In a fitting testament to NASA’s momentous Apollo Moon Landing Program, NASA and billionaire Jeff Bezos confirmed today (July 19) the discovery of a powerful F-1 first stage engine component from the Saturn V moon rocket that launched three American astronauts on the historic journey of Apollo 11 to land the first two humans on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
“On the eve of the 44th moonwalk anniversary, the Bezos Expedition confirms an Apollo 11 Saturn V F1 engine find,” NASA officially announced on its websites just moments ago today, July 19.
Apollo 11 commander and NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong, was immortalized forever when he first set foot on the moon 44 years ago tomorrow (July 20, 1969), followed minutes later by the lunar module pilot, NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
The Saturn V rockets first stage was powered by a cluster of five F-1 engines – a technological marvel and the most powerful single-nozzle, liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed.
“44 years ago tomorrow Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and now we have recovered a critical technological marvel that made it all possible,” says Bezos on his Expedition website today.
Bezos, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the aerospace company Blue Origin and Amazon.com, originally announced the discovery and recovery of significant components of two flown F-1 engines amongst a field of twisted wreckage from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean in March of this year, aboard the Seabed Worker at Port Canaveral, Florida, along with a treasure trove of other major Saturn V components hauled up from a depth of almost 3 miles.
“We brought back thrust chambers, gas generators, injectors, heat exchangers, turbines, fuel manifolds and dozens of other artifacts – all simply gorgeous and a striking testament to the Apollo program,” wrote Bezos in a update this morning, July 19.
But until today, the engines exact identification remained elusive because of decades of severe seabed corrosion and their fiery, destructive end upon plunging and smashing unimpeded onto the ocean’s surface.
Conservators from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas worked painstakingly since March to identify the F-1 engine parts.
“Today, I’m thrilled to share some exciting news. One of the conservators who was scanning the objects with a black light and a special lens filter has made a breakthrough discovery – “2044” – stenciled in black paint on the side of one of the massive thrust chambers, says Bezos.
“2044 is the Rocketdyne serial number that correlates to NASA number 6044, which is the serial number for F-1 Engine #5 from Apollo 11. The intrepid conservator kept digging for more evidence, and after removing more corrosion at the base of the same thrust chamber, he found it – “Unit No 2044” – stamped into the metal surface.”
Apollo 11 launched to the Moon on July 16, 1969 from Launch Complex 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Sea of Tranquility inside the Lunar Module. They took a single lunar excursion and spent 2 hours and 11 minutes as the first two men to walk on the moon. They stayed on the moon for a total of 21 hours and 36 minutes before blasting off for the journey back home to Earth.
Armstrong suddenly passed away nearly a year ago on August 25, 2012 at age 82 – read my stories, here and here.
Aldrin is still active and strenuously advocating for starting human expeditions to the Red Planet.
He outlined his exploration concepts in a newly published book titled – “Mission to Mars.”
The five F-1 engines used in the 138-foot-tall Saturn V first stage known as the S-IC generated 7.5 million pounds of liftoff thrust, or some 1.5 million pounds each. They stand 19 feet tall by 12 feet wide. Each one weighs over 18,000 pounds and was manufactured by Rocketdyne.
The F-1 had more power than all three space shuttle main engines combined. They burned a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel for two-and-one-half-minutes, carrying the Saturn V to an altitude of some 36 miles.
Altogether, six Apollo Moon landing flights boosted by Saturn V’s sent a total of 12 humans on moon walking expeditions to Earth’s nearest neighbor during the 1960s and 1970s.
“This is a big milestone for the project and the whole team couldn’t be more excited to share it with you all,” Bezos wrote.
Bezos’ Blue Origin firm is also working to develop a commercial rocket and ‘space taxi’ to finally resume launching American astronauts back to low Earth orbit from American soil after a multi year gap.
More than four decades have passed since the last humans traversed the lunar surface in December 1972 during NASA’s Apollo 17 moon landing mission.
