getting less deadly is because of nuclear weapons. There hasn't been a direct war between superpowers for the better part of a century. This sounds good, except it's possible we'll essentially wipe out the planet overnight because of a technical error.
Fatalities have gone down even for wars of similar intensities. More important is the improvement in battlefield medicine and body armor - the KIA/WIA ratio for the US military has plummeted, from around 1:1.5 during WW2, to around 1:3 in Korea after the introduction of helicopter evacuation and more refined frontline aid stations, to just above 1:10 in Afghanistan.
e.g. I strongly doubt that Tammy Duckworth's wounds would have been survivable on the battlefield in 1940, or even in 1970.
>I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent.
The people who were test pilots in the 90s were people who succeeded under a system of massive "by the book"-ness.
The cowboys of the 60s don't wind up being successful test pilots in that kind of system.
The organizations changed so the people who succeed in them changed.
And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one.
The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's and 1960's a lot more death was accepted and because of that, the standards were lower."
In the 60s you needed some crazy cowboy to try and fly a brick strapped to a gas tank. Today you simulate what happens on a Dell laptop and that’s that.
That would be more to computer simulation before the aircraft ever takes it first flight. Test pilots from the in the 50s and 60s did not have that option.
Those numbers are fascinating in their own right, but even more so when compared against the staggering 35,000+ deaths per month the US is suffering right now.
(467k over ~13 months of pandemic, obviously it's not evenly spread but the point is it's an order of magnitude greater than the worst ever war death rates.)
You make a very valid point about casualty rates, though I am just about certain that Jim Lovell would have been eager to go regardless.
Getting back to casualty rates, I think you have to at least put them on a log scale to get a feel for their impact on society, at least as long as they are less than the survivorship rate.
The risk isn't just from being a test pilot, there is a line in "The Right Stuff" pointing out that the chances of a Navy pilot being killed in peacetime was 1 in 4 over their career.
Yes, and he's quoted talking about it in an article in The Smithsonian Magazine [1]:
> While stories have persisted that Shepard sprung this stunt on his own—or smuggled the club head and balls to the lunar surface, he had indeed gotten permission.
> It took him a while, though, to convince Manned Spaceflight Center director Bob Gilruth, who was not keen on the idea.
> “Absolutely no way,” Shepard recalled the initial response.
...
> Shepard explained he’d bring the modified Wilson Staff 6-iron club head and two balls in a tube sock “at no expense to the taxpayer.” And he promised not to even try it if anything on the mission went wrong. For that reason, he waited until the end of their lunar visit.
Edited to add: Of course, later missions had toys built-in - lunar rovers for Apollo 15, 16 and 17. Real-time footage of the complete Apollo 17 mission is at https://apolloinrealtime.org/ and I can't recommend it highly enough :-)
It's also important to note how much a bit of goofing around got the public engaged in the missions. It wasn't a dry, clinical, scientific expedition — real humans were on the moon, and took the opportunity to... be actual humans. Hitting golf balls. Jumping around.
Those antics, even if they had nominal risk, are part of what got millions of people (especially young people) excited about manned spaceflight.
What in the world are you talking
about?? That is actually completely opposite of what happened!
As cool as this was to many of us, public support plummeted after seeing NASA "fooling around", and golf especially was seen as an elitist white man's activity. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias. Political support, which was already waning, immediately fell off a cliff as well.
Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.
I would be interested in evidence that "mundane" activities were directly connected with the decline of the program, but I think you're inserting modern biases of race into the public sentiment of the 70s. I don't think people looked at golf explicitly as a "rich white man's game" in a pejorative sense, nor do I think the people that would, were pulling the strings in Congress or NASA.
My understanding was one of "Okay, we beat the Soviets to the Moon, now what?"
> Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.
Hardly. The number of missions was primarily capped by budgetary constraints [0] and the fact that they had only budgeted to build 15 Saturn 5 launchers. Flights after Apollo 17 were used for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
I really wish the people downvoting me would go read a book and not rely on Buzzfeed listicles of top 10 cool things we did on the moon and other crap pulled up via a five second Google search.
If you aren't old enough to remember, go ask someone who was. If you can't find one, then do some actual reading, or check out any of the thousands of documentaries out there. (That doesn't include the History Channel's Nazi Moonbase conspiracy theories.)
Yea, like launching a car in space on an interplanetary trajectory complete with a mannequin in a space suit at the driving wheel! Completely unthinkable nowadays! ;-)
I thought that was odd too. Maybe the middle one was a practice swing?
edit - I watched it again more closely. Looks like he threw down the second ball and the middle shot was either a practice swing or he missed it altogether and it wasn't counted (which I think is fair given he was wearing a thick space suit in low gravity swinging one handed with a fishbowl on his head).
edit 2 - Just seeing child post. Guess I gotta watch it again :)
edit 3 - Yep, child post is correct. It's sort of weird how confusing this short video is. The second ball kind of appears out of nowhere, as if he was doing a practice swing and dropping the ball at the same time.
A ball is clearly visible at 46s. Watching it again, he swings 4 times. I don't see a ball for the second swing, but they are clearly visible for the other 3.
I imagine the analyst found where 2 landed and the write up misunderstood that to be the number of shots.
To anyone interested in early space flight and the Apollo missions, I strongly recommend reading Michael Collins's memoir Carrying the Fire. It is quite amazing all the training that the astronauts had to go through so they could manually perform various tasks and measurements, since the computing capacity was extremely limited.
One aspect of this that seems to have not been commented on is the actual potential danger involved in taking a full swing. It would have been extremely reckless for him to try to hit it hard. He could damage his suit in the swing, or maybe even spin himself off of his feet and land hard and puncture his suit that way. So of course he wasn't really trying to hit it far.
> "We can now fairly accurately determine that ball number one travelled 24 yards, and ball number two travelled 40 yards," says Cheshire-based Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to mark the anniversary.
> "Unfortunately, even the impressive second shot could hardly be described as 'miles and miles and miles', but of course this has only ever been regarded as a light-hearted exaggeration."
Is 40 yards impressive? I don't know anything about golf but as an ignorant observer that sounds fairly tame.
> While those distances may appear underwhelming, it is still an astonishing feat by Shepard
> The pressurised suits severely restricted movement, and due to their helmet's visors they struggled to even see their feet.
> I would challenge any club golfer to go to their local course and try to hit a six-iron, one-handed, with a one-quarter swing out of an unraked bunker.
> Then imagine being fully suited, helmeted and wearing thick gloves. Remember also that there was little gravity to pull the clubhead down toward the ball.
> The fact that Shepard even made contact and got the ball airborne is extremely impressive
Thank you, I missed that part of the article entirely.
I was on my phone, and scrolled down to read the article, but those images took up a large part of the screen and I sort of half-consciously took that to signal the end of the article, thus prompting me to ask here.
It happens. NBD. My initial response was perhaps more snide than I intended, I should have at the very least ended it with a smiley to show I was only being playful. FWIW I don't feel your comment deserves to be downvoted, and this one where you acknowledge it certainly does not.
Sorry, completely missed that. I was looking for that section but the large picture on my phone's screen somehow "signaled" the end of the article to my brain. Thanks for the heads up :)
Much appreciated, this is what I was looking for. Turns out the article answered my question in more depth but I missed that part and thus the downvotes.
He did it one-handed (with some sort of iron IIRC), and had to 'fight' his own suit, which offered poor visibility and range of motion, as well as 'elasticity' from changes in volume.
