Acquisition of Signal
My trip to Washington D.C. was fun.
I got a chance to catch up with old friends, meet new friends, and run a 10-mile race on 4 hours of sleep.
In the United States capital city, there are a lot of tourist spots to check out, but I had time for only one: the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
By chance, it was personally recommended by my Lyft driver and by my Foursquare app as top-rated.
When Elon Musk isn’t putting Tesla ($TSLA) into public relations messes, he’s exploring space with SpaceX.
When Jeff Bezos isn’t conceding billions of dollars of Amazon ($AMZN) value in a divorce settlement, he’s exploring space with Blue Origin.
When Sir Richard Branson isn’t starting every possible business venture on planet Earth with the Virgin brand name, he’s exploring space with Virgin Galactic.
Space is somehow cool again, and not just because of the Star Trek or Star Wars ($DIS) franchise revivals.
The Air and Space Museum is only two floors and some parts were under renovation.
But its economy of space allows for a closer concentration on its content.
Coincidentally, the documentary Apollo 11 (2019) was playing in the IMAX ($IMAX) theater so I bought a ticket after two days earlier having a nice chat with someone from NASA at a financial Twitter ($TWTR) meetup.
The documentary was without a narrator or any post-1969 interview:
It was powerful just watching the raw footage before and after the launch.
In middle school, as part of an assignment, I memorized part of President Kennedy’s commencement address at American University from 1963.
A year earlier, President Kennedy gave another profound speech at Rice University that concludes the documentary fittingly, albeit posthumously:
“But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, reentering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun — almost as hot as it is here today — and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out — then we must be bold.”
On Mad Men, the agency co-founder Bert Cooper’s last on-screen words before dying off-screen were “Bravo” after watching the moon landing.
After almost 50 years, those words are still accurate:
“This has been far more than three men on a mission to the Moon; more still than the efforts of a government and industry team; more, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.”
– Buzz Aldrin
“The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort; next with the American people, who have, through their will, indicated their desire; next with four administrations and their Congresses, for implementing that will; and then, with the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft, the Saturn, the Columbia, the Eagle, and the little EMU, the spacesuit and backpack that was our small spacecraft out on the lunar surface. We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.”
– Neil Armstrong
