"One giant step backward"

The Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle ascent stage, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as seen by command module pilot Michael Collins, as the two spacecraft prepare to rendezvous and dock over the eastern limb of the Moon. An immediately iconic image even though the photograph went unseen by the public for many days after the expedition returned to Earth. In addition, the image was not available in high resolution until remastered into digital format 30 years later [NASA/JSC/ALSJ].

Tucker Mitchell
SCnow.com

We watched it from Boy Scout summer camp. The only TV set around was in the mess hall. They propped it up on a counter, made popcorn and keep fiddling with the antenna. A blob of aluminum foil squeezed and shaped just so finally did the trick. We had a picture and just in the nick of time. The door to the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) opened, Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder and hopped off into the powdery lunar soil. 

The picture was fuzzy but the moment was crystal clear. You’ve seen it. One small step for (a) man … etc. (*See footnote below) 

The impact of American space exploration in the 1960s, 70s and beyond cannot be denied. It wasn’t just the fantastic scientific breakthroughs in communications, rocketry and breakfast drinks (Tang!), it was the cultural import of being people who really learned how to fly. We were so mighty we left the planet.

The nation’s greatest heroes in that period were astronauts, rather than actors of sports stars. None was bigger than John Glenn, who, 50 years ago this week, became the first human to orbit the Earth. The achievement seems a little lackluster in retrospect, but at the time it was a huge deal. Everybody knew the name and America’s next generation sought to emulate him. Popular entertainment reverberated with space-based plots and ideas. It seemed like us students studied the Solar System and all that went with it for well more than half the year. 

Riding with the Russians 

And yet, here we are today in America, without a working starship or even a rocket for that matter. All the Americans who will go into space until at least the end of this decade will ride Russian, using tickets that cost $60 million a pop. 

This sounds like yet one more sign of the apocalypse. Though we’re still committing a fair amount of cash to the space program — President Obama’s budget calls for spending $17.7 billion on NASA next year — it has faded from the frontal lobes of the national consciousness. This is not, as some might suspect, more effects of the Great Recession. Space program spending, measured in real dollars, has plummeted since its mid-1960s peak, when it represented almost 5 percent of governmental spending. The space agency’s budget recovered briefly — and only incrementally —in the late 1980s, but has been in slow decline since. 

This has more to do with space fatigue than economic pressures. After conquering the moon, NASA’s mission became (comparatively) more mundane. While space launches were still noted and viewed, the missions themselves weren’t edge-of-the-seaters. We stopped sending Walter Cronkite to Houston to report live from Mission Control, when all that was happening was that the Columbia was making another orbit, conducting tests on gamma rays and helium isotopes. 

Part of that is our growing distraction due to the ever-increasing media bombardment. A bigger part may be just reality itself. As the idea of human space exploration has matured (realizing, of course, that we’re probably still in our infancy) the next steps have been, well, humongous leaps for mankind. Launching monkeys into space, sending a man up, sending a man into orbit, sending a man some 240,000 miles away to the moon … the progression there made sense. But after 5-6 lunar trips, public interest (which is critical to funding) waned. The next obvious target was, and is Mars, but serious Martian adventures require an expense and contain a complexity of magnitude that dwarfs all that came before. Because of the necessities of launch widows, etc., astronauts headed to the Red Planet would need something on the order of 3 million tons of supplies, or 600 times the capacity of our biggest existing shuttle. And the shuttle currently can’t be any bigger because we don’t have a rocket powerful enough to push it out of our atmosphere. 

The current budget includes expenditures on research for bigger rockets and other technology, but the bulk will be spent on what NASA calls “Earth Science.” These missions look at the Earth’s surface from orbital perches and help us figure out answers to questions about global warming and crop rotation. 

Important stuff that, but it was more fun when there was something in the mess hall to watch.

One POV

From LP Album 4

Editor's NOTE: Lunar Pioneer is not a political fellowship. The ancient and original membership for whom this website has been created (i.e., the widely placed, thirty-three year-old "Society of friends exploring Earth's Moon") individually represent a wide variety of political views. Recently certain members prevailed upon the wider group Conscience to allow the sharing of an occasional opinion or general observation, representing a particular Point of View (POV), through the Lunar Network blog provided said "opinions" were not already widely available here or elsewhere. These POV's are to be presented rarely and for informational purposes only, not to propagate an ideology or opinion, rather simply to share the fact that such opinions exist. Therefore, what follows is the opinion of the writer only. It does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Lunar Pioneer Group nor of any of its members, or of the Editor. - JCR.

"Planetary exploration, that last great endeavor of what Oswald Spengler called Faustian Culture – the spiritual movement that built the great cathedrals of Christian Europe and that invented science and technology – is dead.

"On its tomb we see rise the social-welfare “nanny state,” multiculturalism, affirmative action, Gaia-worship, the entertainment industry, and an education establishment nationalized, feminized, and purged of intellectual rigor so as to make room for insipid self-esteem and the cultivation of homey errands that (how to put it?) teenage girls can do.

"Contemporary society, like the teenage girl, takes interest in itself primarily, in a preening and thoroughly petty way. The postmodern social order dresses women up as soldiers, it puts them in dangerous aircraft as pilots, and it even sends some of them on Shuttle missions, but it lacks the outward urge of the true pioneering spirit. The de-spirited dhimmi-polity meanwhile cozies up to Stone Age barbarians but refuses to rebuild its own fallen towers ten years after they fell..."

The Brussels Journal, July 10, 2010
Via KA-CHING!/Motel Zero

The wet side of the Moon

William S. Marshall
Op-Ed Contributor
New York Times

PICTURE a habitat atop a hill in warm sunlight on the edge of a crater near the south pole of the Moon. There are metal ores in the rocks nearby and ice in the shadows of the crater below. Solar arrays are set up on the regolith that covers the Moon’s surface. Humans live in sealed, cave-like lava tubes, protected from solar flares and sustained by large surface greenhouses. Imagine the Moon as the first self-sustainable human settlement away from Earth and a high-speed transportation hub for the solar system.

We can finally begin to think seriously about establishing such a self-sufficient home on the Moon because last week, NASA announced that it had discovered large quantities of water there.

While we have known for decades that the Moon had all the raw chemicals necessary for sustaining life, we believed they were trapped in rocks and thus difficult to extract. The discovery of plentiful lunar water is of tremendous importance to humanity and our long-term survival.

Read the Op-Ed column, HERE.

The Meek shall Inherit the Earth

The guy who talked Congress into defunding Apollo still singing the same song, still lives with Mom.

The News-Leader, Springfield, MO
Whine of the Day
David Shipp

NASA is eager to resume United States spaceflights to the moon. Russia has expressed an interest in going along. China is planning its own mission. The European community, Japan, India, and even Brazil, are also going through their own lunar desires.

The United States explored the moon on several manned missions between 1969 and 1972. There is no need to go back. I seriously doubt that the moon has changed too much in 35 years. Those manned spaceflights were fine, but the era of lunar exploration is over and should not be brought back to life.

Our government never seems content with focusing on problems and issues here at home. If we are not sending someone abroad to shoot other humans, we are shooting humans into space to send back information that we either already have or have no use for. A lot of time and money is being wasted on exploring the solar system. For hundreds of years, man was content with looking at space with a telescope. Now, we spend millions of dollars sending people, satellites and other unmanned craft into orbit.

Whatever else he has to say HERE.