Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

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To the Moon with Apollo then and back again with Artemis

Expect a rising tide of Man on the Moon stories over the next week as the calendar advances inexorably toward July 20. Next Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of mission commander Neil Armstrong descending from the ladder of Apollo 11’s Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and stepping onto the lunar surface, thus becoming the first person ever to set foot on the moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969.

I recently had the opportunity to through some old copies of the Toronto Globe and Mail for July 1969, and was struck by some of the inside section stories on the Apollo 11 mission. Well beyond the front page news stories, were all kinds of spin-off stories in the family and religion pages and other sections, on different aspects of the moon mission. There was some fascinating theological discussions in the media on what this might mean for our notions of God and the universe.

Only 12 astronauts, all male, all American – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, and Gene Cernan – have walked on the moon to date, and the last moonwalk by Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission, took place Dec. 14, 1972.

What is remarkable in retrospect, I’ve written before, is to think we only travelled to the moon and back for a little less than 3½ years between July 1969 and December 1972. After burning up billions in expenses, peaking at almost $8 billion in 1966, NASA’s Apollo space program ended abruptly with the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. When it began in 1961, using Saturn A spacecraft, renamed as the Apollo program in 1963, the U.S. space schedule included 20 missions. The scope was reduced immediately after Apollo 11 in 1969. By 1972, a combination of escalating costs and NASA’s shifting interest to Skylab, meant no more trips to the moon. Skylab was the United States’ first and only space station, orbiting the Earth from 1973 to 1979, when it fell back to Earth amid huge worldwide media attention.

If you remember, the Sixties, then on most of the planet you remember those famous words, the alleged esprit de l’escalier uttered by Armstrong and stepped onto the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

This was not, of course, quite what Armstrong meant to say, and not what he actually said, Armstrong claimed later. “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind” was what he intended or did say. While the majority historical consensus is that Armstrong flubbed his historic line in the excitement of the moment, a minority of scholarly opinion holds otherwise, saying he may have actually got it right.

A team of researchers from Michigan State University and Ohio State University in 2103  attempted to deciphering Armstrong’s quote by studying how speakers from his native central Ohio pronounce “for” and “for a.”

Their results suggest that it is entirely possible that Armstrong actually did say it correctly tough evidence indicates that people are statistically more likely to hear “for man” instead of “for a man” on the recording.

Armstrong was raised in central Ohio, where there is typically a lot of blending between words such as “for” and “a”, according to a Michigan State University statement.

“Prior acoustic analyses of Neil Armstrong’s recording have established well that if the word ‘a’ was spoken, it was very short and was fully blended acoustically with the preceding word,” said Laura Dilley, an Michigan State University assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders and part of the research team.

If Armstrong actually did say “a,” she said, it sounded something like “frrr(uh).” His blending of the two words, compounded with the poor sound quality of the transmission, has made it difficult for people to corroborate his claim that the “a” is there.

Dilley and her colleagues thought they might be able to figure out what Armstrong said with a statistical analysis of the duration of the “r” sound as spoken by native central Ohioans saying “for” and “for a” in natural conversation.

They used a collection of recordings of conversational speech from 40 people raised in Columbus, Ohio, near Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta. Within this body of recordings, they found 191 cases of “for a.”

The funny thing is this. While it is true to skip the a illogically – and most ungrammatically – reduces the pronouncement to a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind as being the same thing, it still sounds OK somehow.

My July 21, 1969 copy of the Globe and Mail has a 72-point “going to war” main headline that day – in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed’”

I was 12. My dad was on his summer vacation that week in July 1969, so with my parents, I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon from a small portable black-and-white television set at Pioneer Park, a campground just south of Buckhorn, Ontario. In 1969, televisions were not yet ubiquitous at campgrounds and cottages. I suspect the television set we saw the moon landing on may well have been the only one in the campground that night 50 years ago. We probably picked up the somewhat fuzzy TV station signal from a rabbit ears antenna or some jerry-rigged coat hanger antenna. Certainly there was no cable or satellite TV at Pioneer Park in 1969. Campers from everywhere in the campground came out to watch the historic event, as the television was moved outside the trailer housing it, and a couple of the men hooked up an extension cord and hoisted the TV atop a makeshift scaffold, to allow everyone a chance to circle in and watch. At 12, surreal was not quite yet part of my regular vocabulary, but this was a surreal moment to be sure. I remember we all kept switching between glancing at the TV in anticipation of this historic moment, and glancing up at the starry black sky in a time before much anthropogenic light photopollution out Buckhorn way.

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

While Armstrong’s quote or misquote is famous, who remembers the last words to date spoken on the moon? Very few, I suspect.

Just before 5:54 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, Dec. 14, 1972, Gene Cernan said for posterity: “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. ‘Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.’”

