Going Out to Look In

Fifty years ago today, a human being first set foot on another world. Some 600 million people on Earth were watching and listening as Neil Armstrong descended to the surface of the Moon from the Apollo 11 lunar lander, saying (in words slightly obscured by static) "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Those of us who were alive and old enough usually remember where we were. I was visiting Colorado, and had spent the afternoon in a car winding through the dry bare mountains near Denver, which seemed to me as desolate as a moonscape. Kathi, the driver, and my girlfriend Joni were from Denver and we were seeing the sights, but I remember this landscape (and possibly the thin air that I wasn't used to) just made me despondent.

A few hours later we were in the basement rec room of Kathi's parents' house as we watched the ghostly image of Armstrong on the Moon. I felt it--that I was watching in real time an extraordinary moment in human history. At the same time, that indistinct black and white image was a little like watching Captain Video on an early black and white television set when I was five or six.

Nichelle Nichols, Neil Armstrong
and Majel Roddenberry

Years later the worlds of science fiction and factual history collided again for me at a Star Trek convention dinner. I stopped to speak to Nichelle Nichols at a table in the darkened ballroom when she said she wanted to introduce me to someone. From the seat next to her up popped a man in a suit holding out his hand--it was Neil Armstrong. I shook the hand of the first human to really touch another world.

Well into the 1950s the prevailing public view was that the idea of rocketing humans into space was childish fantasy, which no sane adult could afford to believe and remain reputable.  Then when it began to happen in 1961, all kinds of vistas seemed to open, along with all sorts of fears.  In the US, the manned space program really caught the public imagination.

The Apollo program to deliver humans to the moon was perhaps the last great public enterprise to engage government, private businesses and the public in a large common endeavor, although it was still fairly limited.  There was a feeling of common purpose that permeated the program and extended to the media.  The story of humans in space, of humanity on the Moon, was so powerful and inspiring that it often overrode selfishness and spin.

Between 1962 and 1972 there were a lot of manned space flights, and a lot of firsts--the first American in space, the first to orbit, the first woman (Russian), the first two-person mission, first spacewalk, etc.  Then the first manned spaceship to orbit the moon, which focused immense global attention.  Finally the first landing and the first humans to step onto the Moon's surface.

The last human on the Moon, so far...

There were more moon landings over the next three years, while the public gradually stopped paying much attention.  Eugene Cernan climbed back aboard his moon lander in December 1972.  He is until this day, more than 46 years later, the last human to walk on another world.

 When asked what surprised him about the space program, eminent science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke said that it was that humans would get into space, and then stop.

This year, science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson published Red Moon, which posits that humans are going regularly to the Moon in 2047, and most of them are Chinese.  Despite noise out of Washington, that seems the most likely possibility.

He uses the decades-old experiences to describe what being on the Moon might actually be like.  He's especially good on the persistent complications of lower gravity, and on the intensity of the deeply black-and- brightly white contrasts of the surface.

Much of the action of the book, however, is driven by political developments on Earth, which also seems likely. The US and Soviet space programs were driven financially by Cold War politics.  But then, many if not most scientific discoveries and endeavors in history were driven either by military ambitions or commercial interests.  Apollo was not untainted, but it was as close to furthering an ideal of a united humankind and a common enterprise as any so far.

In interviews as well as his fictions, Robinson suggests that the possibilities for humans in space needs major revisions from the hopes of the 1960s, or even the dreams of some present day promoters. Yes, humans will return to the Moon and probably get to Mars, he suggests, but their habitation will remain on a small scale, basically like scientific outposts in Antarctica.  The chances of large settlements, let alone "terraforming" other planets are remote at best.

As for exoplanets beyond our solar system, even if humans were to develop the means of reaching them, they would face what essentially is the reversal of what H.G. Wells Martians experienced when they tried to invade Earth in The War of the Worlds, and Terran microbes killed them.  If another world is lifeless, humans can't survive there long enough to create conditions for life, and get it started.  If another world has life, it is likely to be lethal to humans on the microbial level.  Not to mention the likelihood that the environment of the Earth is the only one that will sustain the collection of organisms we call the human body.  Or as KSR (among others) repeats: There is no Planet B.  Humans will have to unite their efforts on their own world, or not at all.

The enduring images from the Apollo program are not of the Moon but of Earth--the images known as Earthrise and The Blue Marble. Humans have continued to go into space in low Earth orbit, and have recorded visible increases in pollution, witnessed huge storms and fires. Many have been most deeply impressed by the beauty, fragility and rarity of our planet seen from space.   Perhaps this inward look from space is the most important.

One Small Step

Forty-five years ago today, a human being first set foot on another world.  Some 600 million people on Earth were watching and listening as Neil Armstrong descended to the surface of the Moon from the Apollo 11 lunar lander, saying (in words slightly obscured by static) "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Those of us who were alive and old enough usually remember where we were.  I was visiting Colorado, and had spent the afternoon in a car winding through the dry bare mountains near Denver, which seemed to me as desolate as a moonscape.  Kathi, the driver, and my girlfriend Joni were from Denver and we were seeing the sights, but I remember this landscape (and possibly the thin air that I wasn't used to) just made me despondent.

