The race to the moon was simply a Cold War
battle; once Armstrong took that “one small step for a man,” and
we’d vanquished the Russians, there was little national stomach for
making the massive investment necessary to fulfill Werner Von Braun’s
vision of a mission to Mars, says Tom Wolfe on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Wolfe, the icon of New Journalism and author of The Right Stuff. writing in today’s New York Times, argues that Neil Armstrong’s step onto the moon was “One Giant Leap to Nowhere:”
“Well, let's see now … That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA.
“The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add ‘godlike’? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11's Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.
“It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority.
“Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11. I even dared to dream of writing a book about them someday. If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong's small step plus mankind's big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity. Poor guy's bucket's got a hole in it.”
Wolfe’s main point was The race to the moon was simply a Cold War battle, that once Armstrong took that “one small step for a man,” and we’d vanquished the Russians, there was little national stomach for making the massive investment necessary to fulfill Werner Von Braun’s vision of a mission to Mars. “How could such a thing happen? Wolfe asks rhetorically. “In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers” who could and would evangelize about the overarching value of such an investment.
Stephen Hawking, our century’s Einstein, sees things differently than Wolfe. Hawking discussed his views
on the profound significance of the mission on mankind in the
introduction the to a just-published book Apollo Through the Eyes of the Astronauts, which he co-wrote with his daughter, Lucy, a journalist and author.
“In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492,”
Hawking writes. “People might well have argued that it was a waste of
money to send Christopher Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the
discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old.
Sending humans to the moon may yet prove to have had an even greater
effect. It changed the future of the human race in ways that we don't
yet understand and may have determined whether we have any future at
all. It hasn't solved any of our immediate problems on planet Earth,
but it has given us new perspectives on them and caused us to look both
outward and inward.”
While most of us might not have guessed we would not return to the
moon after our last landing in 1972 until perhaps 2020, we should have
guessed that human space exploration is inordinately costly and far
more dangerous than we were led to believe by the initial successes of
the Apollo missions.
Although fuel costs are another reason why
it is so much cheaper to send unmanned missions into space, the chief
obstacle against human travel to Mars is simply cosmic radiation.
During the 18 months or so to do the round trip journey a lethal dose
of radiation is likely to be received.
“Robotic missions are much
cheaper and gather important scientific data,” Hawking says, “but they
don't spread the human race into space, which should be our long-term
strategy. If one is considering the future of humanity, we have to
visit other worlds ourselves. Exploring other worlds won't be cheap,
but it will take only a tiny proportion of this world's resources.”
Hawking
sees space exploration as critical to the human species long -term
survival: “What's next?” he asks: “Can we exist for a long time away
from Earth? The International Space Station proves that it is possible
for human beings to survive for many months away from planet Earth. Any
long-term base for human beings, however, will probably need to be on a
planet or moon, where subsurface enclosures can provide explorers with
thermal insulation and protection from meteors and cosmic rays, and the
raw materials that are necessary to create self-sustaining
extraterrestrial communities can be found.”
Hawking sees he moon becoming a base for travel to the rest of the solar system. “Mars
is the obvious next target,: he adds. “It is half as far from Earth as
Earth is from the sun and so receives half the warmth. Its magnetic
field decayed four billion years ago, stripping the Red Planet of most
of its atmosphere, making it impossible for liquid surface water to
exist. However, the atmospheric pressure must have been higher in the
past because we see what appear to be runoff channels and dry lakebeds.
This suggests that Mars had a warm, wet period during which life might
have appeared. There is no sign of life on Mars now, but if we found
evidence that life had once existed there, we would know that the
probability of life developing on a suitable planet was fairly high
throughout the universe.”
Ultimately our destiny will take us
beyond our Solar System. “There are approximately a thousand stars
within thirty light years of Earth,’ Hawking states. “If 1 percent of
each had Earth-size planets in a Goldilocks Zone, we would have ten
candidate new worlds. We cannot reach them with current technology but
we should make interstellar exploration a long-term aim. By long term,
we mean over the next two hundred to five hundred years, and by
exploration, we mean with humans.”
Hawking sums up saying that
the human race has “existed as a separate species for about two million
years. Civilization began about ten thousand years ago, and the rate of
scientific and technological development has been steadily
increasing.” If we are to survive for another million years, “we will
have to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
This past year also saw the 40th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
a realistic and beautifully crafted version of Arthur C. Clarke's
vision of a future in which humans would travel throughout the solar
system in search of both our origins and our future -a vision of a future shared by one of our species greatest minds.
The enduring legacy of the Apollo 11 landings is the ultimate reality show: the life or death future of the human species.
Posted by Casey Kazan
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19wolfe.html?_r=1
NASA: Apollo Through the Eyes of the Astronauts
Related Galaxy posts:
Stephen Hawking: “Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution”
Stephen Hawking: “Asteroid Impacts Biggest Threat to Intelligent Life in the Galaxy”
Source: http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/07/15/07_15_09_appolo_11/?page=2
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