You will live Lyndon Johnson's nightmare
Quasi in rem- understandably disturbed by our dependence on the Russians for the servicing and re-supply of Space Station Alpha- asks, "Remember when we were winning the space race?"
I do. More to the point, I remember when we were all too aware that we were losing it. That's one advantage of being an old fart: you remember things younger people often never knew. And sadly, George Santayana was right when he said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I firmly believe that the resistance to President Bush's proposal to return to the moon and go, from there. to Mars, is rooted firmly in a failure to remember the past. Allow me to refresh your memories- and to give the substantial number of you who were not alive during the events I will recount a "heads-up" on what your future holds.
October 4, 1957 was a shock to the nation perhaps of a lesser magnitude than those of December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001, but it certainly was only a couple of points down the emotional Richter scale. The United States, the Biggest Kid on the Block, the ruler of the post-war world, suddenly found itself in the shadows, relegated to second-best. A nation not even generally identified with technological sophistication, the Soviet Union, had beaten us to the punch by orbiting the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I.
Now, in one sense, this accomplishment wasn't quite as decisive as it seemed. The United States could have orbited a satellite months earlier. There were even plans among some in the Army late in 1956 to use, of all things, a modified Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile to orbit a very small satellite. But President Eisenhower, fearing that this would somehow involve the militarization of outer space, forbade any such attempt.
In another sense, though, Sputnik gave us real cause to fear. The size of the satellite was such that it could just as well have been a thermonuclear warhead. Russia had ICBM capability, and we did not. Our lack of foresight had placed us in mortal danger.
But then, it got worse. On November 3, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik II, with a dog on board. The dog, Laika, was euthanized in orbit by remote control (obviously), but not before sending back the very first scientific information about biological functioning in space.
It was not until 1961 that two chimps, Ham and Enos, became the first higher mammals send into space by Americans. Again, it wasn't really that the Russians had done anything scientifically marvelous; sending an animal into orbit to die was no real trick. Bringing it back safely, as we brought Ham back from his sub-orbital flight and Enos from his orbital mission, was the real achievement. But the propaganda victory for the Russians, again, was huge- and once again, the American self-image took a beating. A national bout of soul-searching ensued. "WHY IVAN IS BETTER THAN JOHNNY AT MATH," LIFE Magazine entitled the feature story of one of its issues, and the United States was plunged into a national inferiority complex, dazed and frustrated by our demonstrated inferiority in the technical and scientific fields to a nation later aptly described as "a Third-World country with rockets."
There was no question at that point that the United States needed to catch up as quickly as possible. It was not only necessary from the point of view of our national security; even more, it was vital to our national self-esteem. Our first attempt led to humiliation and disaster, as the launch vehicle for the Navy's grapefruit-sized Vanguard I exploded on the launching pad at the moment of intended lift-off. Fortunately, there was a backup plan. Not quite four months after sputnik, an Army/JPL team headed by Werner von Braun utilized a Jupiter C IRBM boosted by the first stage of a Redstone IRBM to place the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit.
Aroused, the United States embarked on Project Mercury, a deliberate and determined effort to make certain that the first man in space was an American.
And then....
If the launching of Sputnik I had been a national shock only two steps down the emotional Richter scale from Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the orbital mission of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 was only one step down. The first man in space was, in fact, a Russian.
We had been bested again by a Third World country with rockets. Soviet prestige skyrocketed to unbelievable heights; American prestige plummeted. Once again- and far more deeply this time- the nation was demoralized. Once again, we had come off second-best. Once again, it was to the Soviet Union, not to the United States, that the world looked in admiration. More importantly, once again- and as never before- we, as a nation, looked at ourselves in the mirror, and saw something second-rate. And it was hard to argue with the proposition that the future certainly looked to be with the Soviets, and not with the United States.
But there were those who refused to accept this state of affairs. "I will not go to sleep at night by the light of a Red moon!," Senator Lyndon Johnson had exclaimed in the wake of Sputnik I. And now, as Vice-President, he was given political oversight over a national crusade to see that he- and we- didn't have to.
Johnson sat in the right-hand chair of the House rostrum on May 25, 1961- a mere six weeks after Gagarin's flight- as the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, issued a call to metaphorical war:
Difficult, yes. Expensive, yes. But between that speech and Neil Armstrong's first step on the lunar surface, literally hundreds of thousands of jobs were created by the effort. The technologies which were developed for Projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo not only enhanced all of our lives in countless, seldom-realized ways, but repaid that expense many times over. Slowly, we began matching the Soviets' triumphs in space- and then surpassing them. Despite a little-known, desperate crash-program called Zond to somehow get a Russian to the moon ahead of them, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin- the first men on the moon- planted Old Glory in the barren soil of the Sea of Tranquility.
