In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their airplane for the first time. Less than a lifetime later, Neil Armstrong wiped gum off his shoe and onto the Moon. In the forty-plus years since, the world put up an American flag, abandoned a car there and dumped some golf clubs along with piles of other garbage. Basically, save for a kiddie pool and drunken brother-in-law, we turned the Moon into some redneck’s front yard. It’s almost a tragedy that Armstrong didn’t accidentally strike oil while planting Old Glory; or, for that matter, just sneak some gold in his suit, let it fall out of his pocket and then “discover” the gold on the moon.
The last man walked on the Moon in 1972. At an average age of 38, that means the moon-walkers are somewhere in the range of “old.” With no successors immediately lined up, it seems probable that the world will suffer—for the first time since 1969—the sad distinction of having not one living being with an experience on another celestial body. So what happened?
"That's a negative, Houston; there are no hot alien-babes here."
In 1957, America soiled about 150 million pairs of pants when the USSR put the satellite Sputnik in orbit. Any hang-ups on the immorality of education (validated in the Scopes Monkey Trial) were shrugged off with the aimless and determined patriotism that only open warfare could muster within America. Afraid that the newly–created NASA program would have a volunteer shortage for the new position of “astronaut,” President Eisenhower suggested recruiting Air Force test pilots. That way, if the pilots didn’t want to be tied to a missile and launched into the stratosphere, the Commander in Chief could just draft them into the program. The logic and legality were shaky, but Eisenhower made his point: America was damn serious.
To create immediate returns on the new start-up, NASA was designed as an incredibly open and public organization. Unlike the Russians who kept everything a secret until the successes, the Americans made every technological advancement a news item and called them successes. In no other regard, were the successes as obvious and thrilling as the overnight celebrity-heroes: the astronauts.
To a man, the early astronauts were test pilots—men who flew the airplanes deemed not yet safe enough for regular pilots. To them, going into outer space in novel, even hypothetical, machines was just part of the job. Their bravado was recast for the papers as “devil may care” and the like, but at their most cordial they were indifferent to the attention. Buzz Aldrin, among others, straight up hated the publicity tours and interviews and photographers and 10-hour-long Media Day press conferences. At best, Aldrin and the others were ever only half-prepared to go into space.
The other half of their training could have been dedicated to the real purpose of the Moon Landing. That is, America’s public relations. More so than any real military advantage, getting a satellite around Earth, putting creatures in space and getting a man to the moon were all gambits pulled for global bragging rights. If Russia could accomplish what America could not, then surely Communism was the system of efficiency and thus the wave of the future. Like divorced parents passive-aggressively vying for their child’s attention, each nation pointed to its own measurable superiority in a rudimentary effort to persuade Greek and Iranian nationals to choose the one, true, winning side in international politics. NASA was a PR campaign for America, and democracy, meant to woo the world.
The space capsule was shot into space by a Saturn V rocket, which had 6 million individual parts. This means that if each part had a success rate of 99.99%, there would still be an estimated 600 separate, individual failures. Just between the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia disasters, 17 astronauts have been killed. 12 people have walked on the moon.
The last person on the Moon was Eugene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17. He did that in 1972. The next year, the air bag was invented. 1974 saw the birth of the Rubix cube. 1975 was the dawn of push tabs on drink cans and in 1976 the world, for the first time, bore witness to the ink-jet printer. That’s right; that $25 piece of plastic crap on the floor next to your computer that could be smashed with a loaf of bread is actually several years more technologically advanced than whatever the hell we were strapping astronauts into moments before putting them in the infinite cosmos.
Despite the billions upon billions of dollars and loss of several promising young lives, what could have been the most psychologically ruinous tragedy did not occur—though preparations were made. As much as any explosion, there existed the fear of stranding Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the Moon. See, the actual landing on the Moon was easily the most hypothetical element of the whole mission. The x-factors even seemed to out-number the certainties. Nobody really even knew what the Moon’s surface was going to be like. Was it solid? Would the landing craft sink into the dust? Beyond that, nobody really knew how the fuel would hold up or if launching back into orbit was even possible, given that no place on Earth could properly replicate the low-gravity, zero-oxygen, solar radiation of the Moon. In the event of the lunar module’s failure to launch, there was no back-up plan. So astronaut Frank Borman and Nixon speechwriter William Safire crafted one of the most chilling and heartbreaking speeches never read to the American public:
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”
Damn.
I mean....damn.
It strikes me that had Aldrin and Armstrong been stranded on the Moon, the foremost objective of all following Apollo missions would have been the recovery of their bodies. Curiously, the original Moon landing was way off-target and so it’s not even guaranteed that ensuing missions would have been immediately able to find and bring home the lost space voyagers. But we would find them. Looking up at the Moon, every night, knowing there are two dead explorers looking back would simply have been far too much for the country, if not the world, to handle.
But it’s hard to find other reasons to go back to the Moon, or to Mars for that matter. Probably not until India or China put people on the Moon will America seriously consider such an endeavor again—mostly because we don’t need the publicity.
Admittedly, NASA spokesman Robert Wilson had a much more eloquent, insightful and optimist opinion at a Senate hearing when asked what purpose his quasi-military, government organization had in the interests of national defense:
“It has nothing to do directly with defending our country,” said Wilson, “Except to make it worth defending.”
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