No, this article is not going to argue that the moon landings were staged.
Writing in his Daily Telegraph column, Boris Johnson used the example of the 50th anniversary of the moon landings to argue for a “can-do spirit” in tackling the Brexit impasse.
“If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border,” Johnson wrote.
“There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.”
He refrained from giving specifics on how exactly this could be achieved.
Although it’s fair to assume it will involve the aforementioned “can-do spirit” and some prodigious political manoeuvring; something that has been sorely lacking among the British leaders in the last three years.
Johnson’s analogy between the border issue and the “frictionless re-entry” to Earth’s atmosphere by the Apollo 11 mission is actually accurate, but probably unintentionally so on Johnson’s part.
There’s no point on dwelling even further on the ineptitude of British politicians on the border issue, we’ve already explained how they’re simply not getting the message.
The comparison
The re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere from space is one of the most dangerous parts of the mission.
Any ship arriving from space will enter Earth’s atmosphere at 400,000 feet and 22 times the speed of sound.
It will face temperatures of over 1,500 degrees, the air surrounding the ship will ionise and electrons are stripped from atoms in the surrounding atmosphere.
In 1969, all three passengers of Apollo 11 were nearly killed when debris from the ejected Service Model nearly collided with Command Module, where three astronauts were located.
A year previous, Soviet Union cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when parachutes did not deploy on his pod.
In 2003, The Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry killing all seven astronauts on board.
Re-entry into Earth is far from frictionless and even with the best preparation and some of the greatest minds on the planet working on solutions, things have gone wrong.
Britain clearly, at this moment, does not have the luxury of good preparation nor the greatest minds on the planet.
As Tony Blair explained on Monday, Britain ‘advanced three mutually inconsistent propositions in their Brexit negotiations with the EU’. There was no way Theresa May could do anything but fail and the same may apply to Boris Johnson.
A negotiating objective of wanting to remain part of the single market and customs union, a frictionless border between north and south of Ireland, and wanting Northern Ireland to be in the same relationship with Europe as the rest of the UK truly is thinking from another planet.
But Johnson is still correct in his comparison, in the sense there’s a lot of things that can go wrong.
The insanity of the whole situation is summed up by the fact that a potential Prime Minister is using moon landing references to justify that his foreign policy is logically sound.
That must be the kind of “can-do spirit” Johnson is talking about.
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