History of space travel: Artemis at the moon UPDATED

I watched quite a bit of the NASA YouTube channel during the ten day voyage of Artemis II to the moon and back. I’m a fan. I like all that space stuff.

But I’m old enough to remember – vividly -- the Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. A lot of Artemis looked … familiar.

Yes, of course the technology is light-years ahead of what they got by with in the 1960s. Good to see the capsule full of screens and digital readouts. The colour pictures and videos were great. The iPhones they carried had infinitely more computing power than everything on Apollo 11. Even the cameras they used to photograph the lunar surface had hundreds of times higher resolution than those of 1968. And in fifty years the crewcut can-do white-guy fighter jocks of Apollo have morphed into a diverse and laidback quartet who gushed affection and love back to the home planet. They probably set off with much more confidence about getting back home than Armstrong and Aldrin, too. So: much change.

But during their flight someone noted that the time from the Wright brothers’ first flight to Apollo is almost the same as the time from Apollo to Artemis. I can’t help thinking the first half delivered much more change than the second one. I guess those were the easy bits.

There is still no space plane. The space shuttle (that could at least fly down to an airfield) was a dud, and the space station is going to be “deorbited” long before a replacement takes shape. There is still no permanent facility either in earth orbit or circling the moon, and none spoken of. Elon Musk is no longer promising to go live on Mars. Just as their predecessors did, the Artemis crew went up on a pillar of flame and came down to bob awkwardly in rubber boats. Artemis III will make its moon landing with the same capsule-and-lander process that operated in the 1960s. Indeed the whole Artemis program seems to follow pretty much the well-worn flight path and landing methods of Apollo, and the astronauts still lack the relay satellites that would allow communication from behind the moon. Anything like routine space travel remains in the realm of science fiction.

I have never forgotten reading an observation, not long after Apollo, that the first trips to the North and South Pole were hellishly difficult and dangerous voyages. But when people went back there, those were routine journeys using new submarine and aircraft technology that made the poles an afterthought. I thought then it might be like that with the moon.  After the dangerous and risky and incredibly expensive flights of Apollo, the next people on the moon would just drop in as part of a general achievement of spacefaring.   

It’s still damn hard just to achieve earth orbit and return. No space planes, no liveable platforms parked above earth and moon, let alone Mars. It’s still absolutely cold and dark and airless everywhere up there, and we still live at the bottom of a deep gravity well that strongly resists us going up and out. Spacefaring is still a long way away.

Next time I dip into a galactic space war novel or a world-building epic of routine travel and trade across and beyond the solar system, I won’t be thinking that’s any closer than it was in the sixties.

Update, same day:  Molly Ungar responds:

Thank you for your excellent comments on the Artemis II mission. We are also fans, and as we watched the splash-down and crew retrieval, we decided then and there to re-visit two films: “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13”.  Both are as engrossing as when they were first released.

 

However, thus far I’ve not heard of any goal attached to the Artemis program other than that of mining for critical minerals on the moon, which of course reminds me of the movie “Alien”, and look how that turned out. I would say that the Cold War “space race” buoyed up government and public interest until the U.S. declared victory and departed the field.

Like yourself, we were interested in the changes you point out, and noticed how much was familiar.

History of Unwritten Histories at Active History

Active History is taking note of the tenth anniversary (and also the end of) the blog called Unwritten Histories. UH's authors have been reposting some of their fave posts at Active History as a farewell from their site.

Unwritten Histories may have been on my History Blogs of Note for a while; certainly I remember reading it. I admired its "Guide to Resources"  and "Canadian History Roundup" posts. It was also a support blog for emerging historians, particularly women, struggling with graduate school and the search for employment (not my own situation at all, but an admirable service):

When I started Unwritten Histories, it was due to frustration and anger after having worked at a history department for three years, only to not even get an interview when the first permanent Canadian History job came up. At that point, I had been working as a sessional instructor for over 5 years, and I was exhausted. In one memorable semester, I had to get up at 5:30 am to take a coach bus and then a shuttle bus to teach an 8 am class two cities over from where I lived. The trip took two hours.  After that class was over at 11, I had to wait 3 hours (because of conflicting bus schedules) before taking the same trip in reverse, to teach another 3 hours class from 6 to 9. I still don’t know how I did it. All I knew was that, after finding out I didn’t get the interview, it felt like my entire career had been a waste of time and I needed a new plan. 

