Dear Editor: I would like to address Mike Sandoval’s Letter to the Editor (8/1/14) and every letter he has written before about the Apollo Program.

To start, there has never been a documentary of why Russia never went to moon because they were to, put it frankly, the losers. No one really cares about who came in second, if at all, but who came in first.

In regards, to his second point about America making a deal with Russia, do you really think that if Russia had proof that the U.S. lied to the world they would not use it, especially if it made the US look really bad? The Russians quit because the point of the Space Race was two of the world’s superpowers throwing their economic systems at a single goal (putting a man on the moon) to see who could do it first. The goal of the moon was chosen because it was one of humanity’s greatest dreams and wonders since the dawn of history and it became our greatest accomplishment in our history thus far.

We have not gone to moon since then because unfortunately our government decided that we should use the money that NASA received for other less grand projects (I am sure we can all think of a few). Fortunately, today the slack has been picked up by companies like SpaceX, who are pushing our reach into the final frontier even further.

It greatly saddens me that there are people like Mike Sandoval still out there (they are unfortunately a small percentage of the population), especially in our great city of Downey because it played such an enormous role in the Apollo space program and the aerospace industry in general.

I also believe that Mr. Sandoval’s words are an insult to some of the bravest heroes ever known (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins) and the people who lost their lives or came close to it because they went into the unknown, not knowing if they would make it back and gave the United States of America the great honor of completing the single greatest accomplishment in the history of mankind.

Mark Montero Downey

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Published: Aug. 7, 2014 - Volume 13 - Issue 17