One Giant Leap Into Past Glory

July 20, 2009

Of all the Apollo 11 decadal anniversaries, this one is particularly made poignant with the passing of the "journalist’s journalist" Walter Cronkite. Alongside astronaut Wally Schirra, he shared our collective excitement about the historic Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. 

I remember camping out on the living room couch, like waiting for Super Bowl, to watch the landing actually happen. Cronkite was like having an uncle in the living room sharing the intimacy and wonder of what was unfolding in real time. I needed this because the only real person in the living room was my widowed mother’s boyfriend, who did nothing but curse out the landing as a waste of his taxed blue–collar wages.

Cronkite was one of the most influential people of the mid to late 20^th century. Yet his passing won’t get nearly the attention – two weeks of nonstop cable TV news coverage – that Michael Jackson’s death did. This is a sad reflection on our narcissistic and frivolous celebrity-preoccupied culture.  (The Washington Post reported this weekend  that a YouTube clip of the first moon walk has 2 million views; Michael Jackson moon-walking to "Billie Jean" has 20 million.)

This landing is also poignant because NASA’s return to the moon looks like it’s heading for an even longer hiatus. When I watched the motion picture 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, I imagined that by the year 2001 we’d have Apollo landers ferrying back and forth to the moon, and an Antarctic-style moonbase. This in fact was beautifully envisioned in the largely forgotten TV series Men Into Space that was so accurate it was boring for the 1960 TV viewers. They apparently preferred the silly antics on the mid-1960s piece of tacky sci-fi cotton candy: Lost in Space.

I never imagined that by 2010 NASA would be so stuck in the mud. If the funding and momentum from Apollo had continued, we would have landed on Mars in the mid 1980s (I’ll blog more on this at a later date).

Today astronaut team “expeditions” endlessly whirl around Earth aboard the International Space Station, but venture no farther.

From all accounts it looks like President Obama’s Augustine Commission of space experts, who are now reviewing NASA’s manned space flight program, is ready to give a thumbs down to the “Apollo-on-steroids” plan to build super-rocket successors to the Saturn V any time soon.  

The gravitational pull of the federal budget could push back retuning Americans to the moon to 2028 (three times the length of time it took to tool-up to originally go to the moon). By then the Chinese will likely have landed, and this might re-trigger a space race mentality in the 2020 decade.

So, like thumbing through an old family scrapbook I look at the restored NASA footage of Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” statement, and the LRO landing site images with pure nostalgia and a sense of lost opportunity.

The Apollo Program died in the Nixon era because it was Kennedy’s space program. George W. Bush’s “Vision for Exploration” looks like it’s ready to die in the Obama era. My former boss, Nobel Laureate Riccardo Giacconi, wondered aloud in the late 1980s if we could have a “viable space program in a democracy.” NASA’s efforts have become such a political pong-pong ball, I’m finally beginning to appreciate Giacconi’s words.

The Apollo landers as photographed by LRO are silent monuments of how exploratory the United States manned program could be again, if we have the will to become an extra-terrestrial civilization.

 

 

Comments

[Jim Belfiore]

Well said, and unfortunately I agree.

http://andromeda-30.blogspot.com/2009/07/three-years-at-horizon.html