We sent several other missions to the moon. But then...we stopped. We didn't go onward to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter, and to the stars.
The reasons were complicated. The age of national self-doubt which began on October 1957 in a sense didn't end until the Reagan years, when once again we had a President capable of moving us to look into that mirror, and see greatness. But something changed when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Apollo 12 was an anti-climax, and the American people were nearly unaware of the Apollo 13 mission until the crisis which prevented its crew from landing on the moon, and almost cost us their lives. The networks, famously, didn't even bother broadcasting the TV interludes beamed from the Command Module back to Earth.
One of my most vivid memories of the aftermath of Apollo 11 goes beyond sad. So little did we think of ourselves after October 4, 1957 that it took us a while to adjust psychologically to having won the race to the moon. A patriotic bumpersticker began appearing on automobiles after Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins returned home with a message that managed at the same time to be triumphant, and not a little pathetic. It consisted of an American flag with a while slash across it bearing the words
in large, black letters. So used to defeat and frustration were we near the height of the Vietnam War and after twelve years of playing second-best to the Russians in space that a bumper sticker bragging about the greatest technological achievement in the history of the human race had to include not simply a statement of that incredible achievement, but a postscript explaining (in case anybody missed the point) that it was something to be proud of.
The moon? "Been there, done that." So the American people- distracted by the war in Vietnam and, other than the Civil War (and maybe today), the most divisive period in our history- seemed to feel about the race to space. Defeated, and hovering on the edge of the economic precipice over which Ronald Reagan would finally push them, the Soviets abandoned all thought of going to the moon. Humanity's efforts in space would continue with Skylab and the Shuttle and Soyuz and Mir and Space Station Alpha, but no further from our homeworld than low orbit.
The Soviet Union collapsed, and for a brief time we deluded ourselves that we had entered into a new era of peace. But then came 9/11. And without the Soviet threat, the real attitudes toward us of the nations of Western Europe and elsewhere who suddenly no longer needed our protection became clear. No longer did their jealousy toward us, their lack of a true commonality of values with us, and their inferiority complex where the United States was concerned find expression only in the words and actions of rude and hostile individual citizens. Instead, they manifested themselves openly and frankly in the foreign policy of those nations. Those of us with open eyes began to realize that those who for so long we had assumed were our friends were in fact hostile strangers, if not enemies, with whom we had much less in common than we had thought.
Those of us whose eyes weren't open imagined that the fault lay with our own impatience with corrupt and effete international institutions, and the "arrogance" of presuming to act on behalf of our own security without asking the permission of those jealous and corrupt and the effete pseudo-allies.
And somewhere along the line, we had lost a large part of our national soul. The spirit of John Kennedy's 1962 speech at Rice University-
- is so alien to us today that the statement might itself have been made by a Martian. This is a time where eight hundred casualties in over a year- compared to that many in weeks even in Vietnam, and in days during World War II- is held to be too high a price to pay for safety from a ruthless enemy who spent decades obtaining and developing chemical and biological weapons, who had a track record of using them- and who, sought persistently to obtain nuclear ones, too. It's also too high a price, it is said, for the liberation of a much-abused people- however ungrateful- from one of the greatest monsters of modern history.
We just don't do things anymore for the reasons why John Kennedy said at Rice that we should go to the moon. True, the moon is rich in hydrogen 3- a substance one square foot of which could meet all the energy needs of the United States for an entire year. True, at a time when we are just emerging from a recession, the rather leisurely program President Bush put forward for returning to the moon would still manage to create a huge number of jobs precisely in some of the sectors of the economy which that recession hit the hardest. True, despite our record deficits- ironically run up under a President who has slashed discretionary spending dramatically from the its levels under the Clinton Administration- is an argument for caution. But then, Mr. Bush's is an intentionally cautious plan.
And yet we see- on television commercials funded, in effect, by soft Kerry money- the objection that President Bush's priorities are wrong- precisely because of the more urgent need to do the very things which the experience of the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo programs tell us a return to the moon and a thrust outward to Mars could well help give us the resources to do!
