by Jay Barbree
It was a struggle he knew he couldn’t win and was grateful that he would always find the unexpected when he looked out the Apollo window.
When heavy cloud decks enveloped the planet, they created a whole new surface that had never before existed, of high mountain ranges, tumbling ravines. Sometimes the clouds would create huge cliffs, sheer walls miles high into which shadows fell to give them a startling sense of solidity, as though the whiteness below was some Antarctic winter mountain scene now spread across all the visible world. No oceans, no land surface, only that startling, shifting panorama, and then, suddenly, it became something else.
Ethereal clouds. Some were misty, others wispy, but most were ghostlike. They appeared everywhere or strangely vanished, then showed up again, brushing the edges of islands and the shores of continents. They were members of the cloud family, a living race dancing and floating above the planetary surface.
Astonished, awed, he had the strangest thought that perhaps this is what the angels could see . . .
Deke gloried in the freedom of weightlessness, able to float and turn lazy pirouettes within the cabin, and what mesmerized him at night offered him a variety of detail when they sailed through daylight washed across the earth. He sought out everything, and he remembered what Alan Shepard had told him to look for, how to pick out the telltale features of life activity on his globe.
He marveled at those moments when they drifted over oceans and seas with their surfaces glassy and undisturbed by wind or waves, for at such times he could see clearly the huge V shapes of wakes from ships plowing through those waters.
Once he saw a shining streak, a single wire-like gleam that ran for uncounted miles—sunlight reflecting off a long, straight railroad track.
Dust storms raised great brown mists off the deserts; snow turned high mountains into zebra-like stripes, differentiating between white snow and dark rock.
And there were moments when the angles were just right, and the sun reflecting off the blue ocean formed a huge, eye-stabbing bowl too bright for him to watch with unprotected eyes.
Green fields, vast tracts of farmland, cities that were darker patches on the surface, huge rivers that from his vantage point were ribbons winding through dark green.
But it was the night that held him in its wonder.
When the sun fell behind them and night swept across the planet, Deke knew he was sailing into a world utterly different from what was bathed by that same sun. Nightfall brought with it what was invisible during the day.
Cities sprang to life with coruscating multicolored lights, a swarming of neon illuminations, brilliantly lit streets, buildings ablaze from neat rows of glowing windows, man-made oases of color and brightness connected by long tendrils of highways marked with headlights. Deke could make out where cities started and ended, and if there were haze or thin clouds the light shimmered and expanded its reach soft glowing bowls unmistakable even from that high platform in orbit. Oil well and gas well fires shone in darkened deserts. Within the vast reaches of invisible forests and jungles was other light this time huge blazes devouring trees and grasslands.
The signs of an inhabited planet that was stirring, surging, moving, and living. Good or bad was not judged from Apollo; it was there for Deke to see.
There were other lights not of storm or kindled by men. Silently, magically, glowing colors would rush down from arctic regions, the aurora borealis, electrical charges ignited by the sun in the upper atmosphere of earth. In seconds they would cover the distance of half a planet, greens and reds and yellows, oranges and blues, painted with the softest of brushes, swirling, flashing, and spinning within their own tremulous structure.
But of all that he saw, what gripped him the most were the light flashes in the darkened atmosphere that he had seen before—but always high, high above him. Meteors blazing through the atmosphere, shooting stars beneath him, the fireflies of space dashing blindly through cremation.
Then came the moment.
Deke would never forget it. He became part of a wonder that opened all space to him.
Meteors flashed in greater number than he had yet seen, the spattered debris of ancient planetary formation and collisions of rock consumed by the atmosphere of Earth.
Something he could not measure in size, but unquestionably large, perhaps even huge, rushed at earth with tremendous velocity. The meteor hurtled in toward his home planet, but at an angle that would send it skimming along the upper reaches of the atmosphere, almost parallel with earth’s surface below. Deke first saw the intruder when it punched deep enough into earth’s air ocean, grazing the edges of the atmosphere with a speed he could not judge, except that it was a rogue body, gravity-whipped to tremendous velocity.
