If You Believe We Put A Man On The Moon...

So I was talking to a colleague of mine about the electric/hybrid car (sidenote: as a group the Mag 8 have an ongoing dialogue as to what things we're morally opposed to - mine was tomatoes as well as Derreck Fisher (even before his cheap shot on Scola), Tiff (who keep in mind is 6'+ and married to Joe, 6'4") was morally opposed to tall guys dating/marrying short girls... she calls it a waste of height... anyway, Ashley Waddell was morally opposed to people who drive hybrids because the majority of them are smug and superior - not that helping the environment is a bad thing, but it's her opinion (and I must say that knowing a lot of people who drive hybrids, it's pretty accurate) that people drive them not to save the environment, but so that everyone sees how green they are and people are envious and awe-struck with them... her point is that for the majority of them it's a smug attention-grabber... and I can't agree more... thoughts??)

Anyway, so I'm having this discussion about zero emission cars and whether its possible to make them, and he comes in with the standard "This is America - we put a man on the moon, we can do anything!" line of reasoning... which, just for the record, I happen to agree with... but this got me thinking about the whole line of reasoning and I came up with a simple question... 

When the Apollo 11 guys went to the moon, do you think they knew that they were raising the bar for everyone from that point on? I mean, do you think they still would have done it if they had known that everybody was going to start saying, "We put a man on the moon but we can't [do something completely unrelated to putting a man on the moon]?"

And what about good 'ole Neil?? I bet it's

 particularly bad for him... his wife is probably like, "We can put a man on the moon, but why can't he unload the dishwasher before he puts a dirty dish in??" And Neil is like, "Baby, (apparently my imagination thinks Neil is a lot like Joe) all I did is climb a ladder... the dudes at mission control took care of everything else." And his wife is like, "Yeah, you couldn't even get your one historic line right." And Neil is like, "What does woman mean? Man said line perfect..."

But what if that mission had failed? Aside from a 75-year old group of men floating around in space with no hope for rescue, would everybody be saying, "Well, it's no wonder we can't [cure cancer/find Osama Bin Laden/stop Britney Spears from reproducing]... we can't even put a man on the moon..."

What did people say before the moon landing set the bar at an impossible standard height? "We've sent men to the North Pole, and not all of them died... so I say we get started on trying to transmit sound through frequency modulation..."

Also, where would Tang and freeze-dried ice cream have come from???