Of the towering Saturn V-Apollo rocket, all that splashed down in the Pacific was the very tip-top Command Module. Getting people into space is energetically expensive: their weight along with that of life sustaining machines has to be lifted up and out of the Earth's gravitational potential. And these are two-way voyages: we have to bring them back to Earth alive. While it proved possible to get to the Moon and return with the existing technology, the Apollo missions demanded a human presence for reasons of both mission contingency and geopolitics.
Today, digital technology is such that a virtual human presence is feasible: spacecraft extend our senses into the solar system. Ironically, we took the first steps in this direction as part of the manned space race: exploring with the robotic Ranger crashers, Lunar Orbiters and Surveyor landers well before humans arrived. Remarkably, today’s space heroes aren’t men, they are Clementine, Sojourner, Hubble, Galileo and very soon, Cassini, all robots that we named after humans. The fundamental limitation on exploration now is that of the speed of light, but we can make robots smart enough to think for themselves in the meantime. Things move much faster here nowadays, and we lack the patience and pocketbook to put people out there.
The big question is how exploration will continue. Robots get us there faster, cheaper and with less risk. It’s not easy, nor is it inexpensive. Costs are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But if NASA is about planetary exploration--including this planet--then that is the way forward. If exploitation is the driving force, then commercial entities and free enterprise will continue to develop and expand. If geopolitics is worth pursuing via space, then I’m all for the International Space Station Alpha. But space telescope and satellite repairmen don’t seem much like explorers or heroes to me.
That’s my view, but it’s your opinion that counts. As taxpayers, you’ve spent a lot of money over the last fifty years flying into space. As a civic duty, you vote to elect representatives controlling how that money is spent. As informed members of the public, your knowledge of astronomy and space makes you extraordinarily qualified to voice an opinion on these matters. As citizens of the United States of America, what this country does up there, and down here, reflects on us and how we are viewed by other countries.
Americans are at their core pioneers and cowboys in my opinion, and that spirit of independence and confidence got us to the Moon first. For me, the most significant achievement of Apollo was not coming back with moon rocks but a snapshot from a mission that didn’t even land on the Moon proving that we all live on the one “good Earth.” In the last three decades, this basic fact has only become more vital to every one of the 6 billion people on this planet.
Kudos to NASA for making many Apollo photos (first, third and fourth, at right) easily available on the web. The Smithsonian Institution has a great web site too (second and bottom images). In hardcopy, I recommend two books: Sightseeing, A Space Panorama by Barbara Hitchcock, and Space Shuttle, The First 20 Years in the own words of the shuttle astronauts. Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published on the web, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 24 November 2002. Text copyright © 2002 Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.