I'm side-eyeing that tenth anniversary announcement a little bit. UH launched in 2016, went silent in 2020, and now returns to claim ten years -- as it closes down. I'm entitled to quibble, I think; this blog has been running since (checks notes) 2004 and has barely missed a week. But history blogs, particularly Canadian ones, are always scarce, and Andrea Eidinger and Stephanie Pettigrew gave a lot to this one.  

And good to note Active History remains very active and worth looking at. Here, for instance, is a note about its year-long Indian Act 150 series -- the Indian Act having been given royal assent on April 12, 1876. 

History of Talking in the changing city

We went to the Daniels Spectrum in Toronto's revitalized Regent Park neighbourhood last night to attend a WalrusTalks discussion sponsored by the magazine. The talk title, "Power and Belonging," was not very descriptive in advance, but the speakers turned out to be young, mostly indigenous, of colour, immigrants --  and all of them articulate, passionate, a bit pissed-off, and positioning themselves as community rather than power in their commitments (though they include a Canada Research Chair, a Vanier Scholar, and so on).

On the streetcars there and back we passed by Sankofa Square (formerly Yonge-Dundas) and connected through TMU subway station (TMU being formerly Ryerson, and the station formally Dundas). Good to go to an event where the speakers matched the new place names beginning to reflect the new city. 

It was a great pick-me-up when so many of the comfortably placed and well-funded old white historians and writers I know are still trying to roll back reconciliation and put the statues back up.

The event was livecast and is to be available with other WalrusTalks at Walrus Video.

Book Notes: Karen Dubinsky on Cuba

Queen's University historian Karen Dubinsky has a new book out: Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters. It's an exploration of many Canadian networks of contact with Cuba during the long American crusade against the island: everything from engineering to cattle breeding to salsa music. It includes her own contacts: Dubinsky has co-taught a course at the University of Havana for years and has visited constantly.

The Canadian government does not seem to think Cuban survival in the face of Trump holds much value, but over the decades a lot of Canadians have seen it differently.

Book Notes: John Fraser on the GGs

Went down last night to Massey College to join a noisy sociable crowd at the book launch of The Governors General of Canada: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office, by John Fraser, the journalist, homme de lettres, and man-about-Toronto. I have been browsing in it in advance thanks to a copy sent by publishers Sutherland House.

It’s not that kind of intimate; it gets its title from the way Fraser has managed over the years to be in the company of quite a few of the GGs, sometimes covering them as a journalist, sometimes inviting them to Massey College during his years as master there. It’s short, chatty, gossipy, and manages to be a Fraser memoir as well as a set of profiles of the Canadians who have held the post from Vincent Massey on - with some serious reflections on the office itself. It's a lively read. About the most disparaged office the country has, that's no small feat. 

Fraser, who loves the monarchy, likes the office of governor general for its reflected glory, and he likes most those GGs who are most in the monarchical style, that is, dignified, reserved, mannered, and a bit de haut en bas. Massey, Georges Vanier, Roland Michener, Jules Leger, and recently David Johnston pass muster. Somewhat to my surprise, he respects Adrienne Clarkson as well. He explains by quoting another anecdote: “She’s a total monarchist. She just thinks the wrong person is on the throne.” She filled the role, in other words, and Fraser respects that. He likes as well how well John Ralston Saul handled the difficult role of GG spouse.

He’s less keen on Sauvé, Schreyer, Hnatyshyn, and Leblanc – too political, too ordinary, and a bit too “just folks” for his taste. He’s cool about Michaelle Jean, too. Perhaps, Fraser admits, it’s because he never managed to have her visit Massey College. Perhaps, he also admits at some length, because his daughter may be right when she accuses him of thinking of her mostly as a DEI hire despite all evidence to the contrary.

