Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (18 page)

Announcing only that Americans were going to go to the Moon would have been very good strategy. It would have been a fine foreign-policy ploy, something of a morale booster for the American people, and an encouraging signal to the space agency and the science and industrial sectors. But putting a time limit on it—within the decade, meaning within eight years—was brilliant. The finite time period was a virtual guarantee that, unlike so many promising programs in Washington that evaporate after they are announced, landing men on the Moon was really going to happen because an actual, stated, on-the-record deadline made it definite. The world had the president's word on it, and no president would volitionally lie, particularly about a subject of such importance whose failure was guaranteed to diminish his image in the history books. Furthermore, deadlines are inherently dramatic because they create the pressure that comes with competition, and there is a penalty of some sort when they are not met. That is why sports events are played in finite periods of time that are extended only if the competitors are tied. “Third and goal with less than a minute on the clock” generally gets football fans on their feet. A tie score that would extend the game to the next day would not.

With that announcement, John M. Logsdon, a leading space expert and author of
The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest
, has rightly explained, Kennedy not only set a single, overarching goal for the space program, but he also fundamentally changed the nature of the program itself. “He challenged the assertion that a ‘single civil-military program…is unattainable' by approving the initial plan for just such a program, aimed at establishing American preeminence in every aspect of space activity, civilian and military, scientific and commercial, prestige-oriented and unspectacular.”
He thereby abruptly and dramatically reversed Eisenhower's decentralized and lackluster space program.
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JFK, in other words, finally got a fractured and unfocused operation pointing in a single direction with a dramatic goal that would require heroism and dignify the whole human race (the Russians, the Chinese, and other Cold War foes, plus the Third World).

Kennedy mandated NASA to plan and carry out no less than the single greatest and most dramatic feat of exploration in human history: to send men to another world. The space agency managed to do that not once but seven times, with six crews landing on the Moon in a program that was adroitly christened Apollo, after the god of light and the Sun in Greek mythology, an omnipotent oracle who bestowed truth and culture on the world. The Russians were decisively routed, and bragging rights were decisively and dramatically won by the land of the free and the home of the brave.

All of the free world cheered when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin alighted on the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins cruised overhead in the
Apollo 11
command module. The landing captured the imagination of the world, with untold millions watching it on television, listening to it on radios, and reading about it in their newspapers (including
Pravda
and
Izvestia
in Russia, and
Jen-Min Jih-Pao
in China). Their fellow men had landed on another world. That was taken to mean that, given the resolve, anything was possible. It was literally the high point in human history—a transcendental moment when humanity expanded its domain as never before.

It was also a masterpiece of subtle public relations. “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong famously proclaimed as he set foot on the lunar surface to begin a romp that lasted almost three hours. That meant the landing was on behalf of all humanity; that Americans had ventured to another world as representatives of all humankind, a distinctly noble gesture. But the flag that Aldrin planted in the
lunar soil as he was being photographed in color was not the United Nation's. It was the stars and stripes; Old Glory.

The newspaper of record (as the
Times
called itself) devoted all of page one to the story, as did every other reputable paper in the country:

MEN WALK ON MOON
ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN;
COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG

“Men have landed and walked on the moon,” John Noble Wilford, the reporter who covered the space program for the
Times
, wrote with eloquent simplicity at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Mission Control controlled the mission.

Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.

Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old commander, radioed to earth and the mission control room here:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
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The space establishment was of course ecstatic, and so, for the most part, were the Pentagon, the news media, the industrial sector, highly educated professionals, Joe Six Pack, and ordinary Americans everywhere.

The intellectual establishment had three perspectives: that there were higher priorities on the home planet, such as disease and poverty; that the Moon ought to be untouched by humans and left in its pristine condition; and that landing on it would not only be scientifically important but would be the greatest adventure of all time, and one that helped unify the world.

Arnold J. Toynbee, the venerable British historian, thought that landing on the Moon symbolized a large gap between technology and morals. “In a sense,” he said, “going to the Moon
is like building the pyramids or Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. It's rather scandalous, when human beings are going short of necessities, to do this. If we're clever enough to reach the Moon, don't we feel rather foolish in our mismanagement of human affairs?” Mark Van Doren, the Columbia University poet and professor of English, thought that the Moon was majestic and a symbol of nature and the universe because it was unsullied by humans and ought to remain that way. “I wish we would leave the Moon alone. I have great respect for the Moon. The arrogance of men landing on the Moon is, to me, very shocking and painful,” he told a journalist.
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Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading theologian, agreed.

Predictably, scientists strongly disagreed. “The Roman Empire decayed when it ceased to be progressive in this kind of sense, and there are other examples,” Sir Bernard Lovell, the director of Britain's Jodrell Bank Observatory, contended. “To a certain extent, you see the beginnings of it in the United Kingdom today, but fortunately not in the United States and certainly not in the Soviet Union.”

