Fifty years ago today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and declared that the nation should, within that decade of the sixties, send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth. NASA, up until then just the old National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) extended to space technology, has never been the same since. The rush, lunar goal, and unlimited budgets transformed the agency, and while it accomplished the Cold-War goal of getting to the moon, it utterly failed in the promise that so many thought had been made in the sixties — to open up space. I expand on this theme — that Apollo got human spaceflight activities off on the wrong foot — in an essay over at Pajamas Media today.
I’m not alone in that view. The “Lexington” column on America in this week’s issue of The Economist, also points out the incongruity of how we attempted to conquer space:
That may be why subsequent efforts to transfer the same fixity of purpose to broader spheres of peacetime endeavour have fallen short. If we can send a man to the moon, people ask, why can’t we [fill in the blank]? Lyndon Johnson tried to build a “great society”, but America is better at aeronautical engineering than social engineering. Mr Obama, pointing to competition from China, invokes a new “Sputnik moment” to justify bigger public investment in technology and infrastructure. It should not be a surprise that his appeals have gone unheeded. Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American—almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.
On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first landing, I described how the project warped our perceptions of both how to do space and its implications for our other societal capabilities:
But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.
As I say there, if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we get people to stop making bad analogies with putting men on the moon? But on this anniversary, a more poignant plea is, if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon? We did, after all, have a plan to do so until Constellation was canceled last year. But there was a good reason it died — it was an attempt to repeat Apollo (quite literally — NASA administrator Mike Griffin described it as “Apollo on steroids” when he rolled it out over five years ago– a phrase he no doubt came to regret). The problem was, it was happening without either the urgency or the budget of that project. As planetary scientist Paul Spudis points out at Smithsonian Air and Space magazine, the real problem is that we have never figured out as a nation why we have a space program:
It would be nice to have, for the first time since that historic announcement, a national discussion of why we have a human spaceflight program. The Augustine panel attempted to establish one a couple years ago, when it pointed out that if we don’t plan to settle space with humanity, there is little point to sending anyone there. But no one seemed to pick up on it, and it became lost in the hysterical reaction to the inevitable cancellation of the unaffordable and ill-conceived Constellation program, driven by a combination of concern about industry job losses and a misplaced and misunderstood sixties nostalgia.
This fiftieth anniversary would be an excellent time to make another attempt at it, but if history is any guide, we will let the opportunity pass once again. But fortunately, as the new space entrepreneurs make more and more visible progress in reducing costs and offering exciting new services for all of us, and not just a select few government employees, it may not matter. Half a century after the false start, Americans will start to seek their own space dreams.
