Forty years ago today, the Apollo 14 Saturn V took to space from Cape Kennedy, Florida for the third human landing mission to the Moon. Commander Alan Shepard, Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa, and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell launched on their nine-day mission on January 31, 1971. Shepard and Mitchell made their lunar landing on February 5 in the Fra Mauro formation; this had originally been the target of the aborted Apollo 13 mission.
The countdown and launch 'moments' are special memories to me inasmuch as I stood in the bleachers near Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew and Dr. Wernher von Braun at the Vehicle Assembly Building (which held Apollo 15 and Apollo 16) to watch my only human lunar space launch. "The moment" caused me to realize the nexus between rocket science and political science as President Richard M. Nixon directed NASA to commence Saturn-Apollo layoffs and end the lunar landings at Apollo 17. I was but age 15; the realization drove me into a career of law and politics entering the youthful epiphany of "No Bucks, No Buck Rogers!'
The Saturn V dwarfed the thunder and rumble of the several subsequent space shuttle at take-off I have had the good fortune to see since STS-1 in April 1981. In my judgment, the elimination of the Apollo program was the single largest national error in my lifetime. With a new NERVA-third stage for the Saturn, who knows where humans would be in the solar system today. I can only hope that in some parallel universe we continued aboard Saturns and far from Earth.
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