16-24 july 1969

so you've heard of buzz aldrin and neil armstrong - first men to walk on the moon - but what about michael collins? heard of him? eh? what does an irish revolutionary have to do with space travel, you ask?

no - not that michael collins, ya eejit!

michael collins was the command module pilot on apollo 11. this means that on the flight that took 2 men all the way to the surface of the moon, astronaut collins drove the get-away vehicle. he circled the moon waiting on his compadres to get done vandalizing the pristine lunar surface, then he picked them up and hustled them back to earth, a quarter million miles away.

michael collins orbited & waited. michael collins was relegated to simply biding his time, alone. for 48 minutes of each orbit, he was out of radio contact - completely & totally alone in space, on the dark side of the moon. did he feel left out? lonely? clearly, his was a vital role, but did he envy the men on the moon?

i have heard that we [and, by "we" i mean the collective consciousness (and by "collective consciousness" i mean rocket scientists)] no longer have the knowledge required to land on the moon. difficult to believe, eh? apparently, the notes were written on - get this - paper and the paper has been lost. ha! eejits! why didn't they store the notes in their iphones??

seriously - some documentation was destroyed by grumman, the company that created the lunar module, but there are actual lunar modules in nasa's possesion which were built for apollo missions that weren't run b/c nasa's budget was cut. i'm fairly certain a rocket scientist could figure out how the lunar modules were made by inspecting these existing models. why did grumman destroy the documentation? i'd guess b/c it was top secret but could have been b/c people can be eejits.

speaking of eejits - someone at nasa erased the original tapes of the transmission of video data from the apollo 11 moon landing. there are secondary tapes created simultaneously, and i won't bore you with the details, but to sum it up: the secondary tapes are completely valid but not as good quality as the primary tapes. in the 70s and 80s when satellites began to proliferate and generate a plethora of 24/7 data, nasa was scavenging for tapes and apparently erased & taped over the moon landing. not sure really how that could happen. weren't they marked «moon landing - save»? and, if the faded ink on the peeling paper label was unreadable - didn't they look at them before they erased them? and, what were they doing so short on tapes - why didn't they run out to officemax and get some more?

we are undoubtedly a rampaging pack of eejits.

can we still put a man on the moon?

do we still want to?