Fifty years ago today, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins returned safely to earth. Armstrong and Aldrin were our first moon walkers. There would be 10 more over the course of just the next three and a half years. It was all over by December 1972.
For all I know, a cell phone and the myriad things it can do these days is as miraculous as a trip to the moon, but it sure isn’t as dramatic as the blast-off of a Saturn V rocket.
At liftoff, five rocket engines ignite 203,400 gallons of kerosene fuel and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and the resulting combustion provides 7.5 million pounds of thrust. All that fuel burns in just 135.5 seconds, hurling the rocket up 42 miles. Then the first stage engines shut down, explosive bolts fire, and the severed first stage falls into the Atlantic Ocean.
In July 1969, Americans were glued to their televisions from Apollo 11’s blast-off to splash down, but for the moon landing the entire world joined in. And that was thanks to the handy help of the Australian “dish.” The moon wasn’t over the western hemisphere when Neil Armstrong took that step “for all mankind,” so the Aussies picked up the television signals and relayed them out to the rest of the world.
When I was growing up in the Sixties we didn’t look at the big black dial phone that was tethered to the house and wonder into what it might morph. Well, we did see that video phone in in 2001 a Space Odyssey, but mostly we didn’t think about the phone. We thought about outer space.
My father would set up a telescope outside for any astronomical event – a comet, eclipse, meteor shower, and for just plain star gazing. While other dads shot things and watched sports on TV, mine talked about galaxies and special relativity.
So I was a natural fan of the space program. But most people were. It seemed like most everyone wanted us to get to the moon, especially beat the Russians to it. We were excited about what we might find there. And we knew we’d be on Mars by 1985 or so.
But we weren’t. The stars – and geopolitics – had aligned just right in 1962 for President Kennedy to be able to set the goal of a manned moon landing and safe return by 1969. Mired in Vietnam, facing an oil crises, Congress and the Nixon administration tightened budgets, forcing NASA to cancel three planned moon landings. Yes, the space shuttle program went forward, but it was a confining forward. We really weren’t going anywhere.
Nixon’s lasting imprint on the space program was an end to human exploration of space beyond low Earth orbit in the twentieth century, according to George Washington University Professor Emeritus John Logsdon.
In his 2015 book, After Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, Logsdon says the Nixon Space Doctrine set out to:
- treat the space program as one area of domestic policy competing with other concerns, not as a privileged activity
- lower U.S. ambitions in space by ending human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future and not embark on another Apollo-like space goal requiring a massive investment
- build NASA’s post-Apollo program around the space shuttle without establishing a specific goal.
This didn’t sit well with those of us who grew up in the Sixties! And those include dot com and entrepreneurial billionaires who found themselves in a position to do something about it. That’s why we have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Paul Allen, Richard Branson and others busying themselves with rockets and robotic spaceships, space hotels and space tourism projects.
(Our fictional hero, meets Richard Branson in 1969 in Walter Hudson and the London Underground Affair.)
Branson’s Virgin Galactic announced earlier this month it plans to fly a passenger spaceplane from Italy’s future Grottaglie Spaceport, which will be built in southern Italy. So Virgin Galatic could become the first to launch someone into space from Europe. The company has one spaceplane, the VSS Unity, undergoing testing in the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Branson is selling tickets for the first flight. That’s as yet unscheduled, but he said he might fly in it yet this year.
Musk’s SpaceX company plans to have tourists on the moon soon, with an ultimate goal of colonizing Mars. Bezos wants to boost man to Mars as well, with the goal of having millions of people living and working in space.
They intend to prove that Earthbound just isn’t mankind’s destiny.
