Ingenuity

 

It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching.  The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial.  But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.

 They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room.  Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more. 

 They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.  Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.

 The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story.  A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer. 

 Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.      

 We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for.  So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed.  That diagram was as exciting as HD video.  It meant it happened.  The first cheer went up in the room.

 A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself.  There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs.  But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.

 So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way.  It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.

 Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits.  It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers.  None of them are coming back.  It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.

 This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future.  Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.

 Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.)  Moreover, the race is timed.  Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be.  And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.

 Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth.  (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.)  But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful.  And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight.  Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.

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.

What We Can't See Does Hurt Us

We  can't see CO2 or what it's doing to the thin layer of atmosphere that enables life as we know it on Earth.  But a NASA satellite has been looking back at the planet to study what its instruments can see.  Video with narration (and music) from NASA that shows the flow of carbon dioxide and other gases over the planet in a year.  National Geographic supplies some further explanation.

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.    

3 Stories of Today and the Future

Three important news stories of today illustrate likely features of the future as well as the present.

Two of these stories were widely reported.  The one that wasn't will likely be the most important, at least for what it portends.

That story was the release of a new study conducted by James Hansen, the most respected scientist in the world on the subject of the climate crisis.  It is a statistical study of recent summer heat waves.  Hansen previewed the findings in a Washington Post oped on Sunday: "Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change."

"Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide. When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe."

Hansen begins the oped with a confession: "When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic." 

"My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather."

Other climate scientists responded to the study Monday.  According to the AP story: The science in Hansen's study is excellent "and reframes the question," said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was a member of the Nobel Prize-winning international panel of climate scientists that issued a series of reports on global warming.

"Rather than say, 'Is this because of climate change?' That's the wrong question. What you can say is, 'How likely is this to have occurred with the absence of global warming?' It's so extraordinarily unlikely that it has to be due to global warming," Weaver said. 

Hansen ended his oped discussing the new present his research suggests, and the future:

 "This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution."

So this is the story that was ignored: a story about how a new reality has begun and human civilization is threatened.  It got more attention in 1988 when it was a dire warning that it does in 2012 when it is a dire description of the future's leading edge cutting into the present. This new normal of climate cataclysm will mean that life is going to change as it takes hold, and eventually change almost completely.  So it is too big, too complicated and in some ways too familiar to take in, even though a lot of  thoughtful action is required.

Instead the news media paid attention to other stories, because there are always other stories.  There's the latest outrages of the presidential campaign, and the latest Olympic winners, both surprises and coronations.  But mostly there were these two stories, and in their own way, they bear upon the climate crisis future.

The first was the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.  Ironically, Hansen is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and it was this amazing triumph of NASA that competed successfully with his study for media attention.  NASA has borne the brunt of criticism lately, for a lack of innovation, for an obsolete Shuttle fleet and nothing to replace it.  But this mission, in the works for a decade, engineered and deployed cutting edge technology in creatively designed and very daring combination to do something that has never been done--send a complex spacecraft to Mars and land a complex piece of engineering the size of a car on the Martian surface, exactly where it was supposed to land.  It is the greatest space achievement of the decade, perhaps longer.  No private corporation could have afforded to devote the manpower, the expertise and the time as well as the resources to such a feat.

As the climate crisis worsens and deepens, technology to fix the effects and stop the causes from wreaking fatal damage will become vital, essential.  And by sometime in the next century, even that may not be enough.  It may be then, or sooner, that humans look a great deal harder at the possibilities of survival in space.

But long before that, the climate crisis is likely to cause disruptions of a frequency and magnitude to challenge the social fabric, even in the U.S. which may well not bear the brunt of the physical changes, at least at first.  That's where the third story comes in.

The story about the attack of (apparently) a lone gunman on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, where he killed 6 people and then died himself in an exchange of gun fire with police.  The apparent shooter was a white separatist, and the FBI is treating the attack as domestic terrorism.

This act of violence would be more shocking had it not been preceded by a lot of racist and xenophobic talk in the political world, including by candidates and elected officials.  Indeed, the very little made of this connection in the aftermath testifies to its pervasiveness in establishment politics.

 This dark trend in America right now is happening when the economy is weak and when a lot of society is changing, including demographically.  Even this level of disquiet is roiling up violence, and there are plenty of guns and bullets out there to create havoc.  Yet today's dislocations--and today's tragedies-- may be minor compared to what is ahead due to the climate crisis.