It tore into thin air; instantly its outer surface began to burn, its front edges blazing like a giant welding torch gone mad. It skipped along the atmosphere and gained an upward thrusting lift, like a flat rock hurled across smooth water. Deke gazed in wonder at the sight and watched the burning invader continue its journey along the atmosphere and then flash beyond. Away now from the clutches of air, still burning, it left behind an ionized trail of particles and superheated gases. Now away from Earth, it lofted high and far until it raced beyond Earth’s shadow. Sunlight flashed through the ionized trail, and the departing mass created its own record of passage, enduring long enough for Deke to watch until the last flicker, the final gleam, was gone.
He felt he should not lower his gaze. His vision moved along the arrowing path of the now invisible wanderer of the solar system, and Deke stared, unblinking, as the mass of stars in his own galaxy shone down on him, an uncountable array of suns, stars he knew were smaller than his own sun, many vastly greater in size and energy, but all members of the great pin-wheeled Milky Way of which Deke and his world were one tiny member.
He was a man humbled, awed, grateful for what had happened, what he had been given to see, and he was now seeing clearly into tomorrow, focusing on life and time itself. Understanding that life was indifferent. Understanding that time is a dimension measured only within the mind.
Had Deke, Alan Shepard, Howard Benedict, and the great aerospace writer Martin Caidin—all of whom worked with lead writer Jay Barbree on the original Moon Shot—lived to see spaceflight’s fiftieth anniversary, they would have been greatly saddened.
During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons.
It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface.
Then Barack Obama was elected president.
The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses.
From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice.
First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans.
Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment
.
$9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet.
The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics.
As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct.
While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl.
Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.”
Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent.
As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes.
Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy.
Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?”
Senator Bill Nelson chairs a Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA, and in Florida’s Orlando Sentinel he wrote:
Some 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson sent a secret message to Congress asking for $2,500 so Lewis and Clark could explore the uncharted West.
Jefferson sought the money quietly to avoid upsetting lawmakers who believed it was too costly while there were too many other important domestic needs.
Back then, no one could travel the vast distances from sea to shinning sea, let alone imagine a plane, a train or even an automobile.
It may seem trivial now, but that expedition led to our western expansion, totally changing the face and future of America.
In the 1960s, President Kennedy had a similar vision. It was America’s destiny, he proclaimed, to explore the heavens.
“If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything,” Kennedy said, “it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.
“The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures . . . and no nation which expects to be a leader of other nations can expect to stay behind.”
If Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton could return today they would find NASA at its most perilous crossroads.
One of the greatest national agencies of science ever conceived is facing its death knell, and if NASA is to survive, it’s up to Congress to save it.
The Obama Administration won’t.
America deserves better.
One should read the words written more than a century ago by Russian scientist and schoolteacher Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky. He was the first person to envision the use of rockets for space travel. In a simple but wonderful turn of words, Tsiolkovsky surveyed the future and saw what the human race must do and where it must go.
“Earth is the cradle of the mind,” wrote the self-taught man reaching for tomorrow, “but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”
If Tsiolkovsky is correct, and he surely must be, then let it be written that Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton, and their fellow space travelers, took the first faltering steps from the cradle knowing their planet one day would pass into history.
If one day humans are successful in journeying to Mars and populating other planets, then the human race would not be without a future. A star might go nova and obliterate an entire solar system, disease, drought, and parched lands might sweep the earth, but if humans populate other solar systems . . . then life will go on.
That was the gift to the future from Shepard, Slayton, Gagarin, Glenn, Schirra, Cooper, Carpenter, Leonov, Stafford, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Borman, Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Lovell, Scott, Irwin, Young, Duke, Cernan, and all the astronauts and cosmonauts from the human species.
They stepped forward.
The question for today’s crossroads is simple: Will the sins of politics prevent future space travelers from doing the same?
If not, and the dreamers and visionaries must be cast upon the waste heap of history, and the history of those called humans will be no longer than a blink.
