It's easy to look to the past and marvel about how smoothly things went back then. I've found that the closer I am to an effort, the more amazed I am that anything gets accomplished. Anyway, in an obscure search today, I came across this article from Time Magazine in 1959. It describes the morass of cross-responsibility and multiple committees that were formed in the post-Sputnik panic. Here's a couple-paragraph teaser:

Pondering the meaning of Sputnik I back in October 1957, the London Express confidently predicted that the result of the Soviet push into space would be a U.S. drive to "catch up and pass the Russians" in space exploration. "Never doubt for a moment that America will be successful." the Express added. The U.S. agreed with that statement: of course it would catch up, and quickly.
But two years later the U.S. is still running a poor second in the two-entry space race. And in high-level Washington last week, there still were no detectable signs of urgency about the U.S.'s space lag. The President, his advisers reported, was convinced that the U.S. space effort must be kept "within reason." Vice President Richard Nixon assured a press conference that the nation's space effort was "moving along at a reasonably good pace." Herbert F. York, the Defense Department's director of research and engineering, dismissed the Soviet lead in the space race as "more a question of acute embarrassment than national survival." Engineer T. Keith Glennan, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, called for a "sane course"—which in NASA bafflegab seems to mean the same program that has kept the U.S. lagging behind. Roy Johnson, head of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, could offer no better proposal than the creation of a "psychological warfare department" to "answer" Soviet space feats.

The next paragraph starts talking about lack of vision...

There are plenty of people on the web reminiscing about Apollo 11's landing. While I tried for tickets to The Air and Space Museum event with the crew and Gene Kranz, I haven't been doing much else related. While 40th anniversaries need to be celebrated because not that many live to see the 50th, I'm spending more time following The Augustine Commission, who released an interesting document for public comment.

Looks like Jupiter got clobbered almost 15 years to the day after Shoemaker-Levy 9 gave astronomers a show. My favorite part of the story is the fact that an amateur astronomer caught the impact first, then notified the community and brought about more involved observations. This further blurs the line between 'amateur' astronomers and 'professional' ones.

A mix of family fun, TEMPO work, 'real' work, and Mars Society Conference preparation has me swamped, but there's been plenty of cool stuff going on.

• SpaceX flew their Falcon 1 rocket again. Next step is the big boy, Facon 9
• Apollo 11 celebrations are going strong, some favorite sites of mine are listening to the mission in real time and seeing new pictures of the Apollo landing sites (as an aside, the LRO control center is in the room next to Landsat 7's, where I work.