So this is not a happy trend.  It suggests the apocalyptic visions of the future all too common in movies and novels these days--of social breakdown, violent gangs, a blasted landscape ruled by medieval warlords.  But there is more to this story in Wisconsin.

Because it is also the story of heroes, of ordinary people who sacrificed themselves automatically for others.  The story now is of Sikh Temple of Wisconsin president Satwant Singh Kaleka, who fought off the gunman to protect others, and paid with his life.  And of  Oak Creek Police Lt. Brian Murphy, critically wounded as he came to the aid of wounded victims.

There were similar stories told about the all-too-recent rampage in the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre, when ordinary people--who seconds before were just there to watch a movie--sacrificed themselves to protect others, and endangered themselves to help others.  Like Kaleka and Murphy, they have little in common but their humanity, and the sense that helping others is just something you do.  Maybe it is their version of the American way, or it's just the human way--the simple conviction that "you'd do the same for me."

That's the humanity that is our best hope in the times to come, when because of the failures of many politicians, the insidious blind selfishness of certain corporate leaders,  and the exploitable weaknesses of the rest of us, we have not addressed the climate crisis in time to stop it from causing severe consequences.  Ordinary people will have to deal with those consequences.  Some will go crazy with blame, some will go crazy with fear and the impulse of violence.  But some will do the right thing.  Many will depend on them to right the balance--will depend on their intelligence, competence and their commitment.

For I don't agree with James Hansen that we can "solve" the challenge, nor do I agree with Al Gore that we can "solve" the climate crisis.  You can't solve a challenge, or a crisis.  You can meet a challenge, you can address the causes and effects of a crisis.  There will be no complete solution.  There will just be lots of attempts to deal with the crisis, to meet the challenges, and those efforts will go on for decades.  They will be the substance of people's lives.  If things go well enough, they will be their careers--very exciting careers.  Or they will be their jobs--relentless jobs.  Nobody will be untouched by what's got its foot in the door.

Because this is Hansen's message.  It's human nature perhaps--or at least the media attention span--that when a warning has been issued since 1988, it isn't noticed when the warning starts to come true.  In effect, it's the boy crying wolf.  When the wolf isn't at the door immediately, the next warning gets discounted.  But people forget what happened in that story, what that story is about.  It's not about a boy who was prone to panic, who rushed to judgment when his data suggested something really bad might happen.  It's equally about the people who didn't listen.  Because the wolf came, and they weren't ready.

That's what Hansen is saying.  The wolf is here a little early.  But the wolf is here.      

Curiosity Has Landed

The Curiosity Rover--the size of a car--is safely on the surface of Mars, getting ready to begin two years of scientific research that may bring us closer to knowing whether there is or was life on Mars.  That's one of the first photos it sent back moments after landing--seeing its own shadow on the Martian surface.  

It was amazing to watch the Jet Propulsion Lab--"mission control"--while the spacecraft was making its complicated approach and landing.  On a day when life on Earth is not going so well, there really is something exciting and transcendent about feats like this, and the reality of such a venture on the surface of another world.      

The Space Shuttle Discovery hitchhiking on a NASA airplane made a beauty pass low over

Washington, DC yesterday (where, by the way, the temp has been near 90 this week.)   That's a building at the Smithsonian, which is Discovery's

ultimate destination. (Sort of.  They've moved the Air and Space Musuem out near Dulles airport.) Photo by Jeff Malet. 

I Touch the Future

Judith Resnik and Christa McAuliffe, Challenger astronauts

I was literally in the air, along the same U.S. East Coast, when Challenger fell from the sky. When I landed in Portland, Maine, I was met by grim faced strangers who told me. They were my hosts for a speaking engagement. By the time I was in my hotel room, the television was covering the story, and reflecting the shock. Even by 1986, a space shuttle flight was fairly routine. When my hosts told me "the shuttle" had exploded, at first I thought it was the New York-to-Washington airplane shuttle. I'm sure that only added to the shock. Something that was so normal now--yet still so dangerous. Yet in the hours and days that followed, we reflected again on the miracle of this, of humans exploring space, and of the kind of people who were taking up that challenge.