IMAGE GALLERY
Shortly after their selection as America’s first astronauts, the Mercury Seven donned their military uniforms and posed beside one of the Corsair 106-B jet aircraft they used for proficiency flight training. The astronauts are (left—right) Navy Lt. Malcolm Scott Carpenter, Air Force Capt. Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., Marine Lt. Col. John Herschel Glenn Jr., Air Force Capt. Virgil Ivan (Gus) Grissom, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr., and Air Force Capt. Donald Kent (Deke) Slayton.
The Mercury Seven training at an Air Force survival school in the Nevada desert in 1960. From left: Gordo Cooper, Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton.
On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became America’s first man in space as a Redstone rocket propelled him 115 miles high and 302 miles down the Atlantic tracking range. For five minutes the astronaut experienced the eerie sense of weightlessness, calling it “a wonderful feeling.” The 16-minute flight ended with Freedom Seven parachuting into the ocean. A helicopter raced to the scene, hoisted Shepard aboard, and ferried him to a nearby aircraft carrier. “Boy, what a ride!” he told the crew.
President John F. Kennedy congratulated astronaut Alan Shepard and presented him with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal during a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House three days after Shepard became the first American in space. Louise Shepard, Alan’s wife, stood at the left, with his mother. Other Mercury astronauts and government officials observed. Seventeen days later, on May 25, 1961, in a special message to Congress, Kennedy challenged the Soviets in the space arena and put the United States on a course to the moon by declaring the nation should land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade.
Project Gemini followed the pioneering Mercury program and during 10 flights of the two-man spacecraft in 1965 and 1966, astronauts perfected all the techniques needed to go to the moon—rendezvous and docking, spacewalking, and long-duration flights of up to two weeks. Edward H. White II became the first American to walk in space, cavorting for 21 minutes outside while linked to the Gemini 4 with a 25-foot safety line.
Tragedy struck the U.S. space program and slowed the march to the moon when fire flashed through the Apollo 1 capsule during a routine launch pad test on January 27, 1967, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White II and Roger Chaffee. The exterior of the Apollo 1 spacecraft was charred when interior pressure burst the hull of the vehicle and spewed flames through the opening. A view of the interior revealed the effects of the intense heat. Investigators said the fire was caused by defective electrical wiring.
The Apollo 11 crew: Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Mike Collins
, and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin.
On July 16, 1969, Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin rocketed away from earth and four days later Armstrong and Aldrin rode the Lunar Module Eagle to a touchdown on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility while Collins stood watch in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module Columbia. Aldrin (shown here) and Armstrong were on the moon more than 21 hours and spent two hours exploring outside their lander.
President Richard M. Nixon greeted Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean following the spacemen’s return from man’s first moon-landing mission. To protect the earth from any possible contamination, the astronauts on recovery were placed in an elaborate quarantine trailer. So the president faced the three through a glass window in their isolation van, saying “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation. As a result of what you have done, the world has never been closer together.”
A major crisis developed in April 1970 when an oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13—Astronauts James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were 200,000 miles from earth, rapidly losing vital oxygen and other supplies, when the blast hit. The sought shelter in the undamaged Lunar Module while Mission Control perfected the means to bring them home safely. Here their spacecraft is being hoisted aboard the carrier Iwo Jima following recovery.
Alan Shepard (center), was named to command Apollo 14, flying with Stuart Roosa (left), and Ed Mitchell.
The Lunar Module Antares carried Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell to the moon’s Fra Mauro highlands, where they made two outside excursions, in February 1971.
Sixteen years after he was named one of America’s original Mercury Seven astronauts in 1959, Deke Slayton finally realized his dream of flying in space. He teamed with astronauts Tom Stafford and Vance Brand in July 1975 as they linked their Apollo spacecraft with a Soviet Soyuz carrying cosmonauts Alexel Leonov and Valeri Kubasov—a mission that would have been considered unthinkable just a few years earlier as the two superpower rivals maneuvered for superiority in space. A symbol of high-flying détente, Slayton and Leonov cavorted in the weightlessness of the Soyuz cabin while orbiting the earth in the first international space flight.