A few hours later we were in the basement rec room of Kathi's parents' house as we watched the ghostly image of Armstrong on the Moon.  I felt it--that I was watching in real time an extraordinary moment in human history.  At the same time, that indistinct black and white image was a little like watching Captain Video on an early black and white television set when I was five or six.

Years later the worlds of science fiction and factual history collided again at a Star Trek convention dinner.  I stopped to speak to Nichelle Nichols at a table in the darkened ballroom when she said she wanted to introduce me to someone. From the seat next to her up popped a man in a suit holding out his hand--it was Neil Armstrong.  I shook the hand of the first human to really touch another world.

Earlier in this 45th anniversary year, MIT Press published Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek.  I liked everything about this book except the title, which suggests a conscious and coordinated campaign of hype and spin.  The book's contents tell a different story.  Though NASA and the major corporations involved in this titanic effort all had public relations and marketing people, NASA set the standard by insisting that the media be given full factual information.  There was plenty of hoopla surrounding the astronauts in particular, but a lot of that was generated by media responding to the burst of public interest that caught everyone by surprise.

As this book says (and other sources affirm), well into the 1950s the idea of rocketing humans into space was considered to be science fiction fantasy, believed only by children.  The Eisenhower administration itself was skeptical, though the U.S. government was confident that its plans to send a satellite into orbit as part of the 1957-8 International Geophysical Year would be the first such endeavor.

But early in the 50s, some magazine articles accompanied by dramatic cover art in Colliers plus the 3 Walt Disney programs beginning with "Man in Space" stirred some public interest.  Then came the shock of Soviet space firsts--the first satellite (Sputnik), the first live animal, the first man and the first woman in Earth orbit.  Humans in space was no longer a fantasy.

After a few disasters (including at least one on live TV), the U.S. Army and Navy succeeded in getting satellites up.  The civilian agency NASA was created, and suddenly the astronauts became heroic celebrities. After two sub-orbital flights, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.  Shortly afterwards, President John F. Kennedy issued his famous challenge: to land a man on the Moon and return him safely before the end of the 1960s.

After a string of successful one-person flights (the Mercury program) and two-person orbits mostly testing procedures and equipment for the moon shot (Gemini), the Apollo program began with an horrific tragedy: during a ground test, a fire aboard the crew capsule killed three astronauts, including the second American in space, Virgil Grissom.  After months of reappraisal and redesign, Apollo flights began and continued at a pretty rapid clip that kept the astronauts in the news and built to the moment of Apollo 11.

But for the next 6 Apollo flights, public interest dropped gradually and then precipitously.  "Few people alive on December 14, 1972, can tell you where they were on that day," this book notes.  But it was the day that the last humans to ever go there left the moon.  No one has been back since.

This book continues examining the coverage and marketing efforts after Apollo 11 and speculates on why interest dropped so far so fast.  Television coverage of the space program increased network news prestige--particularly CBS--but lost money, so after Armstrong it was cut back severely.  Other factors are suggested, notably that the goal of landing an American on the moon was basically Cold War competition with the Soviets, and after Apollo 11, it was game over, the home team won.

The authors also note how much else was going on to absorb public attention, and having lived through those years, that's certainly pertinent: the Vietnam war and associated actions in Southeast Asia, antiwar demonstrations, racial unrest, Kent State, the 1972 presidential campaign and the first Watergate stories were all happening between Apollo 11 and 17.

The book repeats assertions that the rise of the environmental movement in those years--partly inspired not at all ironically by the now iconic views of Earth in space, and the "earthrise" photos from the moon taken by Apollo astronauts--diverted attention from out there.

I recall all of these factors as at least partially true.  But there was also the relentless pace of U.S. space flights.  I saw them all on TV, from Explorer and Vanguard in 1958 through the Apollo shots more than a decade later.  I don't think people were totally fixated on the winning the space race aspect, but nobody could sustain excitement and the same keen interest for all those events.  Rockets to space were getting to be a regular thing.

Also, NASA had apparently concentrated so hard on getting humans to the Moon that they didn't come up with much for them to do there that was interesting, such as scientific exploration and experiments that could be communicated in an involving and exciting way.

This book does an admirable job of chronicling how NASA and the institutions involved got the information out, and how the media went about covering the stories.  There was a marketing concern, since it was felt that public interest would encourage Congress to keep funding the space program, but there were also concerns to keep commercialism from tainting the patriotic effort, leading to a shifting dance on what corporations could and couldn't do to publicize their part of the space program.  (Apart from major contractors, the winner on becoming identified with the astronauts was clearly Tang.  If you were there, you know what I'm talking about.)

This is a large format "coffee-table" book with lots of photos and sidebars.  Written by two public relations professionals, it not only tells the public information story but features enough documentary information (including transcripts of key Apollo moments) to be a good resource on the space program itself.  It seems to fulfill the NASA ideal of being as objective and complete as possible.  Though this was supposedly the Mad Men era, this book affirms that there really was a feeling of common purpose that permeated the space program and extended to the media.  The story of humans in space, of humanity on the Moon, was so powerful and inspiring that it often overrode selfishness and spin.

Today we know how many things went wrong as the Eagle was trying to land on July 20, 1969.  But somehow it did land, and that moment inspires awe even today.  Perhaps even more so, since such a voyage has returned to the realm of fantasy, only with better visual effects.