Posted on 07/21/2009 7:13:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Arthur C. Clarke’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey was released shortly before I left for Vietnam. My wife and I saw it in New York City, and it mesmerized us. No, not the fantasy about the lunar monolith beeping toward Jupiter or the insanity of Keir Dullea, in his best role ever, trying to complete the mission alone after the HAL 9000 computer (voice of Douglas Rain) has killed everyone else aboard Discovery One because it decided that they were a threat to the mission; not the absurdity of Dullea surviving several seconds unprotected in the vacuum of frozen space; and certainly not him as a decrepit old man in a Louis XIV bedroom or the gigantic fetus floating peacefully in the galactic womb. Great special effects for that time, to be sure, and the symphonic music could not have been more appropriate to them: The Blue Danube Waltz and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
But what did that mean? Clarke was famously silent on the matter. He obviously didn’t know, either. He had become enchanted with the mystical and visual effects he could bring forth, “stretching the envelope” as the fighter jocks and astronauts still say. The proof? Try the dismal and nonsensical sequel, 2010. A view of cosmic evolution? Claptrap.
But what grabbed us that hot summer day was the logical inevitability of the first hour or so: mankind outward bound into the solar system. We’d have permanent competing scientific installations as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. extended the cold war to a very cold spot -- the moon; regular commercial service between earth and the moon provided by Pan American, “The World’s Most Experienced Airline” (1927 - 1991); space-to-earth videophones a commonplace. The moon and beyond for a welcome time took my mind off my actual destination. On Christmas Eve I would listen to the Apollo 8 astronauts -- Borman, Lovell, and Anders -- in lunar orbit reading from Genesis on Armed Forces radio at the 11th Cavalry’s base camp near Xuan Loc.
On July 16, 1969, we watched the Apollo 11 launch on the TV in our motel room in Daytona Beach and then stepped out onto the balcony where we saw a tiny intense streak of yellow light arcing out toward earth orbit, the first phase of the moon-landing mission. Four days later in my parents’ tiny living room in West Orange, N.J., we held our breath as we saw the grainy, live, black-and-white image of Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladder and stepping onto the powdery surface.
The Apollo lunar voyages coincided almost precisely with my law school career. I was attending the Army’s JAGC Basic Course in Charlottesville, Va., when a classmate and I watched the night launch of Apollo 17 on TV in 1972. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 had already been cancelled -- budget cuts. William F. Buckley, Jr., and the poet and novelist James Dickey (Deliverance) were there. Thirty-three years later Bill would write:
“It was very cold and still dark when the moon-bound streak of fire shot up from the launch pad. Dickey the poet was frozen in awe and admiration. At breakfast he threatened to break the neck of a television commentator whom he heard saying that the cost of this lunar extravagance was the equivalent of 126,000 units of low-cost housing. Dickey was trembling with furious indig- nation that such vulgar measurements were being used to discredit the beauty and awesomeness of the enterprise we had just seen coming up from its womb on a Florida beach.”
We’ve heard it all before, of course. “If we can put a man on the moon, we can . . . .” [complete the sentence with whatever benefit you can imagine bestowing on society’s parasites at taxpayer expense]. As a matter of fact, we can’t -- put a man on the moon, that is. We would have to start from “Ground Zero,” where we were in 1961 when President Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The technology is no longer available, and even if it were, it would be primitive and obsolete. The first high-tech layoffs began at Cape Canaveral at about the time of the Apollo 11 launch in 1969. NASA knew what was coming. As a nation we were about to become the dog that chased the car and finally caught it, and then didn’t know what to do with it.
I stand second to no one in my admiration for the cool, intelligent, and courageous men and women who constitute today’s astronaut corps. It has been a disservice to them that they have had nothing to work with for 37 years except vehicles in earth orbit, principally the Space Shuttle, that ungainly monstrous white elephant. What purposes has it served? Well, let’s see. It was instrumental in the building of the International Space Station. The ISS is . . . uh, oh yeah . . . to be used as a jumping off place for future lunar landings, the establishment of a permanent base on the moon, and future journeys where no one has gone before. Not in my lifetime -- not when President Obama himself has announced that “We’re out of money,” and he’s the guy who can print all he wants.
