Space Race About Face

I don't feel the least bit sorry for posting back-to-back Tom Wolfe articles. If you read one space race piece this week (the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon) then make it this one.

Intuitively, not consciously, Kennedy had chosen another form of military contest, an oddly ancient and archaic one. It was called “single combat.”

The best known of all single combats was David versus Goliath. Before opposing armies clashed in all-out combat, each would send forth its “champion,” and the two would fight to the death, usually with swords. The victor would cut off the head of the loser and brandish it aloft by its hair.

More than two millenniums later, the mental atmosphere of the space race was precisely that. The details of single combat were different. Cosmonauts and astronauts didn’t fight hand to hand and behead one another. Instead, each side’s brave champions, including one woman (Valentina Tereshkova), risked their lives by sitting on top of rockets and having their comrades on the ground light the fuse and fire them into space like the human cannonballs of yore.

In the truest spirit of "single combat" here's Buzz Aldrin punching an idiotic conspiracy theorist in the face.