Today NASA marked 25 years since the January 28, 1986 loss of Challenger and its seven astronauts. Seven was the total number of the original astronauts of the Mercury program, several of whom would continue through Gemini and Apollo, and would make it to the moon. One of them, Virgil Grissom, the second American in space, died in the only previous fatal accident of the space program. But that had happened on the launch pad. The Challenger seven were the first to be lost in flight--though they hadn't even yet reached beyond the atmosphere. The disaster began little more than a minute after liftoff.

What America learned that week was how different this crew was from those original astronauts. The original seven had been military, fighter jocks and test pilots. They were all male and white. This crew had a pilot that fit that profile--Dick Scobee, flight captain. But it also had Judith Resnik, the second American woman and first Jewish American in space; Ronald McNair, the second African American; and Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian American in space.

And Christa McAuliffe, a civilian, the star of the mission as the "first teacher in space." She brought a lot of attention to this flight, and so a lot of school children were watching. For them and the many more who saw the footage later, this became one of those anchoring events of a lifetime. (Though there were and remain misconceptions about what happened and why.) It was worst for the children in her New Hampshire school, not all that far from Portland. This day has special meaning for them.

For awhile afterwards, Christa McAuliffe's sacrifice elevated the role of teacher in the national consciousness. Her words "I touch the future--I teach" became a bumper sticker, and are still famous and inspirational. They should be a national guide.

Earthrise: The Only Life We've Got

The most famous version of the Earthrise photo, taken by astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968, forty years ago today. It inspired a new awareness and concern for the fate of our home world, the only live planet in the solar system. All photos from NASA; click photo to enlarge.

The Only Life We've Got

Update: a version of this was on the Recommended list at Daily Kos. It was the third most recommended diary of the day.
It was exactly forty years ago, on Christmas Eve of 1968, when millions of Americans watched a television show live from the Moon. Three U.S. astronauts—Bill Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell were the first humans to go beyond Earth orbit and escape Earth’s gravitational influence, to circle another world.

They described the oppressive gray emptiness of the Moon’s surface below them, as viewers saw slowly rolling gray video images of what they were talking about. Then the astronauts read the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis, and sent holiday greetings to the people of “the good Earth.” More U.S. viewers watched this broadcast than any TV program of any kind before, and eventually an estimated one fourth of the world’s population saw it.

But the event of December 24, 1968 with the most lasting impact happened when no one was watching—when the astronauts were cut off from communication on the dark side of the Moon. They had been concentrating on the lunar surface, when Frank Borman caught a glimpse of color on the gray horizon, a conspicuous glow of blue and white against the black sky. It was the Earth. While he excitedly snapped photos in black and white, Bill Anders loaded his camera with color film, and got the shot that became historic. We know it as “Earthrise.”

According to Robert Poole’s fascinating new book, Earthrise: How We First Saw Ourselves (Yale University Press), the idea of photographing the Earth was foreign to NASA’s ethos and sense of the Apollo mission. NASA wasn’t interested in where the astronauts were coming from but in where were going: into space, to the Moon. Only the stubbornness of a few individuals, especially Apollo’s photography chief, Richard Underwood (who emerges as something of a hero in Poole’s book) led to the photos we do have.

The engineers and mission planners snubbed earth photos as “touristy snap shots,” and astronauts often didn’t see the point of them. Until they got out there. Then, as several admitted, seeing their home planet whole became the most memorable aspect of the voyage. In fact it was the Earth that made the impression from the start. “How beautiful our Earth is!” exclaimed Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space.


But it was the Earthrise photo that became a spectacularly popular image—splashed across magazine pages, and posterized for posterity and dorm room walls. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders later suggested that it caused people to “realize that we’re all jammed together on one really kind of dinky little planet, and we better treat it and ourselves better, or we’re not going to be here very long.”
[continued after photo]

Pollution visible from space, over Italy and China. NASA photos.

Forty years later, that Earth has changed. Twice as many people live on its surface. The pictures from space show more gray and brown in the white clouds—evidence of more widespread pollution. “The brilliant, clear photos were the Gemini photos of the mid-60s,” Richard Underwood observed. “The air pollution was a lot less then, and it shows.”

Some of the evidence of global heating is also obvious from space. Noting that the later and at least equally famous full-face “Blue Marble” photo taken from the Moon’s surface in December 1972 during the last Apollo mission showed the “relatively undeveloped southern hemisphere,” Poole points out that its view of the Antarctic in winter already looks different.