Part of it is economic illiteracy, no doubt. People still think of the economy as a pie of fixed size, in which a bigger slice for somebody means a smaller slice for somebody else. Yet as much as the sneering liberals make fun of President Bush's misspoken desire to "make the pie higher" (he meant "larger"), one of the most fundamental of economic realities is that economies grow. It simply isn't the case that a bigger slice for the space program- or, to cite one of John Kerry's more profoundly irrational mantras, "the rich"- automatically means a smaller slice for somebody else. Their slice of the pie gets bigger, too, if the first slice makes the pie as whole grow.
That is not so much the place where the pie analogy breaks down as the explanation of why it's a lousy analogy. As little credit as he's getting for it at this point, President Bush has brought us out of the recession into which we had begun to descend under Bill Clinton precisely by seeking to stimulate the economy, so that it would grow- and thus give everybody a bigger slice.
That's why it's so discouraging to hear even the members of my own Des Moines Astronomical Society say that we shouldn't return to the moon or go to Mars because it would take resources away from feeding the hungry and finding cures for sicknesses. Two of our members- both, parenthetically Democrats- have expressed reasons for their opposition to me that made my jaw drop. One said that, "We know what's on the moon- rocks!" Yes, there are indeed rocks. And hydrogen 3, and with it the potential to end the energy crisis forever..And a peerless- and, in the long run, incredibly inexpensive- base for astronomical observation uncompromised by either Earth's atmosphere, or the trouble and expense of repeated missions to deploy and service orbiting telescopes like the Hubble. And priceless information about the origins of our solar system, and of our planet. And the economic benefits and improvements in our everyday lives that would come as by-products of trying.
Another amazed me even more when he said that he opposed sending men to Mars until we developed the technology to shield our astronauts from the one major practical obstacle to such a journey- the huge amount of radiation to which they would be exposed on route, and on the surface of Mars itself. Hello! Does he really think that the President is proposing that we send astronauts to Mars before we develop such protection? And how in the world are we ever going to develop it unless we try?
If anybody should be in back of the President's proposal, it's amateur astronomers. That they aren't convinces me even more than the poll numbers that we're not going to take President Bush up on his proposal. We won't do so precisely for the reasons why Jack Kennedy said at Rice that we should go to the moon in the first place.
We won't go back precisely because "it would be hard," rather than easy; because it would compel us to "organize and measure the best of our energies and skills," rather than concentrating on dealing with momentary distractions it might even actually help us to resolve. That is why the challenge is not one we're willing to accept; not one we're unwilling to postpone- and therefore, why it is not a matter in which we are going to win.
We know that none of this is true of the Chinese. They are actively engaged in their own lunar program. One of the DMAS members I referred to above says that that fact is "the only reason" President Bush wants to go to the moon- as if, while this is not, of course, true, it would not in itself be reason enough!
We know that the Russians are re-thinking their long-abandoned lunar ambitions, and- perhaps in concert with the European space program- may well soon embark of a moon program of their own. One possible course, obviously, would be one which my friend who apparently thinks that Dubyah is willing to fry some astronauts just to get to Mars would probably find congenial: why not go to the moon, and to Mars, together? Why not share the burden, and the expense? Why should it be a race between humans, rather than a glorious common effort of the human race, which might draw us together, rather than driving us apart?
For one simple reason: Because George W. Bush would get at least some credit for raising the issue, and because there is more political mileage right now in laughing at Columbus, and telling him that he would only fall off the edge of the world- and that, besides, it just wouldn't be worth it.
And so, I fear that those who do not remember, or who were born too late to experience the past, will be condemned to repeat it. Perhaps it will be the Chinese who will demonstrate to the world the vigor and dynamism of their system and their nation, compared to the effete torpor of the has-been United States. Perhaps we will treated to the experience of the French and the Germans smirking their superiority at having achieved something we once achieved ourselves, but lost not only the ability, but the will to do along the way. Humanity will return to the moon. Humanity will go on to Mars, and from there to the moons of Jupiter, and, finally, to the stars. But if Americans go, it will be along a path others have blazed, as followers, not as leaders- and after a long period of national humiliation during which we will dearly wish that we had listened to George W. Bush.
One thing is certain, my younger friends, of which I or anyone of my generation with a memory and a soul can assure you: we've lived that experience- and you aren't going to like it one bit. It may be Chinese rather than Russian, but it appears that you are doomed to live Lyndon Johnson's nightmare: to fall asleep by the light of a Red moon.
