• • • CHAPTER TWENTY
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, APOLLO 11*
The 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.
Today 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.
It’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?
As 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.
Space Tweet #21
Space Shuttle Atlantis – final trip before retirement today. On board, a chunk from Isaac Newton’s apple tree. Cool
May 14, 2010 2:22 AM
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.
Inspiration 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 ga
ve 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!
Neil 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.
Some people seem to believe that we just strap the astronauts to a rocket and fire them to the Moon. Fact is, a lot of image reconnaissance goes into planning these journeys. For example, in 1966–67 five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were sent to study the Moon and photograph possible landing sites. The photograph of what became Apollo 11’s landing site is now part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at the NASA Ames Research Center. Fast forward four decades, and the NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the LRO, returned its first images of the Apollo 11 landing site, with the lunar module still sitting right there, casting a long, distinctive shadow. LRO is the next step in returning astronauts to the Moon—it’s a robotic scout that’s helping to find the best places to explore. Future images will be even better. And by the way, those images are publicly available, so you can show them to anyone who somehow continues to believe we faked it all.
NASA operates on our hearts, on our minds, on the educational pipeline—all for one-half of one cent on the tax dollar. It’s remarkable how many people think NASA’s budget is bigger than that. I want to start a movement where government agencies get paid the budget people think they’re getting. NASA’s budget would rise by a factor of at least ten.
Space Tweet #22
NASA costs Americans half a penny on a tax dollar. That fraction of a bill is not wide enough from the edge to reach the ink
Jul 8, 2011 11:05 AM
That people think NASA’s budget is huge is a measure of the visibility of every NASA dollar that gets spent. An extraordinary compliment that I wouldn’t give up for anything, lest we stop advancing in all the areas Americans have come to value in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For me, an interesting feature about NASA is its ten centers scattered across the country. If you grow up near one of them, you have either a relative or a friend who works for NASA. Working for NASA is a point of pride in those communities, and that sense of participation, of common journey, is something that makes this agency an enterprise for the entire nation, not simply for the select few.
Some engineers and administrators and other workers from the Apollo era still work at NASA today—though likely not for much longer. We are destined to lose them. Many, many people besides the astronauts contributed in essential ways to the Apollo era. Think of it as a pyramid. At the base are thousands of engineers and scientists, laying the groundwork for the Moon voyages. As you work your way up the pyramid, the astronauts are at the top—the brave ones putting their lives at risk. But in doing so, they place their trust in what the rest of that pyramid provides. And what sustains the base of that pyramid, keeping it broad and sturdy, is inspiration of the coming generation.
• • • CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
HOW TO REACH THE SKY*
In daily life you rarely need to think about propulsion, at least the kind that gets you off the ground and keeps you aloft. You can get around just fine without booster rockets simply by walking, running, rollerblading, taking a bus, or driving a car. All those activities depend on friction between you (or your vehicle) and Earth’s surface.
When you walk or run, friction between your feet and the ground enables you to push forward. When you drive, friction between the rubber wheels and the pavement enables the car to move forward. But try to run or drive on slick ice, where there’s hardly any friction, and you’ll slip and slide and generally embarrass yourself as you go nowhere fast.
For motion that doesn’t engage Earth’s surface, you’ll need a vehicle equipped with an engine stoked with massive quantities of fuel. Within the atmosphere, you could use a propeller-driven engine or a jet, both fed by fuel that burns the free supply of oxygen provided by the air. But if you’re hankering to cross the airless vacuum of space, leave the props and jets at home and look for a propulsion mechanism that requires no friction and no chemical help from the air.
One way to get a vehicle to leave our planet is to point its nose upward, aim its engine nozzles downward, and swiftly sacrifice a goodly amount of the vehicle’s total mass. Release that mass in one direction, and the vehicle recoils in the other. Therein lies the soul of propulsion. The mass released by a spacecraft is hot, spent fuel, which produces fiery, high-pressure gusts of exhaust that channel out the vehicle’s hindquarters, enabling the spacecraft to ascend.
Propulsion exploits Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, one of the universal laws of physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hollywood, you may have noticed, rarely obeys that law. In classic Westerns, the gunslinger stands flat-footed, barely moving a muscle as he shoots his rifle. Meanwhile, the ornery outlaw that he hits sails backward off his feet, landing butt first in the feeding trough—clearly a mismatch between action and reaction. Superman exhibits the opposite effect: he doesn’t recoil even slightly as bullets bounce off his chest. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character the Terminator was truer to Newton than most: every time a shotgun blast hit the cybernetic menace, he recoiled—a bit.
Spacecraft, however, can’t pick and choose their action shots. If they don’t obey Newton’s third law
, they’ll never get off the ground.
Realizable dreams of space exploration took off in the 1920s, when the American physicist and inventor Robert H. Goddard got a small liquid-fueled rocket engine off the ground for nearly three seconds. The rocket rose to an altitude of forty feet and landed 180 feet from its launch site.
But Goddard was hardly alone in his quest. Several decades earlier, around the turn of the twentieth century, a Russian physicist named Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, who earned his living as a provincial high school teacher, had already set forth some of the basic concepts of space travel and rocket propulsion. Tsiolkovsky conceived of, among other things, multiple rocket stages that would drop away as the fuel in them was used up, reducing the weight of the remaining load and thus maximizing the capacity of the remaining fuel to accelerate the craft. He also came up with the so-called rocket equation, which tells you just how much fuel you’ll need for your journey through space.
Nearly half a century after Tsiolkovky’s investigations came the forerunner of modern spacecraft, Nazi Germany’s V-2 rocket. The V-2 was conceived and designed for war, and was first used in combat in 1944, principally to terrorize London. It was the first rocket to target cities that lay beyond its own horizon. Capable of reaching a top speed of about 3,500 miles an hour, the V-2 could go a few hundred miles before plummeting back to Earth’s surface in a deadly free fall from the edge of space.
To achieve a full orbit of Earth, however, a spacecraft must travel five times faster than the V-2, a feat that, for a rocket of the same mass as the V-2, requires no less than twenty-five times the V-2’s energy. And to escape from Earth orbit altogether and head out toward the Moon, Mars, or beyond, the craft must reach 25,000 miles an hour. That’s what the Apollo missions did in the 1960s and 1970s to get to the Moon—a trip requiring at least another factor of two in energy.
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Page 16