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The Human Moon, Editorial, NY Times
"Perhaps the wistfulness is caused by the sense of simple grandeur in those Apollo missions. Perhaps, too, it's a reminder of the risk we all felt after the Eagle had landed -- the possibility that it might be unable to lift off again and the astronauts would be stranded on the Moon. But it may also be that a photograph like this one is as close as we're able to come to looking directly back into the human past. There the lunar module sits, parked just where it landed 40 years ago, as if it still really were 40 years ago and all the time since merely imaginary."
The Moon View, editorial, New York Times (18 Nov 2008)
"What is most evocative is the awareness that this is our planet in 1966, which feels like a very long time ago. A train of thought immediately presents itself. If scientists can recover extensive new information from old electronic data, shouldn't there be some way to peer beneath those clouds, back in time, and see how this planet looked when it had only half its current population?"
Perhaps if the news media-like the New York Times-had supported public interest in the space program at the time, instead of constant editorials caling the lunar program a waste of money-there would be people visible in some of the LRO's images-from the habitual occupation of the Moon which would have followed Apollo. Instead we have images of what we abandoned 40 years ago.
Among NASA's greatest critics in the 1960s was the Times. This revisionist longing is too little, too late.