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Thoughts by bigal_a

Sleeping Satellite cover Sleeping Satellite by Tasmin Archer

It's about the Apollo moon missions. I wonder if the "you" to be blamed is American and Soviet politicians who were so bent on being first that they cut corners, blew money at an horrendous rate and pretty much put us off going back again. "The dream that died with the Eagle's flight" - yes, even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had returned from the lunar surface in the Eagle, Richard Nixon (while reaping all the good publicity he could from Apollo) was working to cut it short, so he could have the money for Vietnam. "Don't blame this sleeping satellite" is saying it's not the lonely Moon's fault we didn't go back. The second verse is pretty self-explanatory: "Did we try for the moon too soon "Did we squander the chance "In the rush of the race "The reason we chase is lost in romance "And still we try "To justify the waste for a taste of man's greatest adventure" After spending all that money on going to the moon, we could have capitalised by further, more ambitious missions like establishing a moon base, or using the Moon as a springboard to get to Mars - but the American government just squandered that chance so the USA could be first, and then quietly cancelled Apollos 18, 19 and 20 (the only reason they didn't cancel 12-17 was that the hardware had already pretty much been built by then, so they wouldn't have saved anything). Instead of being seen as the start of a new frontier, Apollo just became a romantic realisation of a human dream. But it could have been so much more. And the rest of the song is pretty much, "Today, could we even do what it takes to repeat Apollo? Most of the people who did it are long retired or dead, and the will, the drive just isn't there anymore.

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