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Like millions of Americans, I can remember exactly where
I was and what I was doing when Neil Armstrong took that
giant leap for mankind
40 years ago. I was was
drinking beer and watching TV at the Offbeat, a 3.2 joint
in Glendale.
Martha and I were newlyweds, living in a $60-a-month apartment on Capitol Hill. She waited tables at the Offbeat at nights. I worked days as a washman in an industrial laundry. Despite our two-income status, we couldn't afford our own TV set, so I went to the bar to see the big event.
Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface. Everybody cheered. Then the conversation turned to the current scandal: the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne two days earlier while riding in a car driven by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
To judge from much of the commentary I've read this week, that's a microcosm of American reaction in general. Here we did this big, bold thing, and after a few more Apollo missions (the last one was in 1972), we turned our backs on outer space.
But the Apollo mission was not really designed for the advancement of science or the orderly exploration of the solar system.
Those were Cold War days. The Soviet Union had scored a major propaganda triumph with Sputnik in 1957, followed by a month later by Laika the orbiting dog, then Yuri Gagarrin's orbits on April 12, 1961. Soviet technology looked quite impressive.
This worried President John F. Kennedy, who asked our
space experts to come up with some project that would be
impressive and be something we could do before the
Communists did it. A manned moon landing fit the bill, and
so on May 25, 1961, Kennedy announced that this nation
should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this
decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning
him safely to the Earth.
The moon landing in 1969 was a major accomplishment,
although President Richard M. Nixon might have gone over
the top when he called it the greatest week in the
history of the world since Creation.
And it appears that it succeeded in its real goal -- convincing people in India and Indonesia and elsewhere in the world that free-enterprise America could outdo the socialist Soviets. (That Apollo was a tax-funded project run by government bureaucrats, rather than private enterprise, was not emphasized.)
We did, after all, win the Cold War, and the last piece of impressive Soviet technology I can remember was an addictive time-eating computer game called Tetris.
But have we really turned our backs on outer space since the moon landing?
Nowadays I can afford a TV set, and it gets its signal from outer space, beamed to a small parabolic dish on my roof. When I watch weather forecasts, often I see images of storm systems as viewed from outer space, and the news often has stories transmitted via satellite uplink. And men don't have to not ask for directions any more, thanks to portable GPS locators that rely on satellites.
Astronauts just had to fix a toilet (doesn't that always happen when you've got company?) on the International Space Station, where the Space Shuttle crew had arrived last week with new parts.
We delighted in the pictures sent back by the plucky little Mars Rovers in 2003. The Magellan space probe of 1994 gave us images of the hidden surface of Venus. The Galileo probe explored the moons and atmosphere of Jupiter. The Cassini probe, launched more than a decade ago, is still providing details about Saturn and its rings and moons.
Meanwhile back on Earth, the latest affectation of the super-rich is to buy $35 million seats on Russian spacecraft (quite a triumph for capitalism), and some do-gooders are upset about NASA's plan to learn more about the moon's composition by bombing it this fall.
So we haven't turned our backs on space. We've been busy exploring it and using it. We just quit sending people to the moon, that's all.
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