By George Will
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission
239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a
story the Irish author Frank O’Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the
challenge of a high wall, O’Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it.
Said Kennedy, “They had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed
its cap over the wall of space.” Kennedy said this on Nov. 21, 1963, in San
Antonio. The next day: Dallas.
To understand America’s euphoria about the moon landing
50 years ago, remember 51 years ago: 1968 was one of America’s worst years —
the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated,
urban riots. President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, vow to reach the moon before
1970 came 43 days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person
to enter outer space and orbit the Earth, and 38 days after the Bay of Pigs
debacle. When Kennedy audaciously pointed to the moon, America had only sent a
single astronaut on a 15-minute suborbital flight.
Kennedy’s goal was reckless, and exhilarating leadership.
Given existing knowledge and technologies, it was impossible. But Kennedy said
the space program would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies
and skills.” It did. The thrilling story of collaborative science and
individual daring is told well in HBO’s twelve-part From the Earth to the
Moon, and PBS’s three-part Chasing the Moon, and in the companion
volume with that title, by Robert Stone and Alan Andres, who write:
The American effort to get to the
moon was the largest peacetime government initiative in the nation’s history.
At its peak in the mid-1960s, nearly 2% of the American workforce was engaged
in the effort to some degree. It employed more than 400,000 individuals, most
of them working for 20,000 different private companies and 200 universities.
The “space race” began as a Cold War competition,
military and political. Even before Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite,
jolted Americans’ complacency in 1957 (ten days after President Dwight
Eisenhower sent paratroopers to Little Rock’s Central High School), national
security was at stake in the race for rockets with ever-greater thrusts to
deliver thermonuclear warheads with ever-greater accuracy.
By 1969, however, the Soviet Union was out of the race to
the moon, a capitulation that anticipated the Soviets’ expiring gasp, two
decades later, when confronted by the technological challenge of Ronald
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. By mid-1967, a majority of Americans no
longer thought a moon landing was worth the expense.
But it triggered a final flaring of post-war confidence
and pride. “The Eagle has landed” came as defiant last words of affirmation, at
the end of a decade that, Stone and Andres note, had begun with harbingers of a
coming culture of dark irony and satire: Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22
(1961) and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964).
Photos of Earth taken from the moon were said to herald a
global sense of humanity’s common destiny. Osama bin Laden was twelve in 1969.
Boris Johnson Is Still Avoiding Questions about Recent
Police Visit to His Home
Stone and Andres say Apollo 11 was hurled upward by
engines burning “15 tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene per second, producing
energy equal to the combined power of 85 Hoover Dams.” People spoke jauntily of
“the conquest of space.” Well.
The universe, 99.9 (and about 58 other nines) percent of
which is already outside Earth’s atmosphere, is expanding (into we know not
what) at 46 miles per second per megaparsec. (One megaparsec is approximately
3.26 million light years.) Astronomers are studying light that has taken
perhaps twelve billion years to reach their instruments. This cooling cinder
called Earth, spinning in the darkness at the back of beyond, is a minor speck
of residue from the Big Bang, which lasted less than a billionth of a
trillionth of a trillionth of a second 13.8 billion years ago. The estimated
number of stars — they come and go — is 100 followed by 22 zeros. The visible
universe (which is hardly all of it) contains more than 150 billion galaxies,
each with billions of stars. But if there were only three bees in America, the
air would be more crowded with bees than space is with stars. The distances,
and the violently unheavenly conditions in “the heavens,” tell us that our
devices will roam our immediate cosmic neighborhood, but in spite of Apollo
11’s still-dazzling achievement, we are not really going anywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment