The Apollo program is really about politics, others told me. This sounded more promising. Nonaligned nations would be tempted to drift toward the Soviet Union if it was ahead in space exploration, if the United States showed insufficient "national vigor." I didn't follow. Here was the United States, ahead of the Soviet Union in virtually every area of technology—the world's economic, military, and, on occasion, even moral leader—and Indonesia would go Communist because Yuri Gagarin beat John Glenn to Earth orbit? What's so special about space technology? Suddenly I understood.
Sending people to orbit the Earth or robots to orbit the Sun requires rockets—big, reliable, powerful rockets. Those same rockets can be used for nuclear war. The same technology that transports a man to the Moon can carry nuclear warheads halfway around the world. The same technology that puts an astronomer and a telescope in Earth orbit can also put up a laser "battle station." Even back then, there was fanciful talk in military circles, East and West, about space as the new "high ground," about the nation that "controlled" space "controlling" the Earth. Of course strategic rockets were already being tested on Earth. But heaving a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead into a target zone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't buy much glory. Sending people into space captures the attention and Imagination of the world.
You wouldn't spend the money to launch astronauts for this reason alone, but of all the ways of demonstrating rocket potency, this one works best. It was a rite of national manhood; the shape of the boosters made this point readily understood without anyone actually having to explain it. The communication seemed to be transmitted from unconscious mind to unconscious mind without the higher mental faculties catching a whiff of what was going on.
My colleagues today—struggling for every space science dollar—may have forgotten how easy it was to get money for "space" in the glory days of Apollo and just before. Of many examples, consider this exchange before the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House of Representatives in 1958, only a few months after Sputnik 1. Air Force Assistant Secretary Richard E. Horner is testifying; his interlocutor is Rep. Daniel J. Flood (Democrat of Pennsylvania):
HORNER: [W]hy is it desirable from the military point of view to have a man on the moon? Partly, from the classic point of view, because it is there. Partly because we might be afraid that the U.S.S.R. might get one there first and realize advantages which we had not anticipated existed there . . .
FLOOD: [I]f we gave you all the money you said was necessary, regardless of how much it was, can you in the Air Force hit the moon with something, anything, before Christmas?
HORNER: I feel sure we can. There is always a certain amount of risk in this kind of undertaking, but we feel that we can do that; yes, sir.
FLOOD: Have you asked anybody in the Air Force or the Department of Defense to give you enough money,
hardware, and people, starting at midnight tonight, to chip a. piece out of that ball of green cheese for a Christmas present to Uncle Sam? Have you asked for that?
HORNER: We have submitted such a program to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It is currently under consideration.
FLOOD: I am for giving it to them as of this minute, Mr. Chairman, with our supplemental, without waiting for somebody downtown to make up his mind to ask for it. If this man means what he says and if he knows what he is talking about—and I think he does—then this committee should not wait five minutes more today. We should give him all the money and all the hardware and all the people he wants, regardless of what anybody else says or wants, and tell him to go up on top of some hill and do it without any question.
When President Kennedy formulated the Apollo program, the Defense Department had a slew of space projects under development—ways of carrying military personnel up into space, means of conveying them around the Earth, robot weapons on orbiting platforms intended to shoot down satellites and ballistic missiles of other nations. Apollo supplanted these programs. They never reached operational status. A case can be made then that Apollo served another purpose—to move the U.S.—Soviet space competition from a military to a civilian arena. There are some who believe that Kennedy intended Apollo as a substitute for an anus race in space. Maybe.
For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the Moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all mankind." As the United States was dropping 7? megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. That plaque is there still, attached to the base of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, on the airless desolation of the Sea of Tranquility. If no one disturbs it, it will still be readable a million years from now.
Six more missions followed Apollo 11, all but one of which successfully landed on the lunar surface. Apollo 17 was the first to carry a scientist. As soon as he got there, the program was canceled. The first scientist and the last human to land on the Moon were the same person. The program had already served its purpose that July night in 1969. The half-dozen subsequent missions were just momentum.
Apollo was not mainly about science. It was not even mainly about space. Apollo was about ideological confrontation and nuclear war—often described by such euphemisms as world "leadership" and national "prestige." Nevertheless, good space science was done. We now know much more about the composition, age, and history of the Moon and the origin of the lunar landforms. We have made progress in understanding where the Moon came from. Some of us have used lunar cratering statistics to better understand the Earth at the time of the origin of life. But more important than any of this, Apollo provided an aegis, an umbrella under which brilliantly engineered robot spacecraft were dispatched throughout the Solar System, making that preliminary reconnaissance of dozens of worlds. The offspring of Apollo have now reached the planetary frontiers.
If not for Apollo—and, therefore, if not for the political purpose it served—I doubt whether the historic American expeditions of exploration and discovery throughout the Solar System would have occurred, The Mariners, Vikings, Pioneers, Voyagers ,and Galileo are among the gifts of Apollo. Magellan and Cassini are more distant descendants. Something similar is true for the pioneering Soviet efforts in Solar System exploration, including the first soft landings of robot spacecraft—Luna 9, Mars 3, Venera 8-on other worlds.
Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy, and breadth of vision that did capture the imagination of the world. That too was part of its purpose. It inspired an optimism about technology, an enthusiasm for the future. If we could fly to the Moon, as so many have asked, what else were we capable of? Even those who opposed the policies and actions of the United States—even those who thought the worst of us—acknowledged the genius and heroism of the Apollo program. With Apollo, the United States touched greatness.
When you pack your bags for a big trip, you never know what's in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their way to and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw. For the first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see their world from above—the whole Earth, the Earth in color, the Earth as an exquisite spinning white and blue ball set against the vast darkness of space. Those images helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness. They provide incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet. They remind us of what is important and what is not. They were the harbingers of Voyager's pale blue dot.
We may have found that perspective just in time, just as our technology threatens the habitability of our world. Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for of survival.
Travel is broadening.
It's time to hit the road again.
CHAPTER 14 EXPLORING OTHER WORLDS AND PROTECTING THIS ONE
The planets, in their various stages of development, are subjected to the same formative forces that operate on our earth, and have, therefore, the same geologic formation, and probably life, of our own past, and perhaps future; but. further than this, these forces are acting, in some cases, under totally different conditions from those under which they operate on the earth, and hence must evolve forms different from those ever known to man. The value of such material as this to the comparative sciences is too obvious to need discussion.
—ROBERT H. GODDARD, NOTEBOOK (1907)
For the first time in my life, I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light-our atmosphere. Obviously, this was not the "ocean" of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.
—ULF MERBOLD, GERMAN SPACE SHUTTLE ASTRONAUT (1988)
When you look down at the Earth from orbital altitudes, you see a lovely, fragile world embedded in black vacuum. But peering at a piece of the Earth through a spacecraft porthole is nothing like the joy of seeing it entire against the backdrop of black, or—better—sweeping across your field of view as you float in space unencumbered by a spacecraft. The first human to have this experience was Alexei Leonov, who on March 18, 1965, left Voskhod 2 in the original space "walk": "I looked down at the Earth," he recalls, "and the first thought that crossed my mind was `The world is round, after all.' In one glance I could see from Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea . . . I felt like a bird—with wings, and able to fly."
When you view the Earth from farther away, as the Apollo astronauts did, it shrinks in apparent size, until nothing but a little geography remains. You're struck by how self-contained it is. An occasional hydrogen atom leaves; a pitter-patter of cometary dust arrives. Sunlight, generated in the immense, silent thermonuclear engine deep in the solar interior, pours out of the Sun in all directions, and the Earth intercepts enough of it to provide a little illumination and enough heat for our modest purposes. Apart from that, this small world is on its own.
From the surface of the Moon you can see it, perhaps as a crescent, even its continents now indistinct. And from the vantage point of the outermost planet it is a mere point of pale light.
From Earth orbit, you are struck by the tender blue arc of the horizon—the Earth's thin atmosphere seen tangentially. You can understand why there is no longer such a thing as a local environmental problem. Molecules are stupid. Industrial poisons, greenhouse gases, and substances that attack the protective ozone layer, because of their abysmal ignorance, do not respect borders. They are oblivious of the notion of national sovereignty. And so, due to the almost mythic powers of our technology (and the prevalence of short-term thinking), we are beginning—on Continental and on planetary scales—to pose a danger to ourselves. Plainly, if these problems are to be solved, it will require many nations acting in concert over many years.
I'm struck again by the irony that spaceflight—conceived in tile cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds—brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.
If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then—like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth—our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. We gain a new understanding, foreseen by the spaceflight pioneer Robert Goddard, called comparative planetology.
The exploration of other worlds has opened our eyes in the study of volcanos, earthquakes, and weather. It may one day have profound implications for biology, because all life on Earth is built on a common biochemical master plan. The discovery of a single extraterrestrial organism—even something as humble as a bacterium—would revolutionize our understanding of living things. But the connection between exploring other worlds and protecting this one is most evident in the study of Earth's climate and the burgeoning threat to that climate that our technology poses. Other worlds provide vital insights about what dumb things not to do on Earth.
Three potential environmental catastrophes—all operating on a global scale—have recently been uncovered: ozone layer depletion, greenhouse warming, and nuclear winter. All three discoveries, it turns out, have strong ties to the exploration of the planets.
(1) It was disturbing to find that an inert material with all sorts of practical applications—it serves as the working fluid in refrigerators and air conditioners, as aerosol propellant for deodorants and other products, as lightweight foamy packaging for fast foods, and as a cleaning agent in microelectronics, to name only a few-can pose a danger to life on Earth. Who would have figured?
The molecules in question are called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Chemically, they're extremely inert, which means they're invulnerable—until they find themselves up in the ozone layer, where they're broken apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun. The chlorine atoms thus liberated attack and break down the protective ozone, letting more ultraviolet light reach the ground. This increased ultraviolet intensity ushers in a ghastly procession of potential consequences involving not just skin cancer and cataracts, but weakening of the human immune system and, most dangerous of all, possible harm to agriculture and to photosynthetic organisms at the base of the food chain on which most life on Earth depends.
