guest log: (...) a giant leap for exploitation

One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
Destiny has its funny ways: 40 years from that first legendary moonwalk in the year of the much more terrestrial departure of the "moonwalker"...
Two different but strong symbols of one same culture: the american dream, the possibility of reaching the impossible, of physically touching the sky starting from nothing.

The culture also where things are not what they seem. A black man that looks white, an old man that wants to be an eternal teenager. A science mission that nobody will ever remember as scientific but that only served to the purpose of showing the strength not only of a country but of a whole political, economical and ethical system. A mission so similar to a hollywood movie to be surrounded by the myth of a setup.

One giant leap for mankind, but in what direction? It is undeniable that that day the whole western world held its breath and dreamed of whole new frontiers of knowledge and freedom. The movement of the students, then in its most intense and creative years, surely dreamed of a different freedom that seemed only a step away that night in front of the television as well as the next day in the streets with thousands of people.

But there is probably no better symbol than the mission to the moon to relate the exploitation of scientists and of the concept itself of science to a more general defense of a political and economical model. That was not a step for mankind, but a step ahead of the Western block with respect to the Eastern one, not a sign of unity but of division, not of brotherhood but of predominance. And all this defended (at least waiting to see whether it worked or not) under the shield of "science" and "progress".

The whole rush to space, as the cold war in general, gave to the great science that was produced in those years on both sides, its character of competition and suspect and secrecy, and highlighted the necessity for scientist to accept the concept of "production" to survive.
The cosmonauts...a childhood dream or one more shiny commercial?

- ailu