Fraser is most blinkered on Mary Simon, whom he calls “a one-trick pony,” “missing the boat” -- because all she talks about is reconciliation. For Fraser, reconciliation is causing national depression and Simon is failing to get “us all” safely past it. Madame Simon, stay on your pony – John Fraser inadvertently shows us how much we need you.       

Monarchical slop

AI slop -- the crazy stuff when AI starts to hallucinate or people use it to do really stupid things -- is in the news regularly, and the media are constantly being warned to avoid it.  But we need to pay attention to monarchy slop -- the crazy things that reputable publications will disseminate when it comes to the British royal family.

Here from CBC News no less, is a story about how Donald Trump's respect for King Charles is what has saved Canada from annexation.  

Now any sentient person knows that Donald Trump does not do respect. He is not into friendship. But this Charles-saves-Canada story seems to get all kinds of space, as if it were a real story with political significance  Here is Susan Delacourt, national affairs columnist at the Toronto Star, taking the whole thing at face value.

Thanks to a British author, we learned this week that all the 51st-state talk is now on the back burner for two reasons: one lies in Trump’s respect for King Charles, and, maybe more significantly, the president doesn’t have enough time to annex this nation.

Look into this story, and one learns it's from "a prominent royal commentator" with a new book being serialized in the Daily Mail. He reports that he happened to be chatting sociably with the American president when the matter came up. Does this happen? Did he buy a membership at Mar-a-Lago, possibly?   

Quick trip to Quebec et la Nouvelle-France

We were briefly in Montreal last week  -- colder and snowier than Toronto, but still a pleasure to visit.  

While we were there, the debate about Quebec's Bill 21, the one about secularism that mostly bans various clothing items for Muslims, Jews, and others, was in the Supreme Court of Canada and in the news.

As it happened we were staying on Rue Saint-Paul, and the streets around us were called Francois-Xavier, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Sulpice, and so on.  When we took the subway we noted stations with names like Pie IX, and l'Assomption, and Sainte-Catherine. Way above us the cross atop Mont-Royal shone bright.

Either the movement for official secularism has a long way to go, or maybe the critics are right to say it is mostly cover for an effort to keep the visible minorities in their place.

Meanwhile, I have been reading People, State, and War Under the French Regime in Canada by Louise Dechêne, translated by Peter Feldstein. The original French-language edition was published (posthumously) in 2008 and the translation in 2021. I regret having to admit I had not been aware of either until very recently.

Because Louise Dechêne really was a terrific historian, and this, like all else she wrote, is most original, deeply source-based, deeply thought-out, and frequently takes no prisoners in what she says of other scholars of New France.  I admire her immensely, and may have more on this book when I'm done with it.

Book Notes: Allan Greer on the Rum Economy

Nice to see a substantial early Canadian history piece by Allan Greer, McGill University historian, featured in the Toronto Star, and based on a book published by McGill Queen's University Press.

The story is about the enormous role of rum in early Atlantic Canada, with particular focus on how the truck system in the transatlantic cod fishery enabled captains and proprietors to sell large quantities of greatly marked-up rum to their employees so as to drive them into debt and avoid having to pay their wages.  

The statistics are persuasive. Still, I'm not sure if it is Allan Greer or just the way the Star selected a bit from his book, but I have to be a little sceptical of the article's suggestion that every poor fisherman was inevitably driven hopelessly into rum-fuelled debt for the profit and convenience of their owner. 

There are many anecdotal accounts of fishers in the records who made long careers -- sometimes credited with making forty or even more annual visits from European ports to the North Atlantic fishing grounds. Presumably at least some were not ruined every year, or the whole economy of the fishery would have collapsed. It was a grim proto-industrial business altogether, no doubt, but its survival for several hundred years suggests it was not a completely irrational economic system.  

Still, a fun read on a Saturday morning. And for once major media runs a history op-ed that is about history, and not a diatribe against wokeness in history and how we are not doing enough to ram patriotic facts down the throats of school children so we can all forget about it later.

Ancient History

A day will come when the passage of time and the assiduous exploration of long centuries will bring to light what now escapes us, and our posterity will be amazed that we were ignorant of such evident things.

             -- Seneca (4 B.C.E - 65 C.E.)

[Shared and suggested by Russ Chamberlayne.]

