On the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s tempting to
emulate William F. Buckley, who was asked how he would describe
the event. “With silence,” Buckley said. This defining human
achievement soon had the effect of making such awe harder to come
by. Those who grew up after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar
surface viewed walking on the moon as an accepted fact of life,
and it quickly became absorbed into an age of wonders. It’s said
we’re a postmodern culture, but it might be more accurate now to
call us post-Apollo. The bar was set so high and so far that a
generation came of age effectively shrugging its shoulders, as if
its answer to the question “How do you top that?” was, “Don’t
even try.”
If one is not going to take Buckley’s vow of silence, though, he
can start almost anywhere in taking stock of what half a billion
people saw on July 20, 1969. It’s worth remembering that the feat
was the fulfillment of millennia of human imagination. Today,
we’re more accustomed to breaking through obstacles in a matter
of years or decades. Consider that the Human Genome Project was
organized in 1990 and completed its work in 2003. Often the
ambition never even enters the public mind, things are moving so
fast. People weren’t crying out for cell phones or writing poetry
imagining their invention. They just arrived. Many technological
advances today have that after-the-fact quality to them. Only
later do we note how, in ways big or small, the new things have
changed us.
Apollo, what Tom Wolfe calls
“the greatest crash program of all time,” made a remarkable,
decade-long sprint to meet the goal set by President John F.
Kennedy to place a man on the moon before the decade was out. It
had public support and it operated under the supreme pressures of
the fixed timeline and the threatening competitor. The mission
was inseparable from Cold War politics, as Kennedy made
clear to his NASA head, James Webb, in a 1962 meeting.
“Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto
the Moon ahead of the Russians,” Kennedy said. He warned Webb
that “otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money
because I’m not that interested in space.” It showed just how far
Kennedy was, for anyone who still doesn’t know, from his
romantic, Camelot image. But Kennedy’s executive vision was
impressive.
We should also note the courage and skill of the Apollo 11
astronauts — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins,
and those who came before and after them. Their professionalism
was never more in evidence than when Armstrong
improvised the lunar module’s landing when he saw that the
designated landing spot was rife with boulders. After the
successful touch-down, Aldrin asked each viewer to “pause for a
moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to
give thanks in his or her own way.” (NASA was then fighting a
lawsuit from atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who objected
to the Apollo 8 crew’s reading from Genesis in space.) Then,
privately, Aldrin, an elder at a Presbyterian church, gave
himself communion. When
it was time to depart, Aldrin, as unflappable as
Armstrong, noticed that he’d accidentally broken the circuit
breaker that would start the main engine. Somehow, he had a felt
tip pen handy, and used it to activate the switch.
It’s striking to read the immediate news accounts of the 1969
landing, not only for their sense of wonder but for their
assumption that the moon was just the beginning. This was best
captured by the title of an article in Time: “Next, Mars
and Beyond.” Wernher von Braun felt that we could make it to Mars
“as early as 1982.” But instead of starting that push, after the
Apollo program concluded in 1972, the U.S. space program
downshifted. Wolfe points out that NASA’s budget plummeted 40
percent from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, from $5
billion to $3 billion. The focus since the moon landing has been
on “orbital” flights, exemplified by the space shuttle, that fly
around the heavens. Many have criticized the nation’s loss of
interest in space generally, and manned flights in particular,
after Apollo. It’s another sign of our decline, they say. We
should have reached Mars long before now.
Maybe. For all of the laments, though, it’s hard to see how such
complacency could have been avoided after the great moon shot. It
seems inevitable that we would lose interest in space, at least
for a time; inevitable that we would find the moon landing
ho-hum, and blanch at the staggering costs of an ongoing space
program; inevitable that we would turn inward again, after the
most outward-looking of feats. Even a society not fraught with
crises of faith, social order, and history would probably have
felt the same spiritual deflation. It’s an existential problem
more than a cultural one, though we’ve done a good job, with our
culture, of making it worse. We won’t solve the mysteries of
morale and imagination any more than we’ll solve the mysteries of
good and evil.
But the American sense of urgency about space hasn’t quite died.
In 2004, President Bush released his Vision
for Space Exploration, which calls for a return to the moon
in 2020 as the springboard for manned trips to Mars. The current
NASA administrator has set
2037 as a target date for landing on Mars, but the European
Space Agency seems determined to get there a few
years earlier. Assuming these projections are realistic —
and I doubt one in ten people knows the first thing about them —
it will be interesting to see if American political leaders feel
any compulsion to push the timelines. It’s hard to imagine men
like Kennedy and the leaders of the Apollo program allowing
another power to beat us out by just a few years. They would stay
up late and find some way to move into the lead.
But then, they were part of an era whose goals and convictions
seem increasingly remote. The Times’s A.O. Scott
describes the “absence of feeling, the dearth of meaning,
that accompanied the widespread awe and wonder” of the moon
landing, and though he overstates, the outlook he describes has
tended to predominate in the generation since. It’s in our books
and movies and politics, and it’s helped short-circuit our
efforts on Earth as well as outer space. We seem more comfortable
today with ironic self-awareness, which has its virtues but
insulates us from the hard choices great ambition demands.
Self-criticism and rocket propulsion rely on different sources of
energy.
I hope we do make it to Mars by 2037, or before. I hope we’re
first, and that I’m around to see it. There will be plenty of
time for irony then, but only if we get there.
