Saturday night, those of a certain age probably gazed up at the moon and remembered it no longer is just a beautiful orb that has danced through space with the earth inspiring countless poets, but instead it is forever marked with human footprints.
That happened exactly five decades ago Saturday when Neil Armstrong became the first of 12 Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon.
Those not old enough to remember the day, the moment, Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander and the made the “giant leap for mankind,” comment can’t fathom how for that instant the world’s attention focused on a single event. It took science, technology and some 400,000 scientists, engineers and technicians. And bravery. And gall, the arrogant belief that the impossible is possible.
Not that the space program was without critics. There were plenty. John Kennedy’s audacious challenge was dismissed by some as a Cold War stunt. The Soviets had put Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin in orbit before the U.S. could launch Alan Shepard into our first manned, 15-minute sub-orbital flight. But, by God, the Soviets weren’t going to beat us to the moon, no matter what.
Critics found proof of this in the person of Wernher von Braun, the brilliant German rocket scientist, former Nazi party member and Hitler wunderkind, who led Germany’s V-2 rocket program during World War II. When the war ended, von Braun and a cadre of fellow German scientists and technicians came to the United States under the secret Operation Paperclip program. The U.S. scooped them up before the advancing Soviets could grab them. We needed the Germans’ help to develop this nation’s military and, later, space hardware. Without them, the space program might not have gotten off the ground, or at least been delayed for years.
To do this, critics argue, the U.S. had to ignore the implications of overlooking von Braun’s SS membership and his use of concentration camp workers, even while an international tribunal in Nuremburg was convicting Nazi war criminals. Von Braun’s head ended up on the cover of Time magazine, while a fellow Nazi who was convicted at Nuremburg might have ended up with his head in a noose.
Of course, the nation’s space program also played out as the backdrop to the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War. Funds being shot into space — the space program cost the nation some $165 billion in today’s dollars — is money, critics argued, that should have been used for education and to lift millions of desperately poor Americans out of poverty.
And critics also argued that the nation simply couldn’t afford to fight a major war in Southeast Asia and send men to the moon. Lyndon Johnson maintained the nation could afford both guns and butter, but the Texan, who pushed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, squandered that wonderful legacy in Vietnam. Instead it was, “Hey, hey LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?”
Then came 1968, one of the most tumultuous years Americans had ever endured, a year of assassinations, race riots and nearly 17,000 more Americans killed in Vietnam.
The nation needed something to celebrate. It came on Christmas Eve with Apollo 8, the first manned flight to circumnavigate the moon. The crew snapped the breathtaking “Earthrise” photo and read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis, at the time the most watched television program ever. For that moment, the nation could breathe again.
It would be hard to top that, to rally Americans around one event, but the next summer Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins did just that. It happened just 66 years after Kitty Hawk and the Wright brothers’ first powered flight.
The Apollo program, with the first lunar landing its capstone, brought us a host of technological spinoffs — from cordless power tools and water filtration systems, to new textiles and more powerful and smaller computers. Most, probably would have come without a space program, but they came faster with it. And the money they cost all stayed on planet Earth.
What the program generally, and Apollo 11 specifically, really gave us was a new perspective. When Armstrong and Aldrin stood in the dusty desolation of the moon with our blue orb visible over the horizon, it was clear to them, and to many 239 million miles away on Earth, that we really have but one home. Like it or not, we’re all ultimately in this together.
Twenty-one years after Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle lander, NASA scientists turned the Voyager 1 cameras back toward Earth as the spacecraft headed for interstellar space. The photo, taken from 3.7 billion miles away, shows a pale blue dot in the vastness, a single pixel on the photo.
Astronomer and philosopher Carl Sagan, one of the Voyager project heads, knew the picture would have little scientific value, but he also understood it was not without value:
“We succeeded in taking that picture (from deep space), and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
Holding on to that perspective, of course, is another matter. Holding on to that perspective, ultimately however, may be what matters most.