I do. More to the point, I remember when we were all too aware that we were losing it. That's one advantage of being an old fart: you remember things younger people often never knew. And sadly, George Santayana was right when he said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I firmly believe that the resistance to President Bush's proposal to return to the moon and go, from there. to Mars, is rooted firmly in a failure to remember the past. Allow me to refresh your memories- and to give the substantial number of you who were not alive during the events I will recount a "heads-up" on what your future holds.
October 4, 1957 was a shock to the nation perhaps of a lesser magnitude than those of December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001, but it certainly was only a couple of points down the emotional Richter scale. The United States, the Biggest Kid on the Block, the ruler of the post-war world, suddenly found itself in the shadows, relegated to second-best. A nation not even generally identified with technological sophistication, the Soviet Union, had beaten us to the punch by orbiting the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I.
Now, in one sense, this accomplishment wasn't quite as decisive as it seemed. The United States could have orbited a satellite months earlier. There were even plans among some in the Army late in 1956 to use, of all things, a modified Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile to orbit a very small satellite. But President Eisenhower, fearing that this would somehow involve the militarization of outer space, forbade any such attempt.
In another sense, though, Sputnik gave us real cause to fear. The size of the satellite was such that it could just as well have been a thermonuclear warhead. Russia had ICBM capability, and we did not. Our lack of foresight had placed us in mortal danger.
But then, it got worse. On November 3, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik II, with a dog on board. The dog, Laika, was euthanized in orbit by remote control (obviously), but not before sending back the very first scientific information about biological functioning in space.
It was not until 1961 that two chimps, Ham and Enos, became the first higher mammals send into space by Americans. Again, it wasn't really that the Russians had done anything scientifically marvelous; sending an animal into orbit to die was no real trick. Bringing it back safely, as we brought Ham back from his sub-orbital flight and Enos from his orbital mission, was the real achievement. But the propaganda victory for the Russians, again, was huge- and once again, the American self-image took a beating. A national bout of soul-searching ensued. "WHY IVAN IS BETTER THAN JOHNNY AT MATH," LIFE Magazine entitled the feature story of one of its issues, and the United States was plunged into a national inferiority complex, dazed and frustrated by our demonstrated inferiority in the technical and scientific fields to a nation later aptly described as "a Third-World country with rockets."
There was no question at that point that the United States needed to catch up as quickly as possible. It was not only necessary from the point of view of our national security; even more, it was vital to our national self-esteem. Our first attempt led to humiliation and disaster, as the launch vehicle for the Navy's grapefruit-sized Vanguard I exploded on the launching pad at the moment of intended lift-off. Fortunately, there was a backup plan. Not quite four months after sputnik, an Army/JPL team headed by Werner von Braun utilized a Jupiter C IRBM boosted by the first stage of a Redstone IRBM to place the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit.
Aroused, the United States embarked on Project Mercury, a deliberate and determined effort to make certain that the first man in space was an American.
And then....
If the launching of Sputnik I had been a national shock only two steps down the emotional Richter scale from Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the orbital mission of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 was only one step down. The first man in space was, in fact, a Russian.
We had been bested again by a Third World country with rockets. Soviet prestige skyrocketed to unbelievable heights; American prestige plummeted. Once again- and far more deeply this time- the nation was demoralized. Once again, we had come off second-best. Once again, it was to the Soviet Union, not to the United States, that the world looked in admiration. More importantly, once again- and as never before- we, as a nation, looked at ourselves in the mirror, and saw something second-rate. And it was hard to argue with the proposition that the future certainly looked to be with the Soviets, and not with the United States.
But there were those who refused to accept this state of affairs. "I will not go to sleep at night by the light of a Red moon!," Senator Lyndon Johnson had exclaimed in the wake of Sputnik I. And now, as Vice-President, he was given political oversight over a national crusade to see that he- and we- didn't have to.
Johnson sat in the right-hand chair of the House rostrum on May 25, 1961- a mere six weeks after Gagarin's flight- as the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, issued a call to metaphorical war:
If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. Since early in my term, our efforts in space have been under review. With the advice of the Vice President, who is Chairman of the National Space Council, we have examined where we are strong and where we are not. Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.
...I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish...