“Humankind now appears to be both the product and the custodian of the only island of intelligent life in the knowable universe,” Poole writes. “Whether that vision has been timely enough, and powerful enough, for homo sapiens, the most successful of all invasive species, to reverse its own devouring impact on the Earth, will probably become apparent before too long.”

The Blue Marble photo, taken in December 1972 from the surface of the Moon during the last Apollo mission. It is now the most familiar image on the planet.

Forty years later, the Apollo program (and its 11 missions, nine voyages to the Moon and six moon landings in just four years) seems like a dream. With budget cuts, management problems and controversies, unfunded missions and the planned end of the Space Shuttle, NASA faces an unpromising and uncertain future.

But even with the election of Barack Obama, a NASA supporter who recently suggested he wants to have “lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars,” there is a sense that NASA’s future is not only in exploring space, but in once again looking earthward.

In 1990, on the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, NASA announced its fifteen year program called “Mission to Planet Earth,” for earth observation satellites. That program suggests an opportunity for the future.

A recent essay by former NASA Johnson Space Center director George Abbey and former Clinton Science Advisor Neal Lane on “How to Save the U.S. Space Program” suggested that earth observations be restated as a top priority for NASA, and that coordination with other earth sciences agencies be strengthened.

One prominent reason for this mission is the Climate Crisis—a harrowing possibility known mostly by a few scientists and science-fiction writers in 1968, but now the most dangerous example of the planet’s life being seriously altered by human activity. As the federal government gets serious about addressing it, more detailed knowledge is needed about what’s actually going on in the atmosphere and on the planet’s surface. Some of that information is best gathered from space.

It’s a mission NASA is aware of, and may now be eager to take on. After all, America’s most respected scientist on the Climate Crisis (and next to Al Gore, the number one target for climate crisis deniers) is NASA’s own James A. Hansen. His own post-election statement minces no words: “Now our planet itself is in peril. Not simply the Earth, but the fate of all its species, including humanity.”
In an Orlando Sentinel oped endorsing Barack Obama for president, former astronaut Sally Ride cited his support for expanding NASA’s research capabilities “to study things like global warming…” But even under the recalcitrant Bush administration, NASA was already engaging in this work, with an upcoming mission specifically related to the Climate Crisis. Scheduled for January launch, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will be its first spacecraft dedicated to studying the chief greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. NASA satellites have also recently measured changes in Arctic sea ice and Alaskan glaciers.

The less famous black and white Earthrise image, taken by astronaut Frank Borman, also on December 24, 1968.

Many of the Apollo astronauts returned to Earth not only with a new interest in ecology, but with a sense of urgency. Gene Cernan, the last man to stand on the Moon, felt “My destiny was to be not only an explorer, but a messenger from outer space, an apostle for the future.” Michael Collins returned determined “that I would do all I could to let people know what wonderful home we have—before it is too late.” Edgar Mitchell thought about “beneath the blue and white atmosphere was a growing chaos…that population and conscienceless technology were growing rapidly way out of control.”

While universal peace and brotherhood did not immediately ensue after Apollo, Poole believes the Earthrise photo had important impact as a symbol for a new consciousness of the home planet that has changed attitudes, however slowly and subtly. It contributed to the power of new metaphors, from Spaceship Earth to Gaia, that guide our understanding and our resolve.

“The sight of the whole Earth, small, alive, and alone, caused scientific and philosophical thought to shift away from the assumption that the Earth was a fixed environment, unalterably given to humankind,” Poole concludes, “and towards a model of the Earth as an evolving environment, conditioned by life and alterable by human activity.”

Beginning with Earthrise, these images of the Earth from space have contributed to a more widespread sense of the Earth’s fragile status as the one known live world, and as the only Earth we’ve got. They contributed to the metaphors of Spaceship Earth and Gaia that guide our understanding and our resolve. But the urgency remains, and grows.

Though the Earth Blue Marble photo became even more iconic than the Apollo 8 image, there is a particular poignancy to Earthrise, because the planet is not all there. Some of it had not “risen” yet, but visually the missing portion suggests how fragile this life-bearing vessel is. Amidst the immense emptiness between the far-flung fires of stars, it could just as easily be setting, or dissolving life by life, leaving only another gray globe in the cold and darkness.

It’s up to us. We are the future we have been waiting for.