we're not going anywhere

Seven years to the day of the Columbia tragedy and loss of seven heroes comes the announcement the Return To The Moon Program is scraped.

This vagabond space cadet still get chills reading and listening to Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, as he stood in the narrow valley canyon named Hadley Rille, in July, 1971. He said:

"As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there's a fundamental truth to our nature, Man must explore . . . and this is exploration at its greatest."

and later:

"For when I look at the Moon I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that will never end."

"This budget is just simply not friendly to exploration," said White House Panel member Sally Ride. "It's very difficult to find an exploration scenario that actually fits within this very restrictive budget guidance that we've been given."

As Jay Barbree, space correspondent, points out, any money spent would stay here on earth. The billions spent for the first moon program "employed 400,000 directly, and another 1.6 million indirectly. Two million Americans oiled Apollo’s gears and rewrote the books on medicine, communications, engineering, astronomy and hundreds of other sciences and disciplines."