After all that time, the F-1 may yet live again.
NASA is now working on an upgraded F-1 to power a future variant of the new SLS heavy lift booster under development and intended to launch humans aboard the new Orion crew capsule back to the Moon and to deep space destinations including Asteroids and Mars.
NASA’s robotic exploration of the moon continues this year with the blastoff of the LADEE Lunar observatory on Sept. 6 from NASA’s Wallops Island facility in Virginia.
I live and grew up in NE Ala. Huntsville was about 50 miles away and we could hear them testing those engines. It was just a dull roar that went on and on.
I lived in Huntsville at the time (my dad worked for a NASA contractor). Those static tests of the individual engines and entire boosters shook the earth like a quake and the shock waves condensed water vapor clouds a thousand feet above the massive test stands in otherwise completely clear skies.
I read somewhere that a Saturn V liftoff could be detected by instruments apparently used for Earth quake detection as far north as Washington DC.
We had developed this spectacular technology and we threw it all away. Richard Nixon was eager to end the Apollo program and vetoed NASA’s plans for further lunar exploration and eventual permanently manned Moon base because he believed that the Moon landings would always be associated with Kennedy and Johnson, two men he hated.
A remnant of a once great nation that used to do amazing things. Now we have all been reduced to arguing over government benefits and Travon Martin.
your right………..
That would be “you’re.”
That’s “Trayvon,” and you’re a whining imbecile. I’m sorry if the importance of the unpunished murder of an innocent young man, the absurdity of “stand-your-ground” laws and the wider implications for race relations in this country are lost on you.
Trayvon* RIP
I’m a tiny bit sick of grumpy old white dudes that could manufacture race politics out of a story about corn futures. I like to think I’m not grumpy but I am white and AARP will be spamming me like crazy in about three years.
There were more than a few other social/national issues, when that hardware flew, you know…
Very true but at least we had some fairly amazing things going on we could all root for as a nation. Now all we have are the “issues”. We used to be a nation of dreamers and doers, and sadly I see that dying out. National pride and morale are low and the fact we aren’t doing great things is part of the reason.
We have a gigantic, expensive administrative state that spends most of its time moving our money around based on political calculations. Meanwhile we have to hitch a ride into space from the Russians.
Private enterprise like SpaceX is doing ‘great things’..
It is the bloated, pork-driven, dead-wood cold war legacy big govt Federal Agency Nasa who has wasted the 40 years and $500 billion on US manned space since Apollo ended…. without getting a single American beyond low earth orbit, and leaving itself incompetent/incapable of crewing or even resupplying our own space station.
The US manned space program is too important to be further entrusted to our Federal Govt and Nasa….
We need to downsize bloated, pork driven Nasa back to Naca levels… rely on Caltech’s JPL for probes, and private enterprise for boosters and US manned space.
I have to agree with you there. I think we need to reduce the size of the entire federal government.
This is so cool! Thanks Mr. Bezos.
Looking history right in the eye! Sweet…. A moment of moments, everyone (alive then) remembers where they were that day! I was visiting Gardner, Mass. at my grandma Littlefield’s house….
I was doing laundry at the local laundry mat and watching it on the TV they had there.
Interesting how so many posts have nothing to do with the above article? I can’t help but wonder whatever else Jeff Bezos has seen with his submersibles? Has he looked for Falcon 9 boosters? I’ll bet there’s tons of rocket parts scattered around out there. Makes one wonder who else might have mined that knowledge base resource?
The moon hoax believers are working around the clock to come up with a new reason that “proves” we didn’t go to the moon.
We don’t need to, NASA did it for us when the scrapped the “successful” F-1 rocket and spent billions to develop a new launch rocket that actually worked.
