I was washing the family dishes this evening when I was abruptly taken back 40 years ago, to July 20, 1969, and the night that Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon. I was a teenager at the time, working a summer job as, of all things, a dishwasher.
The events that were to take place that night were something I’d been looking forward to for a long time. I’d been a space junkie since elementary school, having memorized the distances from Earth to the planets, their relative sizes, the length of their days and years, the names and number of their moons, and most any other facts I could find.
Over the years, I’d read about the various proposals for getting to the moon, followed every flight from Project Mercury through Apollo, and yet, on the night the first astronaut was to step on the surface of another world, it appeared I would be stuck washing dishes and surely miss the whole thing.
What i didn’t realize was how important this event was to almost everyone. Just before 11 PM, the owner’s wife announced that the kitchen was closing early, and I scrambled to the bar where the waitresses, customers and I — and estimated 600 million people around the world — watched man set foot on another world for the very first time. There is no way to describe the sense that all of humankind was for that moment united in shared excitement, wonder, hope and pride.
My interest in manned spaceflight continued for many years, through the remainder of Apollo and well into the STS, but sometime around Apollo 14 or 15, I realized that the US mission to the Moon wasn’t quite what I thought it was. It wasn’t the first step in sustained, manned space exploration but more like a drag race with the Soviet Union. Once the race was over, no one seemed to know quite what to do next. In all twelve men walked on the moon, but most of us only know the names of the first two, Armstrong and Aldrin.
Among the public, manned spaceflight lost its allure as scientists turned to less costly, unmanned exploration of the solar system with spacecraft like Pioneer, Magellan, Voyager, Gallieo. These incredible machines could go where humans could not, see things that we couldn’t see, and when one failed, as they occasionally would, there was no loss of life. What robotic missions lacked in romance, they made up for in practicality. It took me a while, but without a clear reason to send men beyond the low Earth orbit of the Space Shuttle, I too came to favor robotic over manned exploration.
By 2004, when President George W. Bush announced plans to go back to the Moon, then to Mars and beyond, he seemed to do it half-heartedly, as if all he had to do was say the magic words and what the Moon did for Kennedy’s legacy, Mars would do for his. But this time, the public didn’t get on board. They barely seemed to care or even notice, and by 2008, Mars wasn’t even mentioned in his final State of the Union address. Without the competition of the Cold War hanging over our heads, we had more pressing issues on our minds.
Tonight, in spite what we now know about the motivation behind the race to the Moon and what has transpired since, the fact that we got there is no less an accomplishment than it was that night in 1969. Landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth within a decade required a massive mobilization of ingenuity and resources in order to ultimately achieve what at first sounded preposterous, even to those who would later make it happen. Just as critical was the response of the public, who broadly accepted the challenge of their time and supported the effort through its successful conclusion.
Today, we occasionally hear about the need for mobilization on a similar, grand scale in order to address the challenges of our time — most often, climate change and/or the development of renewable energy sources. Yet, everyday we hear others who say we can’t afford it, that it will cost too many jobs, that we can’t do it until someone else does it too. Worse, some play upon anti-intellectualism in an attempt to convince us that these challenges don’t exist in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Surely, such attitudes, had they been as prevalent in 1961, would have kept Project Mercury from ever getting off the ground.
It’s worth remembering that at the time of Kennedy’s announcement, even NASA engineers were taken by surprise. They had no idea how they were going to meet the President’s challenge much less whether it was even possible. They simply accepted it and set about the work of figuring it out one step at a time.
If we are ever to tackle the challenges of our time, I believe it will be done in much the same way: by first accepting the challenge, and then, through determined effort, ingenuity, and allocation of resources, figuring it out as we go.
Those of my generation witnessed a preposterous goal come to be realized in less than ten years. There is no reason to think that we cannot be just a successful in meeting the challenges of our age. The difference is that, this time, it’s unlikely we’ll watch a momentous event that marks success. This time, we’ll need a sustained effort, not a race, with broad and ongoing public support, and leadership that keeps us focused on the work at hand.
How satisfying it would be to look back forty years from now and celebrate the progress we’ve made.
