We went and saw The Martian as a last minute activity last night, mostly because I love the pepperoni pizza at Alamo Drafthouse. The movie was really good and intense. Perfect movie, makes you laugh, cry, think, and discuss what you saw. Chubs and I were a mess with the crying, mostly from the intense moments on screen.
I think these movies are good, we have now had Gravity with Sandra Bullock, Interstellar with Mathew McConaughey, and The Martian which bring science and space to the forefront. As a society, we should be thinking of going out into space and figuring how to live out there. At some point aliens are going to land here, and we'll still be blowing each other up like the monkeys we are in the middle east. We really need to cut that shit out and focus on more grown up things like conquering space travel so we can be the aliens landing on other planets scaring the primitives.
I hate that NASA lost its stronghold on space exploration, at least it was an organization within the government which spent tax dollars getting men (and women) into space. I still remember doing a tour of the NASA facility in Florida. They had a Saturn rocket laying on its side inside a building, I want to say was as long as a football field, a rocket garden outside with a number of old rockets standing together like metal trees. There was a launch simulation which absolutely gave me chills and brought tears to my eyes, feeling a shuttle launch, and the power produced by the rockets even though they are like a mile away.
Nothing makes me prouder to be an american, than seeing those ships and rockets flying into the sky. It is a truly concerted effort by teams of hundreds of intelligent people working together for a moment of perfection. The movie touched on this. There were countless scores of teams helping to save our "boy" and bring him back, working round the clock, coming up with creative solutions where there are nothing but problems.
As Boy countered, there are companies like Space X sending unmanned rockets up, and I guess if we are going to live and die by the capitalist system, it should be this way, but I want Space X to have its competition. Ford, Chevy and Dodge have made themselves better by competing, with themselves and outside competition, this only brings us better cars and trucks. I hope there is more than Space X out there, it needs competition to make better rockets.
I gotta add, Boy was making rockets in high school, large ones, like 8-10 ft tall. It was intense watching them launch. We would go to this all day affair out towards Fredericksburg, where all day long, one rocket after another from different schools launched. Every rocket made me fear, ok, this is the one that is coming righ after us. They never did. A couple did fail at launch, but they would somersault and die in the field before us.
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