Solid Workers

The Moon landing 50 years ago today ranks as the most audacious and spectacular event of the 20th century. Billions watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin goofing about the surface, and for a moment it appeared - at least transmitted by retrospective commemorations - that the human race was united in awe. For the first time members of our species escaped the gravity well of our world and took our first steps onto a body other than the Earth. It represented the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and was testament to the courage of the men prepared to risk a lingering, public death had it all gone wrong. Rightly, and despite the motives of the US government who put them there, for as long as there are people the flight of Apollo 11 is and be celebrated among our greatest collective accomplishments. We should salute the army of NASA technicians, astronauts, admin and support staff that made the Apollo programme possible, acknowledge the spin offs and engineering know-how - later largely harnes...

Growing up in the 1980s, communism didn't have a lot going for it. The taming of Siberia and the stellar achievements of the Soviet space programme were never talked about, and its depression-busting economic performance was long forgotten. The crushing conformity of Soviet life, its concrete vistas and secret police, and the queues in Moscow supermarkets for a single loaf of bread did a better job of queering the pitch for communism than voluminous anti-communist polemic and occasional speeches from Margaret Thatcher. Communism was poverty stricken, dictatorial, and backward - so much so the good people of the Eastern bloc countries wanted a piece of the capitalist action, and duly got it as the so-called "people's democracies" and the USSR came tumbling down. Capitalism, at least in the advanced West and Japan was dynamic, modern, raising living standards and appeared the wave of the future (or, if you like, the end of history ). Communism was dead. Its presence as ...