Yes, it launched, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope, a magnificent scientific achievement that has contributed more to our understanding of the universe than anything has before. But in the first 16 years of manned missions, the U.S. did not have a single fatality in space. The Shuttle’s flaws have claimed 14 brave souls. It is due to be retired next year and its successor won’t be ready to fly until 2014, but don’t set your alarm clock by that prediction.
Yes, most of its missions have been resounding successes. But toward what great end? I recall the late Carl Sagan (Cosmos) being asked to comment on the triumphant conclusion of a Space Shuttle mission. He responded: “Ah, yes. Once again we have proved that tomato plants do not do well in Zero-G. This is not the exploration of space.” Some day we will look back at the Shuttle as a major wrong turn in the development of space travel, much as we now look back on dirigibles in the history of aviation.
The surviving Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts are very old men now. Two generations have become voters since Apollo 17. They cannot grasp the magnificence of the era when heroes walked the Earth, and the Moon, from pallid textbooks and old video footage. In 1995 our daughter, then 23, returned home from seeing Apollo 13. “Was it really like that?” she asked me. I told her that I remembered those excruciating days well and to the best of my recollection they hadn’t made anything up or left anything important out. She unintentionally quoted the words of Admiral Tarrant (Fredric March) at the end of The Bridges at Toko-Ri: “Where do we get such men?”
“Not under this roof,” I assured her.
During one of his “Jaywalking” bits on "The Tonight Show," Jay Leno asked a young woman if she knew the name of the first man to walk on the moon. “Armstrong?” she answered tentatively.
Leno said, “Good. What’s his first name?” She replied: “Louis!”
Leno looked directly into the camera and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
My wife and I were not alone in seeing a straight line to the future in the summer of 1968 as we watched 2001. But Wernher von Braun’s “bridge to the stars” seems now as far away as ever.
-Mr. Rehyansky is retired from the U.S. Army and the Chattanooga, Tennessee, District Attorney's office and now serves as a part-time County Magistrate. He is a former contributor to National Review, and his writings have appeared in The American Spectator and other publications.
Yeah, that's great for all the possible disasters that we can avert. But sometimes, disaster strikes like a bolt from the blue, from causes over which we have no control -- an asteroid impact, a supervolcano eruption, some shutdown of the geodynamo. Life is extinguishable. It's happened before, it will happen again.
The only way to mitigate the fate of extinction is to NOT have all of your eggs (literally) in one basket. That's the real motivation for human space flight. It's not a question of "if" -- it's simply a question of "when."
“nor do we have the drive to be explorers anymore....”
I think you nailed it with this. We no longer dream big dreams, nor do we execute grand plans. We are becoming completely averse to any sort of risk or challenge. We are becoming a nation of metro-sexuals who discuss the latest trends over latte. We are raising a nation of wussies, and it will be to our great sorrow.-—JM
The ISS should be renamed the ASS. (Astronaut storage station) I realize it has some value but I’ve long since begun to doubt that it needs to be as large and expensive as it is.
If we had stayed on track with our previous ambitions, the money wasted on the space station could have gone toward a permanent station on the moon. It wouldn’t need to be boosted into a higher orbit every few years by an expensive mission. Instead or wasting valuable space carrying garbage back to earth it could stay on the moon
Good points. The ISS will be around $100 Billion, and when it's finished, they're going to crash it cause the funds aren't there to continue operating it. In Apollo 13, while capturing the pioneering spirit of the astronauts, they never put forth a compelling reason to go, other than the intense drive by the astronauts to stand on the moon. What will we find on Mars? Most likely more rocks. Few other bodies in the solar system would even allow a person to stand on them in a space suit, and the nearest solar system would be 200 years out, and holds no more promise of life than the other planets in our solar system. While I would love to explore, when Columbus sailed for the new world, there was at least the promise of solid land and air and food when he got there.
Despite what Star Trek says, we don't see that on the horizon.
In shear numbers you are right, but the technology advancements would actually make a difference.
The United States today could not get to the moon.
Why?
Have you seen the photos of the Apollo missions controls room? Full of white guys with crew cuts.