Are you saying we didn’t go? If so, It was nice of the USSR to go along with our hoax. http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/07/20/russia-still-blue-over-moon-landing-40-years-later
Seeing how the Soviets were lying about just about everything, including their entire space program. Of course they had to stay quiet about the Apollo program out of fear of having their hoaxes exposed. In the book written by Werner Keller, everything that was a Soviet success, started out because the West was helping them achieve those successes. http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/792700
The recent confirmation of the Giant Impact Theory from the several hundred kg of rock samples by new methods of analysis could NOT have happened if humans had not gone to the Moon and returned samples with isotope fractionation values which could only have come from a different celestial body than Earth, resulting from a massive impact.
The lunar hoax conspiracy theory is now as valid as the Holocaust Hoax, the Martian origin of the Pyramids at Giza, and the wackier ideas of the late Heinrich Himmler.
BTW, the existence of Africa is also highly dubious, by similar evidence.
The task of Science aka Natural Philosophy is the conversion of category 4 of Auguste Comte’s four types of Knowledge into type 2 or 3.
No other system of human thought can accomplish this- least of all conspiracy theorists- , and Apollo did it in spades
Humans DID go to the Moon; the challenge now is to return at less than 10% of the cost, and as a foothold for the limitless advancement of free and aspirational people, from vast sources of energy and raw materials.
If we do not, we have, deservedly, no future worthy of the name.
A remnant of a once great nation that used to do amazing things. Now we have all been reduced by political crap like Affirmative Action that is keeping the white man out of work and making room for the immigrants coming here from all over the world. We are further reduced by Affirmative Action which is putting bi-lingual people in Human Services jobs and paying them $2.000-$4,000 a year more than non-bi-lingual people. This seems to be the only requirement regardless of someone’s credentials….”The times they are a changing,” ain’t no joke, “the first one now will later be last”
You’re an imbecile. Your comments have nothing to do with this story. You’re just looking for somewhere to whine and cry.
ummmmm you know immigrants like Wernher von Braun are the only reason we had a successful space program?
Though it won’t stop the conspiracy theorists declaring we never went the moon landing in 1969 shows that the USA was once great and can be again if we put aside petty devisiveness. I was one excited and proud space cadet at age 14.
Xenophobic, racist drivel.
Those were extraordinary days, filled with the best and the worst we could conjure up (civil rights, Vietnam, China, the moon, Cambodia, Watergate, . . . ) – all thanks to Lush-Budget Johnson and Tricky Dick Nixon. Now all we have is mediocrity bounded by the placebo President and the maniacs in Congress. Give me a little more of the old style, please. Obama can’t even use the IRS right. If NASA ever goes up again, he and the leaders of Congress should be the crew.
Yea you just said a Mouth Full My Friend I agree
Well what do you think of that i read about this over a month ago and now they want to come up with this Lame Sh-T come on give me a break. ??????????????
First you’re an idiot – Second it says they “confirmed” it on the eve of… you may very well have read about the finding of it. But the confirmation happens later. But thank all that’s holy we have people like you who are so far ahead of the curve!
People from China are filling university seats in which the taxpayer pays about 90% of the true tuition costs. That’s the reality about higher education. The student only pays about 10% of what it truly costs to educate them. Many of those Chinese just leave the country on graduation and/or stay loyal to their homeland. Who pays the 90% of their tuition? In part, working class stiffs struggling to make ends meet. They pay the way of the Chinese, the very Chinese that put them out of work. That is truly evil.
Well, SemiahmooWR, that’s total BS, here is the REALITY::
(My wife is Foreign Student Coordinator at a state college)
Both Immigration and Homeland Security regulate foreign students attending classes in US.
The vast majority of foreign students hold F-1 visa.
By law, those students must pay the max tuition, non-resident out of state tuition rates, about 5-10 times what a resident citizen pays.
They are NOT permitted to work or hold a job.
So in fact, the foreign students SUBSIDIZE the resident citizens.
Just thought folks should know ….
Actually foreign students pay more, alot more, than students who reside in the state. For example, foreign students attending the University of Washington pay about three times as much as students from Washington State.
