By Taylor Dinerman
Saturday, July 20, 2019
In an Oval Office meeting a few days after Soviet Russia
launched Sputnik in October 1957, two
points emerged. Eisenhower’s deputy defense secretary, Donald Quarles, told the
president that “there was no doubt that the Redstone,
had it been used, could have orbited a satellite a year or more ago.” The
administration had, for whatever reason, chosen to try to put a civilian face
on the budding U.S. space program, and the Army’s Redstone rocket didn’t fit the image that Ike wanted to present.
More important was Quarles’s point that “the Russians
have in fact done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept
of freedom of international space — this seems to be generally accepted as
orbital space, in which the missile is making an inoffensive passage.” This
concept opened the way for America’s spy satellites to pass over the closed
Communist empire, providing the U.S. and the West in general with an important,
but not decisive, long-term advantage.
The politics of space, however, were more complicated. Sputnik gave both the USSR and the
Democrats in Congress a great deal of propaganda leverage to use against
Eisenhower. The president’s response was to create NASA as a supposedly pure
civilian space agency and to put the U.S. into what became known as “The Space
Race.” The administration also began development of a million-pound-thrust
rocket engine, the F-1, which eventually powered the Saturn V, which took
Americans to the moon.
When President Kennedy announced that America would “land
a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth,” the most important tool
needed to carry out his vision was already under development. In spite of the
negative attitude of his advisers, notably his science adviser Jerome Wiesner
(later head of MIT), JFK was convinced that the nation could succeed and that
he would benefit politically from the effort.
Today, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon
landing, most Americans will just be happy to celebrate the achievement. Some
will regret that we have not yet returned people to the moon, or for that
matter anywhere outside low earth orbit; a few radicals, including radical
environmentalists, will curse the whole idea of space exploration. But for most
Americans it will be a vaguely pleasant bit of history.
Yet the Apollo program is of vital historical importance.
First of all, it was a hard-won Cold War victory at a moment when the long
struggle against Soviet imperial Communism was not going at all well, and when
U.S. society was looking into the abyss of riots, terrorism, and social
disintegration. For just a moment, the nation stopped and watched while two of
its truly best and brightest sons became the first humans to walk on another
celestial body. Apollo 11 was an antidote to despair, and in the years to come,
in the midst of defeat in Vietnam and a scandal that destroyed a president, it
reminded many Americans of just what their nation could do when it tried hard
enough.
It also helped limit the loss of U.S. standing in the
world at a time when things looked pretty bad. 1969 was right in the middle of
what Paul Johnson called “America’s Suicide Attempt.” All over the world people
were convinced that the U.S. was losing the Cold War and that Communism was
indeed the wave of the future. The fact that we beat the USSR to the moon made
at least a few Europeans and Asians reconsider their pessimism.
Domestically, Apollo was the last and greatest of the
giant New Deal projects. Like the Tennessee Valley Authority (which led to new
developments in explosives) and the Colombia River Project (aluminum), the moon
program added directly to America’s overall military strength, building up
national expertise in rocketry, computers, space navigation, etc. It also
fulfilled the New Deal objective of bringing industrial development to the
South, a Democratic-party stronghold.
The project could never have succeeded without the
obsessive support of Lyndon Johnson, the last pure New Deal president. Aside from
LBJ, the presidents most enthusiastic about space have tended to be ones who
believed in America’s great destiny: Reagan, both Bushes, and now perhaps
Trump. Managerial presidents such as Eisenhower, JFK, and Bill Clinton can be
persuaded to support the program for pragmatic reasons. Others, such as Nixon
and Obama, natural pessimists, tended to be hostile or at best indifferent to
the idea but did not want to be remembered as, in the phrase that Nixon
supposedly used, “the president who grounded the astronauts.”
Of course any president can propose, but in the end it is
Congress, in its collective wisdom, that disposes. Given the circumstances and
the political alignments in the 1960s, it is hard to imagine that, even if the
GOP had been in control of part or even all of Congress, the Apollo program
would have been canceled. Today’s intense partisanship, by contrast, makes it
difficult to carry out long-term space projects.
The moon landing was also part of a plan for space
exploration that was promoted in cartoons by Werner von Braun and Walt Disney.
That vision included a reusable rocket plane, a space station, a moon base, and
eventually settlements on Mars. It’s amazing to note that a TV show from the
pre-Sputnik era is still influencing
America’s space policy. If one looks at pictures of the giant rocket ships
being built by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, one can see bits of designs that
flickered across America’s TV screens in 1955.
The dream of turning humanity into a multi-planet species
is alive and well. A new, commercially oriented industry is emerging, and it
depends more on investors than on politicians. Clusters of small, networked
satellites are slowly replacing the large and very costly communications
satellites. This is just part of the change that is coming. There are now
companies making plans to mine the moon and the asteroids, to build
manufacturing facilities in space, and to develop space tourism.
With some reluctance, NASA has learned to cooperate with
the so-called “New Space” industry. Opening up the International Space Station
to tourism, even when the tourists were transported via Russian spacecraft, was
a major step in convincing the U.S. space agency that it had no choice but to
adapt to a new way of doing business.
Technologically and politically, Apollo firmly belongs to
the past, but the moon still orbits the Earth and the rest of the solar system
is open for human exploration. If we are in a new space race, the moon is still
the principal prize, just as it was during the last one. Trump may speak of
planting the U.S. flag on Mars, but for the moment his administration is
focused closer to home.
The great science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, whom
no one could have accused of being an American nationalist, wrote that “we realize
if any nation has mastery of the Moon, it will determine not merely the fate of
the Earth, but the whole accessible universe.” This sounds like hyperbole now,
just as it did in the 1960s, but no one should doubt that someday soon it will
be an obvious fact of political and economic life.
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