Todays mission would mandate that a certain percentage of the engineers, etc had to be classified as minority or female.
I’d far rather give American scientists and engineers a lot of money to do something that will inspire all mankind than to give (and keep on giving) a lot more money to “the disadvantaged” to do nothing.
“The ISS should be renamed the ASS. (Astronaut storage station) I realize it has some value but I’ve long since begun to doubt that it needs to be as large and expensive as it is.”
When I saw the shuttle for the first time in the late 70’s, I thought the same about it, what a boondoggle. It has done a few interesting things, but overall I think it has set us back. Maybe it and the space station have contributed to some science to assist in further maned exploration in the future, I don’t know. But we have played on low orbit long enough and it’s time to move on. I still think we’re spent up here in the US though. Maybe China will carry the torch now.
“I don’t know about the technology, but I don’t think we have the intelligence to do it safely nor do we have the drive to be explorers anymore. We’re too busy moving resources to the lazy, and that will be our downfall.”
We are a much different people now than the Americans of the 1960s. Instant gratification is a requirement. The public won’t stand for funding a program that would take years, and in cases, decades to yeild a result.
Young people aren’t willing to invest their time and effort for a result that isn’t guaranteed. Study, work hard, join the space program and maybe get a positive result? No way!
As we export our design and manufacturing jobs, we have fewer and fewer hard science and engineering students. Why would a youth study to be an electrical engineer when most of the design jobs are in Japan, India, and China?
Sure, we could import some engineers. Do you honestly think that someone who grew up in another country would feel the same dedication that the Americans in the 1960s space program felt? Nationalism.
We’ve lost our way. We couldn’t safely send someone to the moon and bring them back. And as America is currently constituted, it won’t be possible in the near future.
Watch as China or India steps into that role. The risk taker, the innovator, the prime mover with the drive and desire to get things done. The willingness to risk lives to expand the frontiers.
Sad, but that’s the reality I see.
Only disagreement I have is that the astronauts.... the whole team of engineers,scientists, and technicians that put men on the moon are NOT heroes. They had a job to do. They always looked at it like it was a job and that it should be done well. You want heroes? The guys who were at Normandy, the POWs, anyone who fought in Viet Nam, fire fighters, policemen. Those are real heroes. The astronauts are fine folks but they are not heroes ( and for the record I loved the moon program. We haven’t really had a space program in decades-— what we have had is a cost containment program)
Somebody posted this yesterday.
Whiteys on the moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5smPcN8AoE
if you listen closely you can hear loud and clear why we can’t do squat anymore. Its because there’s always someone else who thinks they deserve money more.
“We are also going to have to face facts. We are alone in this universe...”
By what reasoning do you come to this conclusion?
Yes. Three Gorges Dam.
or be allowed to even attempt such an endeavor today?
In the US? Are there any suitable sites left? If there are (I think the answer is "no"), though, the greenies would have a fit. And I'd be majorly annoyed too. We should be building nukes, not dams.
What is on the moon that we need to go back? Just stand there and go, “See, we did it”?
Since we are in the worst financial crisis this country has seen and it could even destroy this nation, I don’t think billions upon billions more being spent on putting another footprint on the moon is a wise idea.
If by “alone” you mean we have to take care of ourselves, fine. But if you mean it in some other way, I doubt our loneliness is a “fact”
You are wrong. You either know no history or you are very very young. NACA provided some of the ‘latest’ designs for our jets and fighters during the end of the second worl war. They offered innovation and technology throughout the Korean war ( oh yeah conflict). NACA which later became NASA had always had a strong component of military effort in the work. The ‘failures’ that you see footage of are rockets being tested for ICBM use. Yes JFK did want something for the US to ‘strive’ for -— it was feel good. The result was beyond your understanding. Do you use a microwave oven? Have you had any advanced medical imaging? Ever had a CAT scan, an MRI, anEKG? an EEG? The medical and technological advances that have become real products because we went to the moon are vast.
And ALL of that happened at the cost of less than 1 cent per every tax dollar paid.
By the time whitey got to the moon, hundreds of billions of white wealth had already been transferred to black folks.
45+ years down the line, that number has grown into the trillions.
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