Lost Opportunities on the Moon

July 09, 2009

Anticipation is now building to the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. There are two things about this historic anniversary that I regret. First, that we landed in the pre-Internet days, and second, there where exciting lunar landing targets that were simply cancelled.

Science fiction writers of the early 20^th century predicted that getting to the moon would be so technically difficult that it would be centuries before we really did it.  Even in the immediate pre-Sputnik years, this was the opening narrative in the 1956 sci-fi film classic Forbidden Planet:

“In the final decade of the 21st century...men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon. By   2200 A.D., they had reached the other planets of our solar system Almost at once there followed the discovery of hyper-drive."

Then the Cold War came along, and we technologically leapfrogged to the moon. Regrettably it was for national prestige, not scientific curiosity. Without the competition with the Soviet Union for world preeminence, we probably still wouldn’t have landed on the moon.  

Nevertheless, it was very bad timing for the Apollo saga to unfold because the United States was mired in the Vietnam War, social protests, and abuse of power by the Nixon administration. The country had not been so divided since the days of the Civil War.

Apollo was seen as part of the government military/industrial establishment, and derided by some for its perceived extravagance in the face of unraveling social conditions and unrelenting poverty. There was even a popular head shop poster that had a photo of Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin on the moon, with a heading “So What!”

Late night comics lambasted the moon rock samples that were returned as “just rocks.” NASA had no savvy science spokesperson, like Carl Sagan, who could eloquently explain that the rocks – ounce for ounce -- were vastly more valuable than gold.  They were 4.4 billion year-old time capsules.

Without any long-term exciting science goals, and with the public distraction over the war, the excitement of the moon landings quickly waned. This is part led to Congress cutting NASA funding (fear of losing a crew in another Apollo 13-like incident also weighed in). The two final Apollo moon missions were canceled, even though all the space hardware had been built and crews chosen (the two Saturn V moon rockets are on public display at NASA's  Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center).

Each Apollo mission got incrementally more adventurous, and so the last two would have been enthralling.

The floor of the crater Tycho was among targets considered. The impact crater is 50 miles across, big enough to swallow metropolitan Washington D.C. The Lunar Module (LM) would have touched down near the rim of the crater, close to the landing site of the Surveyor VII robotic lander that touched down in 1968. The crater rim plunges three miles down into the lunar crust. The astronauts would have returned samples from over 4 billion years ago, and the photos of the crater wall would have been spectacular.

And equally dramatic crater is the 60-mile wide Copernicus. The LM would have landed at the majestic central peak that rises one-half mile above the crater floor. The floor has domes (not alien built!) and textured material that shows how the floor filled in with molten material after the impact of a small asteroid. Photos of the central peak would have qualified as one of the most seminal images from spaceflight history.  The descent into the crater would have been eye-popping, with the LM skirting of the crater’s three mile-high walls.

Though never formally planned, astronaut geologist Harrison Schmidt – who finally made it to the moon on the last Apollo mission in December 1972 -- lobbied for an Apollo flight to the lunar farside (of course some conspiracy fanatics think we secretly went there to check out space alien bases). NASA would have had to put a radio relay satellite into lunar orbit to send the farside communications to Earth. But I think it would have been eerie for the crew to travel to a place where mother Earth is perpetually hidden from sight.

I’m beginning to regret that the moon landings did not take place just a few decades later. Imagine the continuous media coverage we’d have today, with cable TV and Internet feeds. Imagine twittering from the lunar farside! Ideally a high-tech NASA of today might have gone to the effort to have wide enough bandwidth to send back high-definition video that we could all watch on our wall mounted flat screen TVs. The public certainly would have been more engaged as co-explorers.

We have nearly two decades to go before Americans return to the moon. The communications technology by then will realize everything I’ve dreamt about – and more!  I predict that earthbound viewers will sit back at watch wall-sized images in ultra-high definition, and three dimensions!

Comments

[MichaelL]

I'm not getting my hopes up for a return to the Moon anytime soon - even within 2 decades. I think it will be much longer than that. Unfortunately, I do not think there is the political will for it to happen.