Submarines all the way down: Carney's cultural policy cuts UPDATED

So this happened:  

In February Colin Coates, professor of history, wrote in his role as president of the Canadian Historical Association to Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Heritage, expressing the CHA's concern over the way the budgetary choices made by the Carney government have led to serious closures, service reductions, and staff reductions at almost every federal agency charged with creating, preserving, and distributing historical and cultural knowledge, and particularly Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum, Parks Canada, and Statistics Canada. As he says:

I am sure that you are aware of the key roles these agencies play in encouraging interest in Canadian history. At this particular juncture in the history of our country, active engagement with the complicated Canadian past is more necessary than ever. Canadians need to understand, for example, the features of our past that distinguish us from our neighbours to the south and that have led us to adopt different paths to our concepts of citizenship, democracy, and civic engagement. 

On March 18  (lightspeed by Government of Canada standards) the minister replied, saying (I paraphrase): hey, we only make the budget, these agencies make their own choices, why complain to me?

We have had a deluge of propaganda about how "wokeness" is somehow killing Canadian history.  Now we can consider where the real problem begins.

This Carney government is beginning to shape up as the most philistine Canadian government in a long time. I did not love the Harper government's historical priorities (war, hockey and the crown, mostly) but at least they had some history they valued. This government: seems like it's just submarines all the way down.

See also this

Global News has put up two charts of how much the Carney government plans to cut spending or increase spending in each department.  This below is the hit list. Take a deep breath. And Canadian Heritage is not even one of the big losers, despite the damage summarized above.

Doesn't Cultural Sovereignty Matter too?

NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment, has a new article about about how the Carney government is decommissioning the Parks Canada library, a collection of some 200,000 items that includes:

everything from wildlife and vegetation inventories of national parks to visitor surveys, historical reports, early provisional master plans, reports related to the establishment of various types of protected areas by Parks Canada, and interpretive plans and reports dating from the 1960s onwards. There are also town and a range of other types of planning reports that address areas within protected areas and themes within those protected areas.

"Decommissioning" turns out to mean getting rid of -- shredding, if necessary  -- for some paltry savings "to meet up to 15 per cent in savings targets over three years" in the government's ongoing cut our way to sovereignty initiative. 

Amid the endless cutting of heritage, environmental, and cultural agencies of the federal government, it's important to remember that Mr Carney, smart and charming and articulate as he is, spent his career as a millionaire working with billionaires, and the billionaire worldview just ain't like ours. In a world where we need the Westons and Thomsons just to preserve essential items of Canadiana, it seems the cultural part of sovereignty just is not a public priority right now. 

 

Short history of Time (changes)

To hell with all these moaners -- I love the time change.  

This weekend felt like the first dawning of spring in Toronto, with temperatures finally out of the subzero range and suddenly into double digits. And what really made it special was all the people seizing the year's first opportunity to get out a lightweight coat and stroll the newly lively streets far into the evening -- an evening joyously prolonged by that morning's time change.

In Canada the official starts to each season are absurdly ill-matched to our real climate (Winter starts on December 21, and Summer on June 21? Srsly?) Whereas the time changes really do match and enhance the changes we actually sense:  the coming darkness in October and the promise of brightness again in March.  We live on the northern shoulder of the world: I'll take the hour of early darkness the time change creates in the fall (it's dark and cold anyway!) in exchange for expanding those glorious summer nights when it is warm and wonderful to be outdoors in our extra hour.

Next week is March Break. Many thousands of Canadian will fly away east to the Algarve, Sicily, Egypt, or west to Baja, Hawaii, Fiji and Bali, to get a short week of warmth and sunshine. They will not complain at all at voluntarily submitting their bodies to four or eight or fourteen hours of time change -- in both directions.  

But somehow a one-hour change for Daylight Saving is an unendurable nightmare? Come on.

Once again the media will roll out scare stories about increased automobile accidents and the other disasters the time change supposedly causes -- though never providing credible evidence. This morning Toronto morning radio has its usual traffic reports of endless "stalls" on the highways.  Is it really the time change that causes a sudden neglect of routine auto maintenance?  Time-change deniers are like vaccine 'sceptics' -- they just won't tolerate collective action for the public good.

