The New Penguin History of the World (190 page)

Possibly spurred by a wish to offset a recent publicity disaster in American relations with Cuba, President Kennedy proposed in May 1961 that the United States should try to land a man on the moon (the first man-made object had already crash-landed there in 1959) and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade. His publicly stated reasons for recommending this compare interestingly with those that led the rulers of fifteenth-century Portugal and Spain to back their Magellans and da Gamas. One was that such a project provided a good national goal; the next that it would be prestigious (‘impressive to mankind’ were the president’s words); the third was that it was of great importance for the exploration of space; and the fourth was (somewhat oddly) that it was of unparalleled difficulty and expense. Kennedy said nothing of the advancement of science, of commercial or military advantage – or, indeed, of what seems to have been his real motivation: to do it before the Russians did. Surprisingly, the project met virtually no opposition and the first money was soon allocated.

During the early 1960s the Russians continued to make spectacular progress. The world was perhaps most excited when they sent a woman into space in 1963, but their technical competence continued to be best shown by the size of their vehicles – a three-man machine was launched
in 1964 – and in the achievement the following year of the first ‘space walk’, when one of the crew emerged from his vehicle and moved about outside while in orbit (though reassuringly attached to it by a lifeline). The Russians were to go on to further important advances in achieving rendezvous for vehicles in space and in engineering their docking, but after 1967 (the year of the first death through space travel, when a Russian was killed during re-entry) the glamour transferred to the Americans. In 1968, they achieved a sensational success by sending a three-man vehicle into orbit around the moon and transmitting television pictures of its surface. It was by now clear that
Apollo
, the moon-landing project, was going to succeed.

In May 1969 a vehicle put into orbit with the tenth rocket of the project approached to within six miles of the moon to assess the techniques of the final stage of landing. A few weeks later, on 16 July, a three-man crew was launched. Their lunar module landed on the moon’s surface four days later. On the following morning, 21 July, the first human being to set foot on the moon was Neil Armstrong, the commander of the mission. President Kennedy’s goal had been achieved with time in hand. Other landings were to follow. In a decade that had opened politically with humiliation for the United States in the Caribbean and was ending in the morass of an unsuccessful war in Asia, it was a triumphant reassertion of what America (and, by implication, capitalism) could do. It was also the outstanding signal of the latest and greatest extension by
Homo sapiens
of his environment, the beginning of a new phase of his history, that to be enacted on other celestial bodies.

Even at the time, this wonderful achievement was decried, and now it is difficult to shake off a sense of anti-climax. Its critics felt that the mobilization of resources the programme needed was unjustified, because irrelevant to the real problems of the earth. To some, the technology of space travel has seemed to be our civilization’s version of the Pyramids, a huge investment in the wrong things in a world crying out for money for education, nutrition, medical research – to name but a few pressing needs. It is not difficult to sympathize with such a view. Yet, the far-reaching scientific and economic effect of the space effort is hardly quantifiable; the use of knowledge of miniaturization needed to make control systems, for example, rapidly spills over into applications of obvious social and economic value. It cannot be said that this knowledge would necessarily have been available had not the investment in space come first. Nor, indeed, can we be confident that the resources lavished on space exploration would have been made available for any other great scientific or social goals, had they not been used in this way. Our social machinery does not operate like that.

The mythical importance of what has happened has also to be considered.
However regrettable it may be, modern societies have shown few signs of being able to generate much interest and enthusiasm among their members for collective purposes, except for brief periods (or in war, whose ‘moral equivalent’ – as one American philosopher put it well before 1914 – is still to seek). The imagination of large numbers of people was not really fired by the prospect of adding marginally to the GDP or introducing one more refinement to a system of social services, however intrinsically desirable these things might have been. Kennedy’s identification of a national goal was shrewd; in the troubled 1960s Americans had much to agitate and divide them, but they did not turn up to frustrate launchings of the space missions.

Space exploration also became more international as it went on. Before the 1970s there was little co-operation between the two greatest nations concerned, the United States and Soviet Russia, and much duplication of effort and inefficiencies. Ten years before the Americans planted the American flag on it, a Soviet mission had dropped a Lenin pennant on the moon. This seemed ominous; there was a basic national rivalry in the technological race itself and nationalism might provoke a ‘scramble for space’. But the dangers of competition were avoided; it was soon agreed that celestial objects were not subject to appropriation by any one state. In July 1975, some hundred and fifty miles above the earth, co-operation became a startling reality in a remarkable experiment in which Soviet and American machines connected themselves so that their crews could move from one to the other. In spite of doubts, exploration continued in a relatively benign international setting. The visual exploration of further space was carried beyond Jupiter by unmanned satellite, and 1976 brought the first landing of an unmanned exploration vehicle on the surface of the planet Mars. In 1977 the American Space Shuttle, the first reusable space vehicle, made its maiden voyage.

These achievements were tremendous, yet now they are hardly noticed, so jaded are our imaginations. So rapidly did there grow up a new familiarity with the idea of space travel that by 2000 it seemed only mildly risible that an American should make the first fare-paying flight as a passenger. Yet to have landed safely on the moon and returned had been a dazzling affirmation of the belief that we live in a universe we can manage. The instruments for doing so were once magic and prayer; they are now science and technology. But continuity lies in the growing human confidence throughout history that the natural world could be manipulated. Landing on the moon was a landmark in that continuity, an event perhaps of the same order as the mastery of fire, the invention of agriculture or the discovery of nuclear power.

