40 years ago we landed humans on the Moon. It was A Very Big Deal. It really happened. That said, let us all watch a clip of Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist in the face. Personally, I could watch that clip all day, but I think once is enough to make the point.
I was a little over two years old in 1969 and don't remember a thing about the big event. My parents did, and so did their parents friends and neighbors and coworkers, however. To some extent it was a generational thing. So, first, some review: in 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched a satellite called Sputnik 1 into low orbit and for the first time, anybody on Earth could adjust their short-wave radio to a particular frequency and listen to the signal from this artifact that the future Evil Empire had sent into the sky. The engineers and engineering students understood that nothing would be the same again. The Cold War was in full swing, both superpowers were building fleets of heavy bombers and bombs to drop from them, and the nation that could build a missile big enough to push a satellite into orbit could just as easily build one big enough to carry a nuclear bomb across the North Pole. Such a nation would then be the Unquestioned Supreme Power in the Universe, or so went the thinking at the Pentagon and Kremlin.
Faced with this obvious shortcoming, Americans behaved predictably: we got scared. Yes, we had enough B-52s and atomic bombs to annihilate all of Eastern Europe, but the Russians had demonstrated that had something better. We needed one, too. Preferably a whole fleet of them. So over the next half-decade the U.S. government poured money into a ballistic missile program of our own. Finally, JFK put the issue on center stage when he declared in 1961 that he would make it a goal of the United States to put a man on the Moon "by the end of [the] decade." And we did.
The thing to remember is that the Apollo program didn't just happen because the American president wanted it to happen, even one as renowned as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The work that led to it was a long string of
failures, partial failures and some pretty darned cool successes as
engineers in the U.S. and Soviet Union perfected their understanding of
ballistic science, life support systems, microgravity and acceleration,
and multi-stage thrust systems. It's one thing to comprehend the trigonometry that enables you to plot where a given projectile, traveling at an assumed speed, in a particular direction for a specific amount of time, will land. Building a rocket big enough to transport three human beings a quarter million miles of harsh vacuum and return them safely to Earth is something else. But marrying these two accomplishments into the Apollo program is several orders of magnitude more difficult. There are relatively few among us who truly grasp the difficulties and labor involved in making that day happen. There's a good reason that Buzz decked the conspiracy wacko.
But in today's news environment, the Moon is considered boring. Now, we're told, the next stop on the journey is a manned mission to Mars at some point in, say, the next 20 years. That's fine. Dandy, even. But what do we do in the meantime? Our existing fleet of space shuttles is A) over 20 years old and B) due to retire in a few years. The Air Force no longer builds the heavy Atlas-type boosters that were the mainstay of NASA's heavy lift fleet 30 years ago in quantity (although if the Atlas V proves anything it's that somebody can still build them well.) And now they want us to believe that sending astronauts 35 million miles away is the answer to maintaining a viable human presence in space? I don't agree. A better choice is going back to the Moon.
I can think of a few reasons for this. The Moon is A) known territory, having been explored thoroughly by us and the Soviets back when we had the money and drive to do it, B) only a quarter million miles away, and C) getting there is something we've done before. We need to go back and dig in. There are plenty of ways to do this, some of which are insane and others pure genius. It can be done. And it makes sense to work the kinks out of any space colonization program we adopt closer to home than not.
That said, it remains the case that Mars is by any reckoning A Very Big Deal. The thought of going there captures the imagination of astronauts, politicians, science geeks (including me) and Joe and Jane Average in a way that few projects do. But putting some very big (and valid) parts of that deal--the price tag, the timing, the political will, for starters--off to the side a moment, there is one concern that looms large in my mind about this particular proposal: if something goes horribly wrong, we lose the entire investment. It's 35 million miles from here to there one-way and let's face it, things go wrong. Sometimes they can be fixed (or, such as in the case of Apollo 13, not fixed but at least navigated through and endured). But, as in the case with Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 and more recently, the Columbia in 2003, when something goes wrong, it often all goes wrong at once and the result is destruction and death.
I totally buy the argument that says that when you explore new frontiers, you need to pay the piper, and in the case of our collective space programs, that means the occasional blood sacrifice. I agree, that much is the nature of the game. Only a fool or a Pollyanna would argue with it. But let's also admit that planning a trip to Mars is a long-term goal (ten years? twenty?), so while we plan for Mars, why not get in as much practice as possible in the meantime? Why not go back to the Moon and this time stay there?
The bottom line is that a manned mission to Mars would be impressive as hell if it ever happens but not in the same way the Apollo missions were back in the seventies. Then, the Cold War was still on and the space shuttle--a remarkably successful program for all the problems--hadn't even been built yet. The entire industrial world relies on satellite communications and a dozen countries have ballistic technology sufficient to launch them into stable orbits now. But a working Moon base that gives us the reason and opportunity to develop and refine the infrastructure to get our carbon-based monkey asses off this pale blue dot and into the inner solar system for the benefit of future generations would be infinitely more worthwhile.
If it ever happens.
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