NASA had announced the cancellation of Apollo 20 in January 1970, and eight months later also scrapped the Apollo 19 mission, and a mission originally planned for Apollo 15. The mission in July 1971 was renumbered 15, continuing to Apollo 16 in April 1972, then to 17.

The Nixon administration had tightened space budgets from a peak in the mid-1960s, when NASA absorbed just under 4.5 per cent of the total US federal budget, and employed 400,000 staff and contractors. The workforce was down to 190,000, with plans to cut another 50,000 jobs, by January 1970.

In 1971, the White House had planned to cancel the Apollo program after Apollo 15, but ultimately left the last two Apollo missions in place.

NASA had also reallocated funds and expertise to the Saturn 5 launch of the Skylab orbital station in 1973, while the prospective development of a space shuttle, endorsed under a presidential task force in 1969, further diverted expertise. The final three Apollo expeditions, which may have included landings in Copernicus or Tycho craters, were scrapped.

“With the program winding down, NASA was under pressure from the National Academy of Sciences to include a scientist on one of the final missions,” reported Marea Donnelly, history writer for Sydney Australia’s The Daily Telegraph on Dec. 3, 2017 (https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/last-apollo-flight-finally-put-scientist-on-the-moon/news-story/76075ad07684b18667e60cd04f20536d. ”

Schmitt was one of the first six scientist-astronauts selected in 1965, and was in training for Apollo 18.

Under pressure from scientists, Schmitt was given a place on Apollo 17, which blasted off in the early hours of December 7, 1972. It was the first and only mission to carry a scientist.

Four days after blast-off, Schmitt became the 12th and final person, and only geologist, to set foot on the moon when he and Cernan stepped out of their lunar module, Challenger.

Gene Cernan’s, “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come,” statement has come to be something of an understatement. The year 2024 – some 52 years after Cernan’s pronouncement – is the current best bet for another moon mission.  Pursuant to Space Policy Directive 1 of Dec. 10, 2017, NASA is ordered to “lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually Mars.” Space Policy Directive 1 was based on recommendations from the National Space Council. The council, which had been disbanded in 1992, was reconstituted in 2017.

Ken Bowersox, a 62-year-old veteran of five space shuttle flights, was named July 10 as associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate of NASA, which is responsible for man’s return to the moon in 2024 through the Artemis spaceflight program, a moon mission which is to include the first woman and the next man on the moon. When they land five years from now, the astronauts will step foot where no human has ever been before: the Moon’s South Pole. Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology.

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Space Policy Directive 1: The 45-year wait is over and NASA is going back to the moon

America is going back to the moon. Only 12 astronauts, all male, all American – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, and Gene Cernan – have walked on the moon to date, and the last moonwalk by Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission, took place 45 years ago this coming Thursday – also on a Thursday that year, Dec. 14, 1972.

What is remarkable in retrospect, is to think we only travelled to the moon and back for a little less than 3½ years between July 1969 and December 1972. After burning up billions in expenses, peaking at almost $8 billion in 1966, NASA’s Apollo space program ended abruptly with the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. When it began in 1961, using Saturn A spacecraft, renamed as the Apollo program in 1963, the U.S. space schedule included 20 missions. The scope was reduced immediately after Apollo 11 in 1969. By 1972, a combination of escalating costs and NASA’s shifting interest to Skylab, meant no more trips to the moon. Skylab was the United States’ first and only space station, orbiting the Earth from 1973 to 1979, when it fell back to Earth amid huge worldwide media attention.

But all that was still far away on that magic day in 1969: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

If you remember, the Sixties, then on most of the planet you remember those famous words, the alleged esprit de l’escalier uttered by Armstrong, as he descended from the ladder of Apollo 11’s Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and stepped onto the lunar surface, thus becoming the first person ever to set foot on the moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969.

I was 12. My dad was on his summer vacation that week in July 1969, so with my parents, I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon from a small portable black-and-white television set at Pioneer Park, a campground just south of Buckhorn, Ontario. In 1969, televisions were not yet ubiquitous at campgrounds and cottages. I suspect the television set we saw the moon landing on may well have been the only one in the campground that night 48 years ago. We probably picked up the somewhat fuzzy TV station signal from a rabbit ears antenna or some jerry-rigged coat hanger antenna. Certainly there was no cable or satellite TV at Pioneer Park in 1969. Campers from everywhere in the campground came out to watch the historic event, as the television was moved outside the trailer housing it, and a couple of the men hooked up an extension cord and hoisted the TV atop a makeshift scaffold, to allow everyone a chance to circle in and watch. At 12, surreal was not quite yet part of my regular vocabulary, but this was a surreal moment to be sure. I remember we all kept switching between glancing at the TV in anticipation of this historic moment, and glancing up at the starry black sky in a time before much anthropogenic light photopollution out Buckhorn way.

