Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (21 page)

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CHAPTER TWENTY

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, APOLLO 11
^*

T
he National Air and Space Museum is unlike any other place on this planet. If you’re hosting visitors from another country and they want to know what single museum best captures what it is to be American, this is the museum you take them to. Here they can see the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1927 Spirit of St. Louis, the 1926 Goddard rocket, and the Apollo 11 command module—silent beacons of exploration, of a few people willing to risk their lives for the sake of discovery. Without those risk takers, society rarely goes anywhere.

We celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Moon landing, July 20, 1969. Forty: that’s a big number. How many days was the Ark at sea? Forty. (Also forty nights.) How many years did Moses wander the desert? Forty.

The Apollo era stoked ambitions. Many of us are here because of it. But the struggle is not over. Not everybody was part of that vision. Not everybody was struck by it. And I blame us for that. All space people feel it. You know and understand the majestic journey. Yet there are those who don’t, who haven’t even thought about it. Two-thirds of the people alive today in the world were born after 1969. Two-thirds.

Do you remember Jay Leno doing his Jaywalking for NBC’s
Tonight Show
? He’d go out in the street and ask people a simple question. Once he went up to a freshly minted college graduate and asked, “How many moons does Earth have?” Here’s her reply: “How do you expect me to remember that? I had astronomy two semesters ago.”

That scares me.

T
oday we have assembled many astronauts who were part of the first wave of America’s space explorers—heroes of a generation. There are also heroes who never flew. And those who mattered to us as a nation who are now gone. Walter Cronkite passed away just this past Friday at the age of ninety-two. At first I was saddened when I learned of his death. But when you’re that old and you die, it’s not an occasion to be sad; it’s an occasion to celebrate a life. Cronkite: the most trusted man in America. We all knew him as a supporter of space. He anchored
the
CBS Evening News
with intelligence, integrity, and compassion.

I remember when I was a kid and I first learned there was someone by the name of Cronkite. Do you know anyone else named Cronkite, other than Walter? I don’t think so. So the name was interesting to me. I knew enough about the periodic table that it sounded like a new element. You know, we have aluminum, nickel, silicon. There’s the fictional kryptonite. And then there’s cronkite.

One of my most indelible memories of Walter is from when I was ten years old. At 7:51
a.m.
on December 21, 1968—exactly the scheduled time—Apollo 8 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center. It was the first mission ever to leave low Earth orbit, the first time anyone ever had a destination other than Earth. In one loop, Apollo 8 made a figure eight around Earth and the Moon, and returned. When Walter Cronkite announced that the Apollo 8 command module had just left the gravitational pull of Earth, I was taken aback. How could that be? They hadn’t reached the Moon yet, and of course the Moon lies within Earth’s gravity. Later I would learn, of course, that he was referring to a Lagrangian point between Earth and the Moon—a point where the forces of gravity balance. When you cross it, you fall toward the Moon instead of back toward Earth. And so I learned a bit of physics from Walter Cronkite. Godspeed to this voice of America, who died on the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11. What a way to go.

I
t’s been a busy week. We lose Walter Cronkite; we gain some appointments. The United States Senate confirmed the new NASA administrator and the new deputy NASA administrator, Charles F. Bolden Jr. and Lori B. Garver. Lori Garver—her whole life has been in space. She started working for John Glenn in 1983. She was executive director of the National Space Society and president of Capital Space, LLC. I’ve known Lori Garver for fifteen years; I’ve known Charlie Bolden for fifteen minutes. Just met him in the green room. The man looks like he came from central casting: four decades in public service, a combat pilot for the Marines, fourteen years as a member of NASA’s astronaut corps. The confirmation hearings began like a love fest, with senators from everywhere saying, “Charlie’s the man.”