Margaret Mead, an animated anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, heartily agreed. “People have always said that it would be better to stay at home and till your own cabbage patch. I think that if people don't follow the potentialities of movement and change, they're likely to wither and die,” she said, adding that we would “hate ourselves” if we did not go there.
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And Isaac Asimov, who had a degree in biochemistry that he applied to science fiction and who was then publishing his hundredth-or-so book, saw Earthlings going to the Moon as a unifying factor. “Once we reach the Moon,” he said, “I think we will have made our point and should stop fooling around. The trip to Mars will be too expensive for either the United States or the Soviet Union to do alone. This is an age of global problems. By combining for the conquest of space, we can cooperate
where it bothers our prejudices the least because none of us has a vested interest in space. During the International Geophysical Year, for example, everyone agreed on the manner in which they would investigate Antarctica. It was an empty land which belonged to nobody and they could agree on it without loss of face. Similarly, we can agree on space.”
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The exploration of the Moon, then, should be an international operation that would help unify nations—and, by implication, promote peace—and would lead the way to Mars.

The
Times
enthusiastically supported the Apollo program and a presence in space in general. But, to its chagrin, that had not always been the case. On January 13, 1920, “Topics of the Times” ran a short, smug editorial-page feature that basically said that space travel was impossible. It dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum, where there was nothing to push against, and ridiculed Robert H. Goddard, the American rocket pioneer, for having the temerity to believe otherwise. “That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” The newspaper's editorial board saw fit to run a correction on July 17, 1969, almost a half century later, as Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins headed for the Moon, that was cleverly self-mocking. Under a headline that read “A Correction,” the story recounted the mistake and concluded with dry humor that “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as in the atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”
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That first Moon landing was NASA's finest moment. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins returned from the Sea of Tranquility
to a ticker-tape parade in New York and parades in Chicago and Los Angeles. They were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and had a forty-five-day Giant Leap tour of twenty-five countries that included an audience with Queen Elizabeth II. All of America cheered them, and, implicitly, the space agency that got them to the Moon and back. Many proclaimed almost deliriously that they felt privileged to live at a time when their race first went to another world; it was a moment unique in all of history and they were deeply happy to witness it. But the exhilaration and enthusiasm quickly lessened because of a natural falling off of interest in repeat performances, and also because of détente with the Evil Empire, as President Reagan would call the USSR. And the counterculture was taking hold, and with it, a restructuring of many Americans' priorities. The nation's collective mind was convulsing over the war in Vietnam; the civil-rights movement was fighting for racial equality and an end to bigotry (in the north as well as in the south); and self-proclaimed public-interest groups were demanding a reversal of urban decay, improved public education, and an end to crippling inflation that was severely hurting the poor and the middle class. Campus unrest, mostly because of Vietnam, but also because of the racial situation, was rampant.

No wonder public interest in the Apollo missions had fallen off substantially by the time Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. and Alan L. Bean spent more than a day on the Sea of Storms while Richard F. Gordon Jr. orbited in the command module in November 1969 on the Apollo 12 mission. And if the distractions were not enough, an oxygen tank exploded in Apollo 13's service module on April 13, 1970, two days after launch, forcing it to return home without landing on the Moon. The accident brought to mind the Apollo 1 fire at Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967, that killed Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Edward H. White. The Apollo 14, 15, 16, and 17
missions were duly flown, with the last landing in the Taurus-Littrow valley and spending a record three days there, including a record twenty-two hours on extravehicular activity, as being outside a spacecraft in space or on
luna firma
is called, collecting a record 110.5 kilograms of rocks and other material and leaving scientific instruments. Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt (a geologist and the only scientist to land on the Moon) set a record for the longest time on the Moon before they came home on December 7, 1972. By then, the planned Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions had been scrubbed for a lack of both funding and public interest.

Alan Bean told John Noble Wilford, the
New York Times
's space reporter, that the Apollo astronauts had taken it for granted that the program they started would continue with the construction of a lunar base and space stations (plural) as part of humanity's logical expansion to space for a permanent presence there. “At that time in our culture's history, we were doing the most that was possible to be done. We naively assumed that's what would continue, but it didn't,” a disappointed Bean reflected. “It's the normal thing for a culture, in history, that we respond to emergencies.”
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They are looming. The litany of dangers, from high-velocity boulders peppering the neighborhood to resource depletion, to continuing terrorism, to global warming and the multiple problems it is causing, to overpopulation. Yet humanity is caught in a dangerous predicament. Unlike the other creatures on this planet, humans—at least some of them—have the intellectual capacity to understand the precariousness of the situation. But there is no inclination to respond to it with a long-term plan because, like the other creatures, humans are fundamentally—perhaps because of their evolution—incapable of projecting threats to the distant future and coming up with ways to reduce or avert them. It is the ultimate chess game, and we are playing it like wood-pushers.

E. O. Wilson, the naturalist, has his own theory, which he shared in a speech he gave to the members of the Foundation for the Future in August 2002, when he was presented with an award. “The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limiting band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination, however promising, or menacing.” He explained it in Darwinian terms. “For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short term gains in a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring, even when—and this is the important part—their collective striving put their descendants at risk.”
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