AS YOU ARE NO DOUBT AWARE, NASA’s New Horizons probe arrived at Pluto this week, and pictures and other data are now being beamed back to earth to the amazement of just about everyone who has seen those first, tantalizing glimpses of a heretofore hidden world.
Watching the first data come in from that distant probe, it occurred to me that this week is also the anniversary of another “giant leap” in the exploration of space, the first landing on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the second week of July, 1969.
When I watched that long-ago landing in my PJs in front of my parents’ black and white Sears television, in a sense I was watching it through the eyes of my father who sat next to me on the couch that evening. My father was an engineer by training, and thus was naturally captivated by the effort to surmount the supreme technical challenge of the 20th Century. He had purchased that television a few years earlier so that he could watch the preceding Gemini launches and spacewalks that tested and rehearsed the various technical feats that would be necessary for the Apollo program’s success.
It is hard to convey, almost 50 years later, what an amazing moment it was to watch Neil Armstrong step out of the Lunar Excursion Module and onto the lunar surface. The late sixties were not a happy time in many respects: college campuses were roiling with anti-war protests to the point that actual higher education all but ground to a halt, urban riots had become a regular occurrence in the summers, America servicemen were coming home in coffins at the rate of the combined total casualties of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — every six months — and it seemed that every American leader who was capable of inspiring and uniting Americans was felled by an assassin’s bullet practically as soon as they rose to prominence.
And yet, for a few hours on that July evening, people all over the world forgot the difficulties and struggles of the moment, turned on their televisions and were united in wonder, watching an American walk on the face of a distant world.
The successful accomplishment of that feat was by no means an easy or certain thing. When President John F. Kennedy first set that challenge before the nation in an address to Congress in May of 1961, it was in the context of an American space program had suffered a series of defeats — the Soviet Union had successfully sent the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1, 1957) into orbit, were first to send both a man (1961) and a woman (1963) into orbit, and seemed poised to be the dominant power in the realm that Kennedy called the “New Frontier.” The American effort, by contrast, seemed beset by spectacular failures in which American boosters regularly converted themselves into gigantic fireballs before ever leaving their launch pads.
In a follow-up speech at Rice University in Houston in September 1963, Kennedy went into greater detail, not just on where we should go as a nation, but why:
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
“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?
“…We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not 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.”
When Kennedy was felled by an assassin’s bullet in November of 1963, the nation turned part of its grief into a resolve to realize the goal Kennedy had set, and we made it with 5 months to spare. The Kennedy Space Center was renamed in his honor, and is the place from which the New Horizons spacecraft began its long mission. I think this latest success is, in some small way, due in part to the vision and inspiration of John F. Kennedy.
Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.
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