And because the lunar environment was alien - but comprehensibly so...
Indeed, to the cognoscenti. But I surmise there remain individuals who personally cannot comprehend the comprehensibility (yes, Gillianren, laugh at my expense) of space. To them it is foreign beyond all ability to manage, and thus their egos demand it be equally incomprehensible for all. No experience on Earth, they imagine, can prepare a pilot for the total loss of terrestrial fixation.
This harks back to a point I make frequently throughout the Moon hoax debate saga. People who truly understand the physical world -- and I habitually use engineers as an example, but others too -- attain that understanding by knowing how
everything works, including the mundane. I actually had this conversation Wednesday night over coffee with an airline marketing agent. (We were drowning our sorrows over the grounding of our "baby" the 787 Dreamliner.) The discussion came to some of the principal differences between the engineering mind and the marketing mind, and the point raised that engineers have a hard time "turning their brains off." A good engineer is fascinated by the ordinary. And once he understands why the ordinary happens, he is prepared to cope with the extraordinary.
What this creates is an abstract view of the universe. Rather than seeing the familiar world as a set of unremarkable and easily disregarded stimuli, the engineer (professional or amateur) sees the world as one of several possible expressions of physical law. As I write this, my table wobbles slightly. The engineer is reminded of subjects such as resonance and elasticity. When one has that reductionist habit of viewing the world, space simply becomes different values in the informal equations and relationships
by which one already sees his surroundings. It is that preparation that allows engineers to reason dispassionately enough about the physical world to create what they do.
In contrast the intuitive view of the universe accepts it all as one coherent whole. The holistic view is just as informative as any other in making one's path through life adept. The goal in each case is to relate cause to effect. And that intuitive view encompasses air and sea. Few these days have not been on a boat or in an airplane. But it doesn't encompass space. When one's experience is calibrated holistically, one can become quite anxious to contemplate an environment where so much has differed. In an airplane you're simply high up on a moving platform. Motion and altitude do not seem alien. Banking into turns, and the feeling of rising and falling do not seem alien. Commensurately although we may be uncomfortable at sea, it does not present us with many foreign variables.
But in summary, when a self-proclaimed engineer tells us how incomprehensibly foreign the space environment must be, it speaks in great volumes to whether he is successful as an engineer. He does not seem to have the requisite abstract view of the physical world to understand it the way and engineer would need to relate to it. The intuitive approach does not work here.
...navigation training in planetariums (I refuse to say "planetaria"), etc., etc.
Well there's always plane'arium (
South Park reference). Or, as my colleague's ex-wife once referred to it, "a space aquarium."