As I’m sure you know, decisions at NASA don’t happen in a vacuum. I’ve participated in two commissions in the service of NASA: the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry (its final report, from 2002, was called
Anyone, Anything, Anywhere, Anytime
) and the President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy (the final report, from 2004, was called
A Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover: Moon, Mars and Beyond
). We were trying to study what is, what isn’t, what should be, and what’s possible. As one of the commissioners, I remember being bombarded by the public and by people from the aerospace community. Everybody has an idea about what NASA should do. Somebody’s got a new design for a rocket, or a desired destination, or a new propellant. Initially I felt as though people were interfering with my getting our job done. But then I stepped back and realized that if so many people want to tell NASA what to do, it’s a good sign, not a bad sign. There I was being annoyed, when in fact I should have celebrated it as an expression of love for the future of NASA.

The agency continues to solicit input from experts. A committee headed by Norm Augustine has studied the future of NASA’s manned spaceflight program (the final report, from late 2009, is titled
Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation
). You could go online to hsf.nasa.gov—“hsf” for human spaceflight—and tell them what you think. How many countries allow such a thing, much less suggest you might be able to influence the direction an agency will take?

A
s some of you know, I’m an astrophysicist—less a space person than a science person. I care about exploding stars, black holes, and the fate of the Milky Way. And not all space missions are about building a space station.

One of my favorite recent missions was when the space shuttle Atlantis serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. In May 2009, Atlantis’s astronauts—I prefer to think of them as them astrosurgeons—repaired and upgraded Hubble. They conducted five spacewalks during their mission to extend the life of the telescope at least five years, possibly ten—literally a new lease on life. They successfully installed two new instruments, repaired two others, replaced gyroscopes and batteries, added new thermal insulation to protect the most celebrated telescope since the era of Galileo. It was the crowning achievement of what can happen when the manned space program is in synchrony with the robotic program.

By the way, Hubble is beloved not only because it has taken such great pictures, but because it’s been around a long time. No other space telescopes were designed to be serviced. You put them up; the coolant runs out after three years; the gyros go out after five; they drop in the Pacific after six. That’s not enough time for the public to warm up to these instruments, to learn what they do and why.

I
nspiration is manifested in many ways. Space itself is a catalyst. It operates in our hearts and our souls and our minds and our creativity. It’s not just the target of a science experiment—space is embedded in our culture. In 2004 NASA announced the creation of a special honor, the Ambassador of Exploration award. It’s not given out every year, nor is it given out to just anyone. The award is a small sample of the 842 pounds of rocks and soil that have come from the Moon during America’s six expeditions there, and it is presented to honor the first generation of explorers and to renew our commitment to expand that enterprise.

Tonight, we are honored to present the Ambassador of Exploration award to the family of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Certainly most of us remember President Kennedy’s speech to a special joint session of Congress in May 1961, in which he declared the goal of putting an American on the Moon within the decade. But perhaps not quite so many are familiar with the “Moon speech” he gave the following year at the Rice University stadium in Houston, Texas. Early in that speech, the president mentioned that most of the total number of scientists who had ever lived on Earth were currently alive. He then presented the sweep of history in capsule form:

Condense, if you will, the fifty thousand years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first forty years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover [himself]. Then about ten years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. . . . The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole fifty-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. . . . Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now, if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

Repeatedly Kennedy spoke of the necessity of America’s being first, being the leader, doing what is hard rather than what is easy, and he described, to an audience for whom going into space was new and breathtaking, the multiple US space endeavors that were already under way and the several US satellites that were already orbiting. He didn’t hesitate to announce how much money he wanted for the space budget—
“fifty cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority”—but then justified that generous funding by presenting a vivid picture of the outcome he envisioned:

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the Moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than three hundred feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun . . . and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.

Who could remain uninspired by such words!

N
eil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, was part of NASA long before NASA formally existed. He was a naval aviator, the youngest pilot in his squadron. He flew seventy-eight combat missions during the Korean War. Neil Armstrong is someone with firsthand experience of the Moon, someone who’s had both a bird’s-eye view and a moonwalker’s view of the Sea of Tranquillity.