I was 8 years old and besotted by the exploits of astronauts and the promise of space travel when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and famously declared his and NASA’s accomplishment “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Watching the ghostly images of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hop around on the moon for a couple of hours on that Sunday night 40 years ago, I was sure — I think most of us were sure — that we were watching only the beginning of human travel beyond Earth.
As I write this, I’m listening to the Apollo 11 mission in real time on the Web site, wechoosethemoon.org, sponsored by the JFK presidential library. Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins are in lunar orbit, and Aldrin is powering up the lunar module. He and Armstrong are less than seven hours away from landing on the moon. I’ve been listening to the Web site off and on for the past four days, and while there’s been a lot of checking of data about pitch, roll and yaw, and long silences interrupted by occasional static, it’s been great stuff for a space geek.
Yet, 40 years later, what did any of it mean? I wish I could say that it indeed meant a giant leap for mankind. I wish I could say that it led to a future of passenger service into orbit, to rotating space stations and moon colonies and trips to Mars and beyond. The world of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” didn’t seem at all far-fetched when the movie was released in April 1968, a short 15 months before Apollo 11, but it’s more far-fetched than ever today. The moon landing was an interesting and exciting chapter in the Cold War, but what was its historical impact, beyond maybe contributing to a nascent environmental sensibility thanks to photos of Earth floating in the loneliness of space? In his obituary published Saturday in the American-Statesman, Walter Cronkite is quoted as telling the Statesman in 1997 that the moon landing was the most important story he covered. With all due respect to the recently departed Cronkite, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Nixon’s Southern strategy during the 1968 election, Watergate, the sexual revolution, the Iranian revolution, the Reagan revolution, the arrival of home computing — all of which took place during Cronkite’s tenure as CBS’s anchor — changed American and world history far more than Apollo 11.
The future we thought Apollo 11 promised turned out to be fantasy, of course — as distant from reality as those jet packs we also thought would be part of our lives in the new millennium. Putting humans in space is expensive and dangerous. The longest anyone has stayed in space at any one time is 437 days, accomplished in the mid-1990s by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov aboard the Mir space station. A trip to Mars would require a longer stay. The problems posed by radiation and isolation continue to confound NASA as it contemplates sending humans to Mars; simply provisioning a mission to Mars with enough food, water and oxygen is a challenge with no easy solution.
You probably have heard lamentations during the past week that we’ve been stuck in low-Earth orbit for the past 40 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the last Apollo moon landing in 1972, humans have landed on Mars a half-dozen times (an image of the Martian surface from Viking 2 is pictured at right), Venus (an image of the Venusian surface from the Soviet Union’s Venera 14 is pictured below) and Titan, probed the atmosphere of Jupiter, orbited Saturn, flown by Mercury, Uranus and Neptune, landed on an asteroid and returned comet samples to Earth, and we are now on our way to Pluto. We have peered deep into the cosmos and are on the verge of reaching interstellar space. That all this has been done with probes and robots does not diminish the accomplishments of Spirit, Voyager, Hubble and other missions, which rival — and scientifically far exceed — the accomplishments of Apollo.
In lunar orbit with Apollo 11 in July 1969 was an unmanned Soviet probe named Luna 15. Its mission: To land on the moon, drill into the surface and return some soil to Earth — beating Apollo 11 back home if possible. Luna 15 crashed on the moon several hours after Armstrong and Aldrin completed their walk. But the Soviets’ next attempt succeeded; Luna 16 returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 1970, with about a quarter of a pound of lunar soil. Two other Luna probes also returned soil samples and two Soviet rovers roamed the moon’s surface in 1970 and 1973 — at a fraction of the cost of Apollo and with no risk to human life. Apollo was the greater adventure (maybe the greatest there ever was), but Luna was the future of space exploration.