Word: moons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...model for manned flight was not Art Carney in the sewer but Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape. Long ago, public support for space exploration had two parts. First, a spirit of competition. It was sport -- war by other means -- writ large, very large: an international race to the moon...
...romance. It meant meeting our destiny. Today it means little more than physical displacement. Compare the films of the early space age with the sci-fi of today. Compare 2001 with Robocop, Close Encounters with The Terminator. Compare John Kennedy's thrilling pledge to race to the moon with . . . what? No politician talks that way anymore. The new frontier is not the moon. It's HMOs...
...years later, and we are weighed down by cynicism about government, worries about our economy, deep anxieties about a level of social breakdown we could not have imagined in 1961. True, in the '60s too we had our scolds who told us that money spent on the moon was better spent on this or that program here on Earth. But in a more expansive time, people ignored those with the souls of accountants who knew nothing of national adventure...
...show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short of his 53rd birthday, it may now be easier to appreciate an often overlooked fact about Francis Vincent Zappa...
...time warp. For a few days, America was back in the 1960s, an era when space was a grand frontier to be tamed, and when NASA's technical brilliance and right-stuff bravado made the agency seem virtually unstoppable as it sent men into orbit and on to the moon...