It can be compared also to the great age of terrestrial discovery. The timescales are interestingly different. Something like about eighty years of exploration were needed to take the Portuguese around Africa and India; there were only eight between the launching of the first man into space and the arrival of men on the moon. The target set in 1961 was achieved with about eighteen months to spare. Exploration in space proved safer, too. In spite of a few spectacular accidents, in terms of deaths per passenger-mile travelled it is still the safest form of transport known to man, while fifteenth-century seafaring was a perilous business. Actuarially, the risk of travelling in the
Santa Maria
– or even the
Mayflower
– must have been much greater than that faced by the
Apollo
crews. But there are continuities, too. The age of oceanic discovery was for a long time mainly dominated by one people, the Portuguese, building on a slow accumulation of knowledge. Cumulatively, the base of exploration widened as data was added, piece-by-piece, to what was known. Da Gama had to pick up an Arab navigator once around the Cape of Good Hope. Unknown seas lay ahead. Five hundred years later,
Apollo
was launched from a far broader but still cumulative base, nothing less than the whole scientific knowledge of mankind. In 1969, the distance to the moon was already known, so were the conditions that would greet men arriving there, most of the hazards they might encounter, the quantities of power, supplies and the nature of the other support systems they would need to return, the stresses their bodies would undergo. Though things might have gone wrong, there was a widespread feeling that they would not. In its predictable, as in its cumulative quality, space exploration epitomizes our science-based civilization. Perhaps this is why space does not seem to have changed minds and imaginations as did former great discoveries.

Behind the increasing mastery of nature achieved in seven or eight thousand years lay the hundreds of millennia during which prehistoric technology had inched forwards from the discovery that a cutting edge could be put on a stone chopper and that fire could be mastered, while the weight of genetic programming and environmental pressure still loomed much larger then than did conscious control. The dawning of consciousness that more than this was possible was the major step in man’s evolution after his physical structure had settled into more or less what it is today. With it, the control and use of experience had become possible.

NEW CONCERNS

Already in the 1980s, nevertheless, space exploration was overshadowed in many minds by a new uneasiness about man’s interference with nature. Within only a few years of
Sputnik I
, doubts were being voiced about the ideological roots of so masterful a view of our relationship to the natural world. This uneasiness, too, could now be expressed with a precision based on observed facts not hitherto available or not considered in that light; it was science itself which provided the instrumentation and data that led to dismay about what was going on. A recognition of the possible future damage interference with the environment might bring was beginning to arise.

It was, of course, the recognition that was new, not the phenomena which provoked it.
Homo sapiens
(and perhaps his predecessors) had always scratched away at the natural world in which he lived, modifying it in many particulars, destroying other species. Millennia later than that, migration southward and the adoption of dryland crops from the Americas had devastated the great forests of south-west China, bringing soil erosion and the consequential silting of the Yangtze drainage system in its train, and so culminating in repeated flooding over wide areas. In the early Middle Ages, Islamic conquest had brought goat-herding and tree-felling to the North African littoral on a scale that destroyed a fertility once able to fill the granaries of Rome. But such sweeping changes, though hardly unnoticed, were not understood. The unprecedented rapidity of ecological interference initiated from the seventeenth century onwards by Europeans, however, was to bring things to a head. The unconsidered power of technology forced the dangers on the attention of mankind in the second half of the twentieth century. People began to reckon up damage as well as achievement, and by the middle of the 1970s it seemed to some of them that even if the story of growing human mastery of the environment was an epic, that epic might well turn out to be a tragic one.

Suspicion of science had never wholly disappeared in western societies, although tending to be confined to a few surviving primitive or reactionary enclaves as the majesty and implication of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century gradually unrolled. History can provide much evidence of uneasiness about interference with nature and attempts to control it, but until recently such uneasiness seemed to rest on non-rational grounds, such as the fear of provoking divine anger or nemesis. As time passed, it was steadily eroded by the palpable advantages and improvements that successful interference with nature brought about, most obviously through
the creation of new wealth expressed in all sorts of goods, from better medicine to better clothing and food. In the 1970s, however, it became clear that a new scepticism about science itself was abroad, even though only among a minority and only in rich countries. There, a cynic might have said, the dividends on science had already been drawn. Nonetheless, scepticism manifested itself there first and in the 1980s as ‘green’ political parties sought to promote policies protective of the environment. They were not able to achieve much, but they proliferated; the established political parties and perceptive politicians therefore toyed with ‘green’ themes, too. Environmentalists, as the concerned came to be called, benefited from the new advances in communications, which rapidly broadcast disturbing news even from previously uncommunicative sources. In 1986, an accident occurred at a Ukrainian nuclear power station. Suddenly and horribly, human interdependence was made visible. Grass eaten by lambs in Wales, milk drunk by Poles and Yugoslavs, and air breathed by Swedes, were all contaminated. An incalculable number of Russians, it appeared, were going to die over the years from the slow effects of radiation. The alarming event was brought home to millions by television not long after other millions had watched on their screens an American rocket blow up with the loss of all on board. Chernobyl and
Challenger
showed to huge numbers of people for the first time both the limitations and the possible dangers of an advanced technological civilization.

Such accidents reinforced and diffused the new concern with the environment. It soon became tangled with much else. Some of the doubts that have recently arisen accept that our civilization has been good at creating material wealth, but note that by itself that does not necessarily make men happy. This is hardly a new idea but its application to society as a whole instead of to individuals is a new emphasis. It led to a wider recognition that improvement of social conditions may not remove all human dissatisfactions and may actually irritate some of them more acutely. Pollution, the oppressive anonymity of crowded cities and the nervous stress and strain of modern work conditions easily erase satisfactions provided by material gain and they are not new problems: 4000 people died of atmospheric pollution in a week in London in 1952, but the word ‘smog’ had been invented nearly half a century before that. Scale, too, has now become a problem in its own right. Some modern cities may even have grown to the point at which they present problems that are, for the moment, insoluble.