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/international-american-colleges/
According to UW’s dean of admissions the higher fees paid by foreign students is how low-income Washington freshmen (which make up more than 25% of their class) get an education for FREE. With recent cuts in educational funding the high fees paid by foreign students has actually made it possible for more U.S. students to pursue a higher education.
During the 2011-2012 school year the 764,495 foreign students attending US universities contributed $22.7 billion to the US economy. That’s money from China and other foreign countries being spent on goods and services right here in the good ol’ USA and that means USA jobs.
So keep them foreigners out! Let em take their money somewhere else! Right?
But there also goes money that provides jobs for Americans and helps to send American kids to college. Higher education is something that the USA does better than any other country. It’s a premium product that our universities can charge foreign students a premium price for. It also bring people here to spend money on all sorts of things. Businesses call them, you know, customers.
And you want to keep these paying customers out?
Now that is truly evil…and un-American.
*Now we return you to your regularly scheduled program… and sorry that this was off topic but this dude is full of….
Kerbal Space Program? Lmao
Totally awesome! In 1978, I believe, or somewhere in that vicinity, m,y daughter’s dad, my preteen son and I went to Barksdale Airforce base near Shreveport, LA to see the moon rocks that had been brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts I THINK it was Apollo 11 that had brought them back… I’m 65 now, and things are sometimes a little muddled in my memory). It was a day of great pride for me, pride in what my country had accomplished. I only wish that the progenitor of the space program, President Kennedy, had lived to see that happen. I think he would have been awfully proud, as well!
yes penny, the world changed and not for the better when kennedy was murdered.
I completely agree.
Jeff apparently needs to get some footage of the several LEM module bases left on the lunar surface, There are a crazy amount of wacko conspiracy theorists who still think we staged the moon landing, not once, but several times (who would do that?), and just for fun, an almost disastrous aborted attempt.
NASA in the early years had focus. Workers from the assembly line on were dedicated and felt being a part of something valuable and historic. It was OK to be proud of your nation and mankind’s great achievement. The Apollo program epitomized the best in our country and our species. An historic, fleeting time.
Thank you Bezos, Musk, et. al. for re-igniting hope and grand aspirations in some small way.
The Apollo mission was the work of good people, but the other Americans were busy corrupting the UN so the US could mine the colony of West New Guinea. Nixon’s tour of Asia and the Apollo mission were being exploited by the worse of America’s businessmen to keep the news media away from the fake ‘act of free choice’, away from the US gold mine, and away from the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of our Pacific War allies in and since 1969.
There were ^many* things going on at that time, not the least of which were the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. News ‘distracts’ from news. Even today. There is no need to invoke ‘businessmen’ conspiracies, everyone simply can’t watch everything. It’s always been a busy world, (‘We Didn’t Start the Fire?’) The only differences today are possibly many more news sources, and shorter attention spans…
Except Americans did start this fire, it was the US that sent RFJ and then Ellsworth Bunker to create the New York Agreement in 1962 for UN and Indonesian occupation of the colony. It was bonesman McGeorge Bundy who personally told JFK on 1 December 1961 that the US might as well profit from the Indonesian demands for the colony, and it was bonesman Freeport director Robert Lovett who told JFK to appoint Bundy as the national security adviser. Do you really believe that was a coincidence instead of the simple deadly truth that the US and Indonesia are colonial powers? Hundreds of thousands dead, the world’s largest gold mine, and the media is still being kept out of the colony..
andrew767
Adjust your tin foil hat for better reception.
Amerman instead of relaying on your tin-foil hat, you could start learning by doing a google on the “New York Agreement”. You may be embarrassed the US support of the Indonesian militay since 1949, but hiding behind your hat isn’t going to stop the military aid or the colonial business relations
Nothing drives a nation like a goal. What is our goal today? To pander to every group, sub-group, minority or clic that thinks they are owed everything from our money to control of the language. Americans got to the moon… not African-Americans, not Italian Americans, not Irish-Americans… Americans. If you don’t identify yourself as one, then you are not. Don’t like my opinion? Good… you won’t like me either.