Difficult, yes. Expensive, yes. But between that speech and Neil Armstrong's first step on the lunar surface, literally hundreds of thousands of jobs were created by the effort. The technologies which were developed for Projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo not only enhanced all of our lives in countless, seldom-realized ways, but repaid that expense many times over. Slowly, we began matching the Soviets' triumphs in space- and then surpassing them. Despite a little-known, desperate crash-program called Zond to somehow get a Russian to the moon ahead of them, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin- the first men on the moon- planted Old Glory in the barren soil of the Sea of Tranquility.
We sent several other missions to the moon. But then...we stopped. We didn't go onward to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter, and to the stars.
The reasons were complicated. The age of national self-doubt which began on October 1957 in a sense didn't end until the Reagan years, when once again we had a President capable of moving us to look into that mirror, and see greatness. But something changed when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Apollo 12 was an anti-climax, and the American people were nearly unaware of the Apollo 13 mission until the crisis which prevented its crew from landing on the moon, and almost cost us their lives. The networks, famously, didn't even bother broadcasting the TV interludes beamed from the Command Module back to Earth.
One of my most vivid memories of the aftermath of Apollo 11 goes beyond sad. So little did we think of ourselves after October 4, 1957 that it took us a while to adjust psychologically to having won the race to the moon. A patriotic bumpersticker began appearing on automobiles after Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins returned home with a message that managed at the same time to be triumphant, and not a little pathetic. It consisted of an American flag with a while slash across it bearing the words
MAN ON THE MOON: U.S. VICTORY
in large, black letters. So used to defeat and frustration were we near the height of the Vietnam War and after twelve years of playing second-best to the Russians in space that a bumper sticker bragging about the greatest technological achievement in the history of the human race had to include not simply a statement of that incredible achievement, but a postscript explaining (in case anybody missed the point) that it was something to be proud of.
The moon? "Been there, done that." So the American people- distracted by the war in Vietnam and, other than the Civil War (and maybe today), the most divisive period in our history- seemed to feel about the race to space. Defeated, and hovering on the edge of the economic precipice over which Ronald Reagan would finally push them, the Soviets abandoned all thought of going to the moon. Humanity's efforts in space would continue with Skylab and the Shuttle and Soyuz and Mir and Space Station Alpha, but no further from our homeworld than low orbit.
The Soviet Union collapsed, and for a brief time we deluded ourselves that we had entered into a new era of peace. But then came 9/11. And without the Soviet threat, the real attitudes toward us of the nations of Western Europe and elsewhere who suddenly no longer needed our protection became clear. No longer did their jealousy toward us, their lack of a true commonality of values with us, and their inferiority complex where the United States was concerned find expression only in the words and actions of rude and hostile individual citizens. Instead, they manifested themselves openly and frankly in the foreign policy of those nations. Those of us with open eyes began to realize that those who for so long we had assumed were our friends were in fact hostile strangers, if not enemies, with whom we had much less in common than we had thought.
Those of us whose eyes weren't open imagined that the fault lay with our own impatience with corrupt and effete international institutions, and the "arrogance" of presuming to act on behalf of our own security without asking the permission of those jealous and corrupt and the effete pseudo-allies.
And somewhere along the line, we had lost a large part of our national soul. The spirit of John Kennedy's 1962 speech at Rice University-
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
- is so alien to us today that the statement might itself have been made by a Martian. This is a time where eight hundred casualties in over a year- compared to that many in weeks even in Vietnam, and in days during World War II- is held to be too high a price to pay for safety from a ruthless enemy who spent decades obtaining and developing chemical and biological weapons, who had a track record of using them- and who, sought persistently to obtain nuclear ones, too. It's also too high a price, it is said, for the liberation of a much-abused people- however ungrateful- from one of the greatest monsters of modern history.
We just don't do things anymore for the reasons why John Kennedy said at Rice that we should go to the moon. True, the moon is rich in hydrogen 3- a substance one square foot of which could meet all the energy needs of the United States for an entire year. True, at a time when we are just emerging from a recession, the rather leisurely program President Bush put forward for returning to the moon would still manage to create a huge number of jobs precisely in some of the sectors of the economy which that recession hit the hardest. True, despite our record deficits- ironically run up under a President who has slashed discretionary spending dramatically from the its levels under the Clinton Administration- is an argument for caution. But then, Mr. Bush's is an intentionally cautious plan.
And yet we see- on television commercials funded, in effect, by soft Kerry money- the objection that President Bush's priorities are wrong- precisely because of the more urgent need to do the very things which the experience of the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo programs tell us a return to the moon and a thrust outward to Mars could well help give us the resources to do!
