August 2008 Edition

EDITOR'S CORNER

 

Heads in the Sand

We’ve become an inward-looking society since we first set foot on the moon, and it’s not something of which we can be proud

It happened 39 years ago last month. When it took place, many of the readers of MAN weren’t even born. It was the biggest event of the 20th Century, and I’d say it was the high point in human history. I’m also willing to bet that most of the public doesn’t even know or remember it.

On July 20, 1969, men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. They came in peace for all mankind – it said so on a plaque signed by then-President Richard Nixon, and attached to one of the lunar lander’s legs.

In less than 10 years, starting from a point where the U.S. hadn’t placed a human in orbit, we went to the moon 14 times, landed six times, and placed a dozen astronauts on its surface. Prior to that, the closest the U.S. got to space were high-altitude balloon ascents, 15-minute sub-orbital jaunts aboard intermediate-range ballistic missles, and high-speed X-15 rocketplane missions. In fact, some of those X-15 pilots, including the first man to set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, were granted astronaut status because they’d flown higher than 50 miles.

Today we have private companies with business plans that depend on taking tourists to the same edge of space explored by Alan Shephard and Gus Grissom.

But, back in the early 1970s, after the sixth mission to the Moon, the public got bored, Congress cut funding, and the grand adventure ended.

We Get an "F" in Nerve

Failure of vision, nerve, and interest kept us from following up with expeditions to the Moon and other planets. Most of the engineers and scientists responsible for that first giant leap of mankind are retired or dead.

The last of the most powerful machines ever created – the Saturn V rocket – is decaying away as a lawn ornament. We couldn’t get back to the Moon in 20 years, let alone 10, despite what the president and NASA has said. Sure, there’s supposed to be an intiative to return people to the Moon in a dozen years, but every president since Ronald Reagan has made vague promises about expanding off of the planet, but it hasn’t happened.

"Why waste all of that money on space?" used to be the cry of the timid. Funny, I don’t remember the astronauts slinging bales of cash out of the airlocks. Elves don’t build spacecraft at night when engineers are tucked snug in their beds.

Ask the machinists, job shops, and operators at the big aerospace firms and the small subs that helped build those amazing machines. That federal money put bread on people’s tables and cash into their savings accounts. None of it was "wasted" in the sense of throwing money down social experiment rat-holes like "The Great Society" programs that built the welfare state.

Not So Much "Can-do" as "Won’t Do"

In those 39 years we turned from a "can-do" society, in general, into a civilization afraid of technological progress. We want better cell phones and digital cable TV, but when it comes to pushing the limits of what we can accomplish, we’ve abdicated our role as a leader to Japan, India, and China. In fact, it is more likely that the next humans on the Moon will have Chinese as their native language rather than English.

Not that I begrudge developing countries the opportunities that space exploration offers, it’s just that we’ve had a 39-year headstart and squandered it. What we have now is a multi-billion dollar tinkertoy space station that we’ll have to access through Russian launch vehicles. I guess in the long view, they won the so-called Space Race.

Every so often, someone will use the phrase "If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we . . . " as an example of the failure of technology. The last time we put men on the Moon was in December 1972, back when a red LED digital watch was first introduced with an asking price of $2,100 and an HP scientific hand-held calculator cost $395.

Things have gotten cheaper and faster, but we’ve become an inward-looking society, allowing more vigorous civilizations to look beyond the sky.