I’ve kept my cherished copy of The Globe and Mail from Monday, July 21, 1969 since boyhood. I’ve been lugging that paper around – Oshawa, Peterborough, Boston, Durham, North Carolina, Kingston, Ottawa, Yellowknife, Halifax, Sackville, New Brunswick, Thompson, and no doubt a few places I’ve overlooked, for some 48 years now.

The 72-point “going to war” main headline that day– in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed’”

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was not, of course, quite what Armstrong meant to say, and not what he actually said, Armstrong claimed later. “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind” was what he intended or did say. While the majority historical consensus is that Armstrong flubbed his historic line in the excitement of the moment, a minority of scholarly opinion holds otherwise, saying he may have actually got it right.

A team of researchers from Michigan State University and Ohio State University in 2103  attempted to deciphering Armstrong’s quote by studying how speakers from his native central Ohio pronounce “for” and “for a.”

Their results suggest that it is entirely possible that Armstrong actually did say it correctly tough evidence indicates that people are statistically more likely to hear “for man” instead of “for a man” on the recording.

Armstrong was raised in central Ohio, where there is typically a lot of blending between words such as “for” and “a”, according to a Michigan State University statement.

“Prior acoustic analyses of Neil Armstrong’s recording have established well that if the word ‘a’ was spoken, it was very short and was fully blended acoustically with the preceding word,” said Laura Dilley, an Michigan State University assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders and part of the research team.

If Armstrong actually did say “a,” she said, it sounded something like “frrr(uh).” His blending of the two words, compounded with the poor sound quality of the transmission, has made it difficult for people to corroborate his claim that the “a” is there.

Dilley and her colleagues thought they might be able to figure out what Armstrong said with a statistical analysis of the duration of the “r” sound as spoken by native central Ohioans saying “for” and “for a” in natural conversation.

They used a collection of recordings of conversational speech from 40 people raised in Columbus, Ohio, near Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta. Within this body of recordings, they found 191 cases of “for a.”

The funny thing is this. While it is true to skip the a illogically – and most ungrammatically – reduces the pronouncement to a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind as being the same thing, it still sounds OK somehow.

While Armstrong’s quote or misquote is famous, who remembers the last words to date spoken on the moon? Very few, I would aver.

Just before 5:54 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, Dec. 14, 1972, Gene Cernan, who died at the age of 82 last Jan. 16, said for posterity: “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. ‘Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.'”

NASA had announced the cancellation of Apollo 20 in January 1970, and eight months later also scrapped the Apollo 19 mission, and a mission originally planned for Apollo 15. The Apollo 16 mission in July 1971 was renumbered 15, continuing to Apollo 16 in April 1972, then to 17.

The Nixon administration had tightened space budgets from a peak in the mid-1960s, when NASA absorbed just under 4.5 per cent of the total US federal budget, and employed 400,000 staff and contractors. The workforce was down to 190,000, with plans to cut another 50,000 jobs, by January 1970.

In 1971, the White House had planned to cancel the Apollo program after Apollo 15, but ultimately left the last two Apollo missions in place.

NASA had also reallocated funds and expertise to the Saturn 5 launch of the Skylab orbital station in 1973, while the prospective development of a space shuttle, endorsed under a presidential task force in 1969, further diverted expertise. The final three Apollo expeditions, which may have included landings in Copernicus or Tycho craters, were scrapped.

“With the program winding down, NASA was under pressure from the National Academy of Sciences to include a scientist on one of the final missions,” reported Marea Donnelly, history writer for Sydney Australia’s The Daily Telegraph on Dec. 3(https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/last-apollo-flight-finally-put-scientist-on-the-moon/news-story/76075ad07684b18667e60cd04f20536d. ”

Schmitt was one of the first six scientist-astronauts selected in 1965, and was in training for Apollo 18.

Under pressure from scientists, Schmitt was given a place on Apollo 17, which blasted off in the early hours of December 7, 1972. It was the first and only mission to carry a scientist.

Four days after blast-off, Schmitt became the 12th and final person, and only geologist, to set foot on the moon when he and Cernan stepped out of their lunar module, Challenger.

Space Policy Directive 1, signed by President Donald Trump Dec. 10, orders NASA to “lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually Mars.”

As he signed the directive at the White House, with Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, and now 87, present, Trump said: “We will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps some day to many worlds beyond.

“The pioneer spirit has always defined America. This is a giant step toward that inspiring future and reclaiming America’s proud destiny in space.”

He added: “Space has so much to do with other applications. including military applications.

“Lift our eyes up to the heavens and once again imagine the possibilities waiting in those big beautiful stars if we dare to dream, and dream big. That’s what our country is doing again.”

Trump’s signing of Space Policy Directive 1 was based on recommendations from the National Space Council, which is chaired by Vice-President Mike Pence.

The council had been disbanded in 1992 and was reconstituted by Trump, meeting for the first time in October.

Under President George W. Bush’s Constellation program a trip back to the moon was planned for the 2020s, but his successor President Barack Obama cancelled it

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