Part of it is economic illiteracy, no doubt. People still think of the economy as a pie of fixed size, in which a bigger slice for somebody means a smaller slice for somebody else. Yet as much as the sneering liberals make fun of President Bush's misspoken desire to "make the pie higher" (he meant "larger"), one of the most fundamental of economic realities is that economies grow. It simply isn't the case that a bigger slice for the space program- or, to cite one of John Kerry's more profoundly irrational mantras, "the rich"- automatically means a smaller slice for somebody else. Their slice of the pie gets bigger, too, if the first slice makes the pie as whole grow.
That is not so much the place where the pie analogy breaks down as the explanation of why it's a lousy analogy. As little credit as he's getting for it at this point, President Bush has brought us out of the recession into which we had begun to descend under Bill Clinton precisely by seeking to stimulate the economy, so that it would grow- and thus give everybody a bigger slice.
That's why it's so discouraging to hear even the members of my own Des Moines Astronomical Society say that we shouldn't return to the moon or go to Mars because it would take resources away from feeding the hungry and finding cures for sicknesses. Two of our members- both, parenthetically Democrats- have expressed reasons for their opposition to me that made my jaw drop. One said that, "We know what's on the moon- rocks!" Yes, there are indeed rocks. And hydrogen 3, and with it the potential to end the energy crisis forever..And a peerless- and, in the long run, incredibly inexpensive- base for astronomical observation uncompromised by either Earth's atmosphere, or the trouble and expense of repeated missions to deploy and service orbiting telescopes like the Hubble. And priceless information about the origins of our solar system, and of our planet. And the economic benefits and improvements in our everyday lives that would come as by-products of trying.
Another amazed me even more when he said that he opposed sending men to Mars until we developed the technology to shield our astronauts from the one major practical obstacle to such a journey- the huge amount of radiation to which they would be exposed on route, and on the surface of Mars itself. Hello! Does he really think that the President is proposing that we send astronauts to Mars before we develop such protection? And how in the world are we ever going to develop it unless we try?
If anybody should be in back of the President's proposal, it's amateur astronomers. That they aren't convinces me even more than the poll numbers that we're not going to take President Bush up on his proposal. We won't do so precisely for the reasons why Jack Kennedy said at Rice that we should go to the moon in the first place.
We won't go back precisely because "it would be hard," rather than easy; because it would compel us to "organize and measure the best of our energies and skills," rather than concentrating on dealing with momentary distractions it might even actually help us to resolve. That is why the challenge is not one we're willing to accept; not one we're unwilling to postpone- and therefore, why it is not a matter in which we are going to win.
We know that none of this is true of the Chinese. They are actively engaged in their own lunar program. One of the DMAS members I referred to above says that that fact is "the only reason" President Bush wants to go to the moon- as if, while this is not, of course, true, it would not in itself be reason enough!
We know that the Russians are re-thinking their long-abandoned lunar ambitions, and- perhaps in concert with the European space program- may well soon embark of a moon program of their own. One possible course, obviously, would be one which my friend who apparently thinks that Dubyah is willing to fry some astronauts just to get to Mars would probably find congenial: why not go to the moon, and to Mars, together? Why not share the burden, and the expense? Why should it be a race between humans, rather than a glorious common effort of the human race, which might draw us together, rather than driving us apart?
For one simple reason: Because George W. Bush would get at least some credit for raising the issue, and because there is more political mileage right now in laughing at Columbus, and telling him that he would only fall off the edge of the world- and that, besides, it just wouldn't be worth it.
And so, I fear that those who do not remember, or who were born too late to experience the past, will be condemned to repeat it. Perhaps it will be the Chinese who will demonstrate to the world the vigor and dynamism of their system and their nation, compared to the effete torpor of the has-been United States. Perhaps we will treated to the experience of the French and the Germans smirking their superiority at having achieved something we once achieved ourselves, but lost not only the ability, but the will to do along the way. Humanity will return to the moon. Humanity will go on to Mars, and from there to the moons of Jupiter, and, finally, to the stars. But if Americans go, it will be along a path others have blazed, as followers, not as leaders- and after a long period of national humiliation during which we will dearly wish that we had listened to George W. Bush.
One thing is certain, my younger friends, of which I or anyone of my generation with a memory and a soul can assure you: we've lived that experience- and you aren't going to like it one bit. It may be Chinese rather than Russian, but it appears that you are doomed to live Lyndon Johnson's nightmare: to fall asleep by the light of a Red moon.
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