I am amazed how much Neil Armstrong and Bill Paxton favor each other. They should have had Bill play Neil in the miniseries from the “Earth to the Moon” instead of Tony Goldwyn.
I remember July 20, 1969 as if it was yesterday; although I was only 13
at the time. Neal, Buzz and Mike Collins were my American heroes at a
time when the United States was deeply troubled by the events in
southeast Asia, Ted Kennedy’s swimming off of Martha’s Vineyard, Kent
State. You know the rest of the story if you were at least 57 years
old.
The first moonwalk was on July 21st, not July 20th.
Apollo 11 touched on the moon on my 12th birthday, 7/20/1969. I thought we would have gone to Mars already!
Bloated, pork driven, Federal Agency big govt Nasa has frittered away the 40 years and $500 billion since Apollo ended…
Govt screws up, corrupts whatever it touches…
We need private enterprise efficiency, innovation, spirit to do what big govt Nasa has failed so miserably at… opening up space for Americans.
Private enterprise developed US aviation… 50 years after the Wright Bros, tens of thousands of Americans flew worldwide safely and affordably…
Big Govt Nasa grabbed a monopoly on US space.. 50 years after John Glenn, only a few hundred Govt selected ‘astronauts’ have flown, at over $1 billion taxpayer dollars EACH.
The Gov’t also tried its hand at building the first aeroplane, Samuel Pierpont Langley received a War Department grant of $50,000 and $20,000 from the Smithsonian to develop a piloted airplane. Gold was $20 an ounce back then, equivalent to 3,500 ounces of gold, and at today’s price for gold ($1334/oz), $4,669,000 in today’s dollars.
Whereas two clever men working in their bicycle shop did it for considerably less money, and sold their first aeroplane to the government for $30,000.
That was a great day my 18 birthday. I was visiting Ghana with the Red Cross.7/20/69
Indeed. I’m two years past that.
Ted Kennedy’s career would have been hurt even more than it was, were it not that most of us were watching Apollo 11 (a project started, ironically, by his brother, but one Ted himself did not support) more closely.at the time.
Maybe if we all had more to root for we would stop arguing with each other. You have an axe to grind and that is fine, but you are not solving anything. Race relations have improved in this country dramatically, we need to stop flogging ourselves if we are going to move ahead. I want to STOP the whining and restore our greatness.
Oh, sure, they’ve improved dramatically. Unless you’re Trayvon Martin, in which case they’re decidedly bad. I have no axe to grind. You’re the one who brought this completely unrelated topic up.
The death of Trayvon Martin was the result of an overzealous neighborhood watchman with a gun and a young man with too much attitude to utter 6 little words without feeling like he was being forced to disrespect himself by telling the “creepy ass cracker’ “I’m staying here with my father” His own sense of self importance wouldn’t have allowed him to answer to an older figure in authority. That same attitude and misplaced belief in their self importance that man young people black and white carry with them like a giant chip on their shoulder these days.
All I can say is that I admire Neil Armstrong more than anyone and I always will.
I am curious why he leased a salvage vessel from Norway and not the US? The lease rates and fuel costs would be cheaper from the US. There is a ship home ported in Cape Canaveral specifically designed to recover booster rockets from the shuttle.
yeah, it always pisses me off when i have to see that son of a bitch richard nixon talking to neil armstrong on the moon.
Nixon always said he was not a crook…. well, he wasn’t called Trick Dicky for nothing! If EVER a President should have been impeached, it was HIM! (Followed closely by George Bush — son, not father).
Yeah Nixon didn’t mind jumping on the phone at that historic moment to steal some of the glory for himself. They would have surely impeached him if he hadn’t resigned.
Worst POTUS?
How about FDR, who gave us his 10 year First Democrat/socialist depression, Pearl Harbor after CIC for a decade, WW2, segregated military, and his racist Japanese internment?
