Forty years ago...

[Captain Seafort]

...yesterday, Apollo 13 landed in the Pacific Ocean. NASA's finest hour.

[Deepcrush]

Which only reminds how little we have done since then.

[Sonic Glitch]

BBC coverage of the landing. Apollo 13

[Monroe]

Shame in 40 years we haven't topped this.

[sunnyside]

Probably their most movie worthy hour. But they have done a rather lot since, including astronauts tooling around with the lunar rover on the moon.

While it lacks something compared to putting humans on celestial bodies, I also have to get them props for their Mars missions. Spirit and Opportunity are still operating I believe, far far beyond what was expected of those two. And that's all the more impressive in that I think other countries have only managed to put wreckage on Mars so far, highlighting the difficulty of the task.

[Sionnach Glic]

NASA's problem is that the Space Race is finished. The US got to the Moon first, so as far as they're concerned it means they've won. With stopping the commies spreading to the moon accomplished, NASA was without any real aims. Thus why they've spent the last forty years just sending out the odd probe and taking decades to build a single space station. All the budget cuts, naturally, haven't helped. But I think what they need more than anything is some motivation. They need, to put it simply, a target.

[Mark]

What we need is another world power is to challange us to a "Mars race". Without the thought of looking bad, the US doesn't giveashit

[Captain Seafort]

Just don't let it be a European microstate stuck in the fifteenth century with no indoor plumbing - you'll loose. Again.

[Mark]