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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

40 Years after a truly huge achievement and we are … where?

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the landing on the Moon in 1969. Neil Armstrong (“One small step for a man… one giant leap for mankind”) ad Buzz Aldrin planted the flag and put out a plaque marking the landing which, in under a decade, had been the result of spending $183 Billion Bucks and upping the confrontation with the Russians, who had achieved the original advance in space by putting up Sputnik and sending two different cosmonauts on full orbits around the Earth.

I was a Junior in college and I know I was impressed. Jack Kennedy, who kicked off the program wasn’t alive to see the results he had called for carried out by NASA. Lyndon Johnson, who pushed the budget through, was no longer in office. And Dick Nixon, who was never really a supporter of the space program, but who saw its publicity value, got to congratulate the two moonwalkers by phone as they stood looking at our planet in space.

The reason why the moon oriented space program got the push it did was the Cold War. To let the USSR get ahead of us scientifically, in a way that could have military consequences, was not going to be tolerated.  When the military threat of the USSR was gone… when the USSR itself was gone… there was no reason to put that kind of thrust into our rockets. Reagan wanted to put our military budget relating to space into missiles pointed back at our enemies from satellites. George H.W. Bush was concerned with Saddam Hussein’s actions, but there was no Iraqi space program to compete with. Clinton saw the public relations advantages of doing a minimal amount of activities with a space station and George W. Bush, well, he barely saw that,

Originally, NASA had planned to have us on Mars by 1987. People, that is. In the 21st Century we have managed to get a couple of crawling robot TV cameras on Mars, and a very old space shuttle is still flying on missions that do very little. And we are bored with it all.

That’s right… bored. We rarely know when a shuttle goes up any more (unless it blows up in space… dead people are always news wherever they are) and we don’t really seem to care. It is not as important as unemployment or health care or the recession. They talk about getting folks back on the moon by 2020… but you can bet that such a program, without some kind of real, philosophical need by Americans is unlikely to make the deadline. Or, if the Iranians gave up on nuclear power and focused their attention on a Muslim moon base, perhaps we would have a need to beat the date. That’s how we’re programmed.

The 19th Century and early 20th once had a philosophical and artistic need to get us to the moon. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells created literary works. Filmmakers from the silents to the sci-fi directors of the 1950s got us to the moon frequently (and rarely with rocket ships.) Science Fiction magazines in the 1920s made Hugo Gernsbach a rich publisher and getting us to the moon was an established need. So many youngsters in my generation grew up wanting to be involved that science programs in colleges grew faster than arts programs and that all helped us get to the 1969 landing.

And now here we are, 40 years later, watching a 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin on TV being interviewed about a future that has become the past. We are not pushing for it any more… and that is too bad.



Under The LobsterScope


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5 comments

  1. Chris Blask

    being four years old and having my parents explain it to me as it occurred.

    In Junior High I saw the first picture of a space shuttle and thought “wow!  that’s going to be so cool!”.

    Now I look at the shuttle program and think of all the Saturn 5s we could have flown instead, all the trips to the moon (four per year would have been possible in place of the shuttle program), the long-established base on the moon…

    .sigh.

    Sure, people had stopped watching the moon shots by the end, but we’ve stopped watching the shuttle launches, too.  Becoming normal is what we want out of the programs – it should become normal to see people going into space.

    At the Kennedy space center I did see mockups of Orion this month, and it is good to look forward to seeing people going to the moon again.  This time, with luck, we won’t stop.

  2. sricki

    It’s a pity, I think, that more young people today aren’t interested in such things. Born in the mid 80s, I have to admit that, as a child, my only interest in space was finding out what Asimov and a few others of his ilk had to say about it. I always enjoyed science of most varieties (though I admittedly avoided physics in favor of chemistry on several occasions). Still, I clearly did not feel sufficient passion for it to become heavily involved with it, or to devote my life to contributing to it.

    I would like to say I hope things change — and technically, I do. It would be nice for people to care about the space program again. But even as I say that, I realize that I’m part of the problem. I’m one of the ones you’re talking about. Because deep down, I suppose I don’t really care. My comment, “I hope things change,” is little more than a remark in passing, based on the vague interest aroused by this diary, which will undoubtedly pass. There is no real conviction or passion behind my sentiment that I hope things change. In order for me to be truly excited, something exciting and well-publicized would have to happen. And in order for something exciting and well-publicized to happen, people have to be excited.

    Really is a pity. And on some level, I DO hope things change and that people become interested again. I am just not personally passionate about it to do anything to help, even were I capable of doing so.

  3. John Allen

    We will expand into space, because it is there. That is all it takes. We are still in the early stages. The technology isn’t really ready yet. I’d say we are at the longboat stage. The Norsemen managed to do some amazing things with what were little more than large rowboats. Yet what they did was still very limited compared to what happened when decked sailing vessels became commonplace. Leif Erickson could never have circumnavigated the globe with the vessels he had available.

    First came the long boats (Apollo) circa 1000 CE, then came the long-distance sailing ships in the early 1500’s when Magellan and others circumnavigated the globe. It wasn’t until the 1800’s before steamships accomplished the same feat. Less than 80 years later, it was accomplished by air.

    Technology advances while mankind’s wanderlust stays constant. As I said above, we are still in the longboat phase. We’ve reached Greenland (the Moon), soon we will reach Mars and the Asteroid Belt. From that time forward, we will go further and faster than ever before. It’s not if we will explore space. It is only a matter of when.

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