Let's watch Vancouver stumble out to work and school in the dark next winter, only to realize that because it's winter it's dark again anyway by the time they get home. See how popular the no-time-change fad is then.

Book Notes: the political science of parliamentary oversight.

I’ve been reading a curious book called Overseen or Overlooked? Legislators, Armed Forces, and Democratic Accountability, written collectively by three political scientists: David P. Auerswald, Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M. Saideman. Auerswald teaches security studies at the National War College in the United States. Lagassé and Saideman are both professors at the Paterson School of International Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Their book’s project is to compare three types of democratic legislatures by how well or poorly they oversee military and security policy. Do Westminster parliaments, or Congressional legislatures, or what they call “consensual” parliaments (generally, European legislatures that have added proportional representation to Westminster structures) do this important job best? Being political scientists, they develop an elaborate testing model.

Long story short, the whole investigation goes sideways. After a huge effort in travel, interviewing, and the assembly and handling of masses of data, they have to conclude: it doesn’t matter a toss. 

They find some Westminster parliaments perform their oversight functions well, and others badly. The US Congress and similarly structured governments elsewhere have sometimes done oversight well, but sometimes not. After comparing how the European parliaments have done, they throw up their hands. “Oversight levels appear to be unrelated to the democratic regime type” (121), and  “similar types of democracies do not always have similar patterns of legislative behaviour.” (147)

Overseen or Overlooked? is an institutional study that concludes that institutional form is not really that important. Two hundred and fifty pages in, they start to think that “micro institutional rules and conventions matter a great deal in strengthening or weakening legislative oversight.” Political culture matters!

No matter a legislature’s institutional form, “Oversight improves when the governing party members are less beholden to their leaders and act more independently,” they start to think. For instance, “Canadian MPs are tightly disciplined, whereas UK MPs are loosely disciplined and known for the independence." And so: “parliamentary oversight is more vigorous in the latter despite the similarity in legislative form.”  Ditto for the Congressional examples.

They even grasp, in looking closely at the European legislatures that they dub “consensual” (because they rely on proportional representation systems that produce coalitions of many small parties), that consensus is often not reached. Indeed, legislators there, often appointed by parties rather than directly elected, are tightly controlled by party leadership and as limited to point-scoring in partisan wrangles as their counterparts elsewhere. (Have we seen much sign of ‘consensus’ among German or Italian or Polish or Belgian or Hungarian legislators in recent times? The whole presumption is unfounded.)

The theme their study might have pursued is expressed in one sentence. They come to conclude that “Executive control turns, in part, on party discipline” (258) and then jump quickly to the recommendation that , defence committees should try to operate more independently of government whatever the legislative system.

This whole subject cries out for the kind of intense investigation given to their fruitless comparison of legislative structure. But they toss off this conclusion with vague handwaving about legislators putting their desire for ministerial office ahead of their oversight roles. What is really needed is close examination of the various ways that parties select their leaders either encourage or discourage independence of legislators. And somehow that question never seems to interest political scientists.

I was reminded of all this by a recent BlueSky post by one of the contributors, Philippe Lagassé, who offers Canadians a primer on how Parliament really works, particularly in military decision-making. The constitutional theory is elegantly laid out: Lagassé rightly establishes that the legislature is there “to hold the executive to account for the decisions it makes,” not “to expect a say in the matter.”  He seems faintly irritated that Canadians don’t understand this. 

But for all Canadians who would rightly respond: “But it does not hold to account; has not in decades! MPs are driven like sheep,” he offers not a word about all the (“microinstitutional”) ways that party discipline has highjacked parliamentary accountability. He has missed the point.

From the American Senate and House  (now reduced to servility by the Republican loyalty to Trump) to Britain (how did Boris last ten minutes?) and to the European parliaments (how did a loyal parliamentary bloc make Orban an elective authoritarian?), to faraway New Zealand, the global plague of legislative failures  to confront party machines that are increasingly skilled and determined in obliterating parliamentary oversight should be an urgent question for analysis. 

Somehow political scientists find the whole subject unworthy of close study.