6degrees AstroBlog

Houston, Tranquility Base here.  The Eagle has landed.

By Irwin Horowitz, 7-20-07

	Caption: Apollo 11 Astronaut w/US flag

It was 38 years ago today.  Across the country, families gathered around their televisions to watch as grainy images were being sent back over 250,000 miles across space as Neil Armstrong bounded down the ladder of the lunar module Eagle and uttered one of the most famous quotes in human history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

It is hard to believe that less than 3½ years later, the crew of Apollo 17 lifted off from that same surface.  This was the last time humans left the close environment of Earth orbit.  We have sent robotic explorers to each of the planets in the solar system (including one currently en route to the former planet Pluto).  However, human space flight has stagnated during the past 3½ decades.  Now, we cheer whenever a space shuttle mission manages to safely return from another routine trip to the space station.  This is hardly the stuff of which dreams are made of.

During that span two whole generations have come of age with the notion that we’ve been to the Moon but haven’t gone back nor have we gone any further.  Given the current quagmire that is our nation’s foreign policy, it isn’t likely that the resources for a return to our glory days will be forthcoming in the near future.  Americans never stood taller nor were we prouder of our national accomplishments than we were in those heady days of the late-1960s and early-1970s.

I myself was all of five when Eagle touched down at Tranquility Base, and barely remember the experience.  I know more about what occurred by watching the old news footage shown on this date each year.  I would appreciate hearing from some of you who have clearer recollections of how the Apollo 11 lunar landing was received in your homes and communities and how you feel our nation’s space program has done in the years since that success.

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I have a slightly different take on this. I remember watching sputnik overhead and hearing the adults speak in fear of the Soviets and their communism. The 60's were convulsed with race riots and then followed by anti-war riots. We were not united as a nation towards much of anything except being anti-communist or so it seemed. President Kennedy launched the US manned space flight program in response to the Soviets and the cold war. I remember our first manned flight that lasted only a few minutes. I watched from our living room while eating a bow of Cream O' Wheat. I remember sneaking a radio to school to listen to the news about John Glenn. I remember our astronauts killed in the fire on the launch pad. By the time Apollo 13 rolled around the news had quit carring live coverage. I remember watching as the first carbon feet planted themselves on the moon. Awesome!!

I hit the wrong button and sent my comment before I was finished.

The space program was under constant pressure to prove itself with the cost of the war and all. There was a constant parade of stuff like Tang and Velcro as discoveries. As a child moving into adulthood I always felt that our space prgram was worth it but it lacked true public support because of the societal divides that we were experiencing much like today. Once "we won" the race to the moon with the Soviets, the cars were parked. I have always been very saddened by this.

I was 11 years old in 1961, when President Kennedy challenged congress and our space program to put a man on the Moon and bring him back safely, before the end of the decade. This was only 20 days after the first US manned space flight in which Alan Shepard took our first 15 minute baby step into space. Even as a kid, I knew we were a very long way from putting a man on the Moon. A VERY long way. Reruns of the hopelessly corny "Flash Gordon" TV series were still being aired, but that was very cool and "hi-tech" at the time.

I was sitting in my junior high school math class when we got word of President Kennedy's assassination, and the first thing that popped into my mind was if the space program was going to die with him. Fortunately it didn't. I was a big fan of space travel and even though the main reasons for space exploration at the time had to do with politics and defense, to me it was worth it just because it was there. I couldn't figure out why the world powers were wasting time waving nuclear weapons at each other when we were all at the threshold of the greatest frontier of all.

Oddly enough, I had been in Da Nang, RVN, for about a month when the AFVN TV station aired coverage of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon in 1969. To me, this was the greatest accomplishment since cavemen figured out how to make fire. This was the culmination of thousands of years of trial and error, finding truth, and developing the scientific method and high technology, yet here I was in a part of the world where the Khmer Rouge was exterminating anyone who even looked like he could write his name. I never could understand why every person on the planet was not caught up in the thrill of finding out what's "out there".

Yes, I'm disappointed that humans have not been back to the Moon in 35 years, but at least we're still moving forward with local manned and extended unmanned exploration and learning more about what's out there at an even greater rate than in the past. Aside from exploration, a person would have to spend his life in a sealed cave to avoid the technological benefits of the space program. The day we give up looking toward the stars would be a sad day indeed.