Or JFK, whose recklessness took us to the edge of thermonuclear war, sacrificed good men at the Bay of Pigs, and started the Vietnam war costing 58,000 US lives?
Or LBJ, whose failed ‘great society’ cost $18 trillion and destroyed black culture and families?
Or Barack Hussein Obama, who has added $10 trillion new bankrupting Democrat deficit on our kids, this Second Democrat/socialist depression, and the most divided/partisan politics in US history?
Let me guess, you live in the American South, and self identify as a Christian Conservative. Am I close?
You failed to acknowledge even a single presented fact, number, reality….. instead focusing on the messenger..
Let me guess… liberal… Am I close?
I agree with you on LBJ, but have to beg to differ with you on Kennedy ad Roosevelt.
if you want someone to blame for WW2, at least put it in the right place…
===== =
Democrat FDR was CIC for a FULL DECADE before we were forced into WW2….. a decade where Japanese and German arment and agression could have easily and cheaply been preempted and confronted … yet FDR did not, while FDR’s Depression made America look weak..
FDR could have preempted WW2 but did not.. the result of that FDR failure was 60 million dead.
*sigh* Sheep…..
FDR also gave military contracts to friends instead of picking the best aircraft, leading to countless American deaths (IMHO murders), flying inferior aircraft. Which continue to this day flying inferior commercial aircraft that cannot survive crashes and kill most everyone aboard.
To my forebears’ shame, Great Britain and France could have stopped Hitler at minimal cost in 1936 when he annexed the Rhineland with three divisions and a rudimentary air force. France had 100 divisions and we were her military allies.
Even Hitler’s Generals were praying for us to stop them and call time on him ; in the event, we missed the chance, and the German military gave up , taking the notorious Fuhrer Oath.
My late father always said that after WW1, no-one believed that Hitler, a man of the people who had served in the ranks with some gallantry, could be so mad as to risk another ruinous war. But then my father was a reasonable, scholarly man with little interest in psychiatry- who went on to serve with great gallantry in Special Ops.
Many people should have read “Mein Kampf” in the 1920’s- he was a rare politician who went on to keep his promises to the letter. I can’t say I blame readers for flunking the ordeal- it was pretty much unreadable..I did try , aged 10, but it is really turgid.
Today, however , Mein Kampf is most widely read in Arabic or Farsi; in the Middle East, it is the second best seller after the Koran…Interesting, huh?
Yes Nixon gave NASA an choice, (a)work with the Air Force on a space shuttle or(b) cease to exist. NASA chose (a) and the AIr Force requirements meant a much larger vehicle than NASA had been studying. A lifting body concept not unlike the one Steve Bezos is building now. Because of cross range landing requirements the Shuttle needed wings. The budget for STS was ridiculously low. Basic crew launch safety requirements were left out and 14 people died as a result. of two failures.
Once again NASA is an agency with no clear mandate. This week Congress voted to cancel any NASA asteroid mission and slashed it’s budget by one billion dollars , and instructing NASA to confine it’s studies of future plans to returning to the Moon or sending humans to Mars. If NASA had been permitted to it’s long range goals of further lunar exploration, upgraded landers and an eventual permanently manned lunar outpost Americans would be living on the Moon right now. Instead we wasted forty years farting around in low Earth orbit just so that the U.S. could have some kind of space program instead of moving forward. Our lunar base disappeared with the stroke of a pen when Nixon decided to veto the funding of another batch of Saturn Vs.
Trayvon, Miami Gardens street fighting thug, was ‘innocent’ until he CHOSE to circle back, ambush, sucker punch, ‘ground and pound’ a much shorter, weaker, defenseless looking ‘sorry white assed cracker’.
If Trayvon survives, he is arrested/convicted of aggravated assault/battery, and a hate crime.
This is not the proper forum for this discussion, please comment on the article/subject at hand, or choose another site to offer your opinion. I’m interested in science and astronomy, and as such would like to see comments related to these subjects. Thanks in advance…..
William… I agree not the proper forum, and I would not have introduced it….. but I did responded to tom linder’s previous post, rather than let untruths stand…
Why didn’t you object to his post?
The facts, testimony, including prosecution ‘star witness’ are that Trayvon reached his abode, then CHOSE to circle back and attack… Zimmerman had no ‘authority’..never tried to use any, never approached, confronted, or questioned Martin…
Zimmerman was a neighborhood watcher guilty of ‘watching’
Nasa promised a gullible Congress and America a $7 million per flight ‘cheap, safe, reliable access to space’ Shuttle…
Then bloated, pork driven Federal Agency Nasa delivered a $1.6 trillion/flight boondoggle which killed 2 crew and had chronic and multi-year service outages..
Nasa’s shuttle was the most unaffordable/unsustainable, dangerous, unreliable space vehicle in history..
Blame failed big govt Nasa, not taxpayers, Congress, or anyone else.
I don’t think the illegal immigrant LA gang members, or the recent Muslim Boston bombers are ‘von brauns’
Taxpayers and Congress have handed Nasa $500 billion for US manned space in the 40 years since Apollo ended…
Big govt, bloated, pork driven Federal Agency Nasa is doing what Govt ALWAYS DOES… Failing..with massive waste, pork, bloat.
We need to downsize or eliminate Nasa, and instead use the NSF to fund Caltech’s JPL for probes, and private enterprise like SpaceX for boosters/capsules.
This sort of sheeple statement gets really tiresome. Too many people are getting fed their opinions. I say this because your post about the ‘murder’ and referring to the stand your ground laws as absurd is practically a copy and paste from all the other sheeple facebook lawyers. You weren’t there, none of the other people who post this bullshit as ‘facts’ were there, and the defendant was acquitted by a court of law.
I mean, you do realize that the ‘absurd’ law combined with the castle laws are there to protect you, yes? It’s not a get out of jail free card permitting someone to kill indiscriminately, they are specifically designed to allow a person to adequately defend themselves in need against an attacker. Such as if someone breaks into your home, etc. States without that ‘absurd’ law require you to show every possible effort to escape (if you can even escape) and just let them do as they please.
Regardless, these things are only relevant and newsworthy because they provide good ammunition as distractions from the real issues. Cases such as this, Casey Anthony, and so on happen every single day. Why is this one and a few select others so much more important than all the others? Because they can inflame certain tensions. In this case, they saw an opportunity to play the race card since the person who was shot was black and the one that shot him wasn’t. Which the fact that the defendant didn’t even know what race the guy was at first when he spoke to 911 (as proven with the actual facts) negates it having any sort of racial motivation, but is conveniently ignored because then nobody can be offended by it.
So where’s the big media attention and massive social outcry for the dozens upon dozens of other accidental deaths, murders, etc, that have happened since and are happening probably even right now? A waitress was followed home and brutally assaulted, blasted by a shotgun (died in the hospital) by 3 men for the 85 bucks she got in tips that night. That happened back in May of 2012. They could even have played the race card with that one since all 3 of the murderers (and this one is clearly and most-definitely murder) were black and the victim was white. But wait, that one clearly was a robbery and a murder, so no one can argue that it wasn’t. Though, and I hate to have to say this, I honestly imagine had the races been reversed it would have exploded all over.
Derailment aside, Kfredrick has a valid point. People today are so desperate to be offended by the actions of other people that they will go any lengths to find it, even if it’s completely unjustified and fueled by lies and misdirection created due to intolerance.
We used to innovate…now we’re too busy trolling each other on the internet, ensuring we’re following the latest ‘fad’ (though making sure to never admit that’s the real reason we’re wearing XX style or type of clothing or using phone YY), and ravenously hunting for reasons to be